Gary Hart writes about Bush and the War in Iraq in light of the uranium fiasco and the lack of progress in the terror war:

Meanwhile, what happened to the vaunted “war on terrorism”? No Osama bin Laden, “dead or alive”. Almost two years after 9.11 our States and cities are not prepared for the next attack. The suddenly silent John Ashcroft is managing to make more and more Americans nervous. The CIA has, once again, been made the fall guy for an administration’s excesses. George Tenet accepts responsibility for not taking key words out of a presidential speech? That’s not the question. The question is: Who put those words in?

...The American people have given the Bush administration great leeway to combat terrorism. So far they have given the President the benefit of the doubt. But our tolerance is being strained and our credulity sorely tested. I sense we're reaching the "tipping point" where it all starts going south.

More is at stake than George Bush's future or partisan advantage. The honor and reputation of the United States is now at stake. We cannot claim to be "the world's leading democracy" and commit the power of the United States to a war that, so far, has been justified on false grounds. The wheels of justice grind exceeding fine. And judgment day is coming.

The Guardian has an extensive report on the Bush Administration's marketing of the Iraq war, Trading on Fear, by public relations analysts analysts Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.

From the start, the invasion of Iraq was seen in the US as a marketing project. Selling 'Brand America' abroad was an abject failure; but at home, it worked. Manufacturers of 4×4s, oil prospectors, the nuclear power industry, politicians keen to roll back civil liberties - all seized the moment to capitalise on the war.

Our favorite part is the description of the Administration's assault on civil liberties since 9/11:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared on Meet the Press this morning. He said we should expect more Iraqi attacks on U.S. troops this summer--that we are still at war--and that our troops will be there "for the forseeable future." Currently, there are about 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Since May 1, when Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, 31 U.S. soldiers have been killed and "scores have been wounded in hit-and-run attacks."

Sixth Circuit Appeals Court Judge Gilbert Merritt is in Iraq studying documents as one of 13 experts selected by Department of Justice to help rebuild Iraq's judicial system. He writes in The Tennessean that he has come across a "List of Honor" published in November, 2002 in the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper, run by Uday Hussein. The list contains the names of 600 people deemed to be regime persons.

Judge Merritt writes:

Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.''

Judge Merritt then reports:

At the same time this was published, Saddam was denying that he had any relationship with Osama. Therefore Saddam had all the papers confiscated, and he ordered that publication of the paper be stopped for 10 days.

From this, Judge Merritt concludes:

I believe that President Bush was right when he alleged that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama and was coordinating activities with him.

It does not prove that they engaged together in any particular act of terror against the United States.

But it seems to me to be strong proof that the two were in contact and conspiring to perform terrorist acts.

Instapundit takes this as extremely significant proof of the Saddam/Osama connection. We don't think anyone ever denied there is a relationship between Saddam and Osama. But where is the proof they "conspired to commit terrorist acts?" We think the critical sentence in Judge Merritt's article is this one:

It does not prove that they engaged together in any particular act of terror against the United States.

There still has not been any evidence that we are aware of that Saddam was a part of 9/11 or any specific terrorist act against the U.S. We take Judge Merritt at his word, but we don't think this information in any way establishes the need for a preemptive strike against Iraq.

In fact, the Associated Press reported yesterday:

"There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Intelligence agencies agreed on the "lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaida" and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September. Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaida. "The relationships that were plotted were episodic, not continuous," the former official said.

Update: SKBubba has this priceless gem about the Osama-Saddam connection. Too funny.

We received this by email today....

"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit -- we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on."-- Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero

"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability." - George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998

David Corn of the Nation has more evidence that Bush misled the country on the existence of WMDs.

Slowly, official material is seeping out that confirms the allegation that Bush and his national security crew misled the country into war. Last week, Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, referred to preliminary findings of a review being conducted by her committee. This examination, like Kerr's, has found that the intelligence analysts had attached caveats and qualifiers to their assessments of the WMD threat from Iraq (which Bush never bothered to mention) and that there had been no good intelligence linking Hussein with bin Laden.

