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On a not so great note, TalkLeft picked up a little bug somewhere and we've got to move servers again tonight so that it can be isolated and removed. Don't worry, it's not catching. But if you get an empty page when you come to visit in the next 12 hours or so, just refresh the page or clear your cache.

Former CIA Chief George Tenet now says the Iraq war was wrong. [link via Daily Kos.

"We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the community of gaps in our intelligence," Tenet said, with surprising frankness, as recorded by Clark, who recently covered a speech by Paul Bremer before the same group. "The extraordinary men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong."

As for the regime of Saddam Hussein: "I believed he had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't. At the end of the day I have to stand up accountable for that. In the meantime our nation needs to honor the commitment we made in Iraq."

Tenet was recently made a Professor at Georgetown.

Mark Dow in today's Miami Herald examines the plight of the Mariel Cubans, and the Bush Administration's insidious attempt to keep them locked up forever:

They are not suspected terrorists. They are not ''enemy combatants.'' They are not even charged with a crime. But on Oct. 13, in Clark vs. Martinez and Benitez vs. Rozos before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Bush administration defended the executive's authority to imprison them on U.S. soil until they are dead.

Allowed to depart the island in 1980 from the port of Mariel, some 125,000 Cubans came to the United States over a six-month period. Many of them have committed crimes here, and detention typically begins on completion of a criminal sentence for anything from murder to shoplifting -- though one Mariel Cuban was locked up for not being able to afford medical care. Cuba will not take them back, and the United States says that it can detain them for any length of time.

Republican Congressman Tom Delay days as Teflon Tom may be nearing an end...he was served today with a subpoena in the Texas redistricting case.

More Urgent Action needed to oppose H.R. 10-- Please Act Now!

Congress Considering Federal Death Penalty Expansion
Conference Committee Decision Imminent -- Act Now!

Congress is currently considering legislation that would expand the federal death penalty - again! Although the 9/11 Commission's report did not recommend any further extension of the death penalty, the House of Representatives' "9/11 Commission Recommendations Implementation Act" exploits this national tragedy with eight new provisions to broaden the federal death penalty.

This bill, H.R. 10, has already passed the House and will be considered in conference with Senate legislation that contains no death penalty expansion. Within the next few days, the bills will be reconciled -- please write the conferees right away and tell them to drop the wasteful and counterproductive death penalty provisions from the bill!

Ask the conferencing members to drop death penalty expansion Here's why:

Is the fear of a draft affecting the election?

Bush's conviction that preemption and unilateralism are the only way to ensure U.S. security in the 21st century could well provoke a strong turnout by younger voters to preempt a military draft and turn him out of office.

Abu Graib guard Ivan "Chip Frederick" received an 8 year sentence today for his part in torturing Iraqi prisoners. His lawyer thinks it's too harsh. Does anyone agree?

This has to be the feel good story of the day. Check out what senior citizens in Florida are doing to make sure everyone gets to vote. If these 70 and 80 year olds can spend hours a day in the hot sun, "bunions and all," so can we. Call your local Kerry campaign headquarters and see what you can do to make sure that everyone who has registered gets a proper ballot and has a way to return it.

At Kerry-Edwards headquarters last week, the seniors were sadly shaking their heads because an absentee ballot had not reached the man in hospice care in time. His dying wish was to cast a vote against President Bush, and if only he had signed the ballot before he died, it would have counted.

God forbid that should happen to one of them.

Why don't they like Bush?

They tick off the war, the economy, Social Security, prescription drug benefits, homeland security, education and the man in the Oval Office, whom they regard with suspicion for a perceived lack of intellectual rigor.

...So they stream by the hundreds into the office here, volunteers in their seventies and eighties, die-hard Democrats, many of them Jewish, still irritated about the famous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot of 2000.

Are they making an impact? You bet.

We already knew that the Army National Guard fell short of its recruitment goals this year by 5,000. The Wall Street Journal now adds that the Reserves fell 45% Short of their goal while the gap in regular signups was 30% of the military's target: (available free to AOL members here):

this year, the Army entered fiscal 2005 with an unusually low number of recruits in the bank, about 16,000, or 21% of its overall goal for the year. By contrast, a year ago, it began fiscal 2004 with 33,000 prospective soldiers.

Abu Ghraib prison guard and Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick pleaded guilty in a court-martial Wednesday. He is cooperating with authorities for a lesser sentence, and told the court that at the request of military and civilian intelligence officials, he staged a mock electrocution.

A US soldier on trial for abusing Iraqi prisoners told a Baghdad court martial yesterday that he hooked up wires around a hooded detainee in a mock electrocution at the behest of military and civilian intelligence officials.

If Frederick is to be believed, these officials set the policy for the treatment of prisoners.

In his testimony yesterday, he described a prison regime where policy was set by military and civilian officials involved in the interrogation of prisoners. However, Sgt Frederick played a pivotal role in the events at Abu Ghraib. His experience as a prison guard in civilian life led his superiors to put him in charge of the night shift in the main prison block at Abu Ghraib, including the tier where the abuse was photographed.

Burger King has withdrawn all ads on Sinclair television stations for the day the John Kerry show is supposed to air:

It was a bigger burger--Burger King, in fact--”that lobbed the biggest grenade at Sinclair. The fast-food giant announced that it was withdrawing all its ads from all Sinclair stations all day on the date the weapon is broadcast--”now scheduled for Friday, October 22.

"Burger King wants to maintain neutrality during this election," spokesman Eric Anderson told Bill Carter of The New York Times.....This is believed to be the first time the fast-food giant has come out publicly against whoppers.

As Hesiod at Counterspin (where we found the news) says, "Go show Burger King some love." Remember, at Burger King, you can have it your way.

Remember this case of informants setting up immigrants to be busted with fake drugs? It's quite a tale.

Today, an independent report was released that blames the police:

Poor supervision and disregard for police department rules contributed to a fake-drug scandal that landed two dozen innocent people in jail, an investigation found. The report released Wednesday said confidential informants used those lapses to frame people - mostly poor Mexican immigrants - with billiards chalk bundled like real drugs.