If you would like to register a complaint with your congressional representatives, go here . True Majority will send the fax for you. True Majority was founded by Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

People in the Iraqi town of Ramadi are calling for the return of Saddam and threatening jihad against America.

``You will see what will happen to the Americans now. You will see what we will do to them,'' hospital administrator Taha Hussein told Reuters.

.... ``The Americans are terrorists. They don't respect us. They enter our houses and frisk our women. They handcuff us at checkpoints and step on our necks,'' said Abu Mohsen.

....``Now look at this. They just shoot at cars and kill innocent people,'' he said pointing to the body of the decapitated man on a stretcher outside the morgue.

....``We want Saddam. Look what the Americans are doing. They are killing us. The attacks on Americans will get worse. It will be Jihad (holy war),'' said Yassin Mishaal.

Three U.S. soldiers have been killed in Baghdad in the past 24 hours. A British freelance journalist was killed on Saturday. Seven Iraqi police recruits were killed a few days ago in a bomb blast just after they finished a U.S. training school.

Twenty-seven American and six British soldiers have been killed in Iraq since US President George W Bush declared major hostilities over on 1 May.

The locals don't want us there. Who can blame them?

President George W Bush's declaration that the United States is preparing for a "massive and long-term undertaking" in Iraq will have confirmed the fears of many in Baghdad - that the US is establishing itself as a force for occupation, not liberation.

Steve Gilliard over at Daily Kos tells us why the U.S. recently has been losing a man a day.

According to U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, there is a 70-30 chance Saddam is alive .

The U.S. is setting up a reward scheme for information leading to the identity of the murderers. This is in addition to the existing $25 million reward in place for Saddam and his sons. US Central Command , whose website is down for "routine maintenance," says its troops will continue to conduct active patrols. Reward schemes don't impress us. No one has turned in Osama or Saddam. We have a different solution: Send the troops home.

From an editorial in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Bring On Reality:"

Bring 'em on"? U.S. soldiers are dying and dodging guerrilla bullets in a hot and hostile country and their commander-in-chief says, "Bring 'em on"?

Mr. President, do you live in a play house or the White House?

[link via Buzzflash]

An audio tape purportedly made on June 14 by Saddam Hussein has surfaced on Al Jazeera in which "Saddam" claims he is alive in Iraq and fighting.

No confirmation was immediately available that the voice on the tape was indeed that of Saddam, who has not been seen in public since he and his government were ousted from power on April 9 during the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

The poor-quality recording, which sounded very much like Saddam, urged Iraqis to support resistance against the "infidel" U.S. presence and not to aid the occupiers. It also warned the Americans of more bloodshed to come.

The tape is 20 minutes long. Al Jazeera played ten minutes of it on tv. Here is the text of the tape.

Howard Dean was a major critic of the War in Iraq. But he is now calling on Bush to send U.S. troops to Liberia to avert a human rights crisis.

When asked to reconcile his two positions, he said:

....Bush never made the case that Iraq posed a threat to the world. "The situation in Liberia is exactly the opposite. There is an imminent threat of serious human catastrophe and the world community is asking the United States to exercise its leadership."

A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll conducted over the weekend shows that people are beginning to realize that Bush lied--and it matters to them.

The number that expects the United States to find weapons of mass destruction... has dropped from 84 percent in late March to 53 percent now.

Almost four in 10 say they believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, while six in 10 say they do not believe that.

More than half, 53 percent, say it would matter a great deal to them if they became convinced the Bush administration deliberately misled the public on that subject.

The poll of 1,003 adults was taken Friday through Sunday and has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points, larger for subgroups.

On a related topic, a new Amnesty International Report blasts the US for its mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. The human rights organization is demanding that the U.S. provide the detainees with the right to meet with their families and lawyers and to have a judicial review of their detention.