Giant bubbles could sink ships, say maths experts

Methane bubbles from the sea floor could be responsible for the mysterious sinking of ships in areas like the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea, new Australian research confirms.

Computational mathematics honours student David May and supervisor, Professor Joseph Monaghan of Monash University in Melbourne report their research in the American Journal of Physics.

Their modelling suggests that giant bubbles are much more likely to sink ships than previously thought, adding new weight to warnings about ships travelling in areas where bubbles are likely to be.

Huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. The methane - found as an odourless gas in swamps and mines - becomes solid under the enormous pressures at the deep sea floor. Under the sea, however, the ice-like methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface.

This research is obviously wrong. There is nothing in the Kay report about Saddam working on bubbles of mass destruction. It follows they cannot exist.

In mugsville, where payback beats politeness

The shenanigans by the Greens' Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle were obvious kindergarten stuff when it came to the shameless and arrogant stunting carried out, at your cost, by our Prime Minister. Simon Crean might not be much of a leader, but he displayed more dignity and quiet good manners than all that raucous triumphalism orchestrated by the Government for the Government. This had nothing to do with a goodwill visit to the Australian people. This was as blatant a political exercise as ever you will see on the very grandest of grand scales.

Crean was relegated to two minor bit parts in the 20-hour visit. He was included in the small phalanx of political pooh-bahs who welcomed Bush on his arrival Thursday morning at Parliament House. And he was accorded a meeting with Bush and his people in Crean's office as Opposition Leader that was extended from 10 minutes to 'almost 20 minutes', according to the Government. And Bush, would you believe, wanted to know why Howard wasn't going along to the Crean meeting as well!



Otherwise, the Opposition Leader was left out in mugsville. He was not included in the welcome at Canberra airport, in the farewell, in the ceremony at the War Memorial, or in the barbecue at the Lodge, the only social occasion Bush would agree to. Even the press gallery was represented at the lunch by its president, Malcolm Farr of The Daily Telegraph. But not the Leader of the Australian Opposition. If nothing else, you'd have thought protocol if not manners might have extended an invitation to Crean.



Not a bit. When I asked Howard's office why, I got some smart lines about 'so you want to go in to bat for them do you?' and 'we know his office has been trailing its coat around the gallery'. And, most pertinently, 'we don't forget how John Howard was left standing on the tarmac at Canberra airport' in 1995, at the time of Yitzak Rabin's assassination in Israel and prime minister Paul Keating wouldn't take Howard, then Opposition leader.

Don't ever say Howard isn't motivated by payback. He never forgets a bad turn or who did it to him. Neither does his staff. And in my anger I was moved to tell his office I thought it had behaved towards Crean like 'miserable little turds'. After all, who paid for the cosy 'private' barbecue lunch behind the Lodge walls? Not John Howard, rest assured.

We should just have another republic referendum and make an honest president of John Howard.

A little constitutional nonsense...

The SPEAKER�Order! On behalf of all senators
and members, I extend to the President our thanks for
his address, and wish him and Mrs Bush a very pleasant
and successful time here in Australia.

Before I adjourn the House, all senators and members
will be well aware that under the standing orders
both Senators Brown and Nettle leave me no choice
but to name them, having defied the chair. Senators
Brown and Nettle are therefore named.

Mr ABBOTT (Warringah�Leader of the House)

(11.54 a.m.)�I move:

That Senators Brown and Nettle be suspended from the
service of the House.

Question agreed to.

I think this makes Senators Brown and Nettle the first members of the Senate to be suspended from the service of a strange unicameral body unknown to the constitution.

Thursday's proceedings were not a joint sitting under Section 57 of the Constitution. In fact the two houses have held joint meetings (as opposed to sittings) in this way on 5 occasions, to receive a mace from a House of Commons delegation, and to hear addresses from Presidents Johnson, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger and Hu. There are standing orders for a Section 57 joint sitting and for the opening of parliament. There are none for a joint meeting on other occasions. Just for the record, the arrangements agreed to for the joint meeting are available.

The only body that can suspend a senator is the Senate. A show of hands by members of the two houses is legal and constitutional nonsense, in keeping with much of what happened that day. John Howard is a desperate advocate of the monarchy. Apparently that means an invisible governor-general whose sole function is to disappear whenever the prime minister so directs.

It goes without saying, that a mere simple majority of both houses cannot alter the constitution and confer parliament's power on a body outside the constitution. But then it should also go without saying that the doors of the parliament should not have been shut by the presiding officers on the demand of the executive. That the opposition leader should not have been excluded from the reception. And on and on and on.

US Intelligence Chiefs Facing Broadside over Iraq

The report comes against the backdrop of a blame game in the US, with intelligence sources privately claiming the Bush Administration exaggerated the threat posed by Sadam Hussein, and vice-versa.

It also comes as the CIA-led weapons search team, the Iraq Survey Group, has so far failed to find any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Senator Roberts told the Washington Post: "I worry about the credibility of the intelligence community.

"If there's stuff on the fan, we have to get the fan cleaned."

At the centre of the row is a 100-page top secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) document which was produced in October 2002.

Such reports usually take months to compile, but a senior intelligence expert was quoted by the newspaper claiming that the NIE was a "cut and paste job", completed in just three weeks and reviewed in only one day.

The document analysed the threat posed by Saddam and the risks of staging an invasion.

I would have thought the problem lay in a White House determined to cherrypick the intelligence advice it was given, not the intel itself. And a president determined to cherrypick what his palace staff fed him.

The main game

The pundits' claims that September 11 made terrorism the defining issue of the Bush presidency are completely wrong. The Bush Administration deliberately rejected the counter-terrorism opportunities of post-September 11 to return to its pre-existing agenda of extraordinarily aggressive political and geopolitical activism: an agenda not even remotely connected to terrorism; an agenda squarely devoted to entrenching Republican power at home and US power abroad.

Of course, the administration is also pursuing some genuine counter-terrorism measures. But these are the added extras, not the core agenda. And even the counter-terrorist extras were not enough for Bush's White House chief of counter-terrorism, who resigned in a fury of frustration and went to work for the Democrats.

The full scope of the Bush agenda may also flow in part from the personal convictions of the president himself. In his 1999 pitch for office, a book titled A Charge to Keep (Perennial, 2001), Bush wrote that he learned from his father's experience as president that political capital was not a collectible to hoard but a currency to be used. His father had not spent the political capital he had earned in winning the first Gulf War, and W was determined not to make the same mistake.

and:

"My faith frees me," George W. Bush wrote in his memoir. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like." The world, preoccupied with Bush's apparent feeble-mindedness, has failed to grasp the true breadth and boldness of his ambition. Bush is a shrewd and ruthless risk-taker. Not content to be in power, he is using his presidency to make the Republicans the party permanently in power. Not satisfied with America's status as the superpower, he is working to make it an unchallengeable superpower. Bush might not have hit on the precise formulation but he certainly does seem to have reached the right conclusion about the way the world views his presidency: "They misunderestimated me.

We are a strange people. We are unsurprised when politicians behave badly. We seem to have made two senatorial hecklers into national heroes. I suspect much the Bush speech fell on deaf ears because messianic arrogance and blatant partisanship just does not fly in Australia. Howard has, until now always, carefully avoided it, although he did indeed, as one letter to the Canberra Times said, look as if he'd died and gone to heaven.

The alleged security measures, closing the parliament and removing demonstrators out of sight and sound, could perhaps have been justified. But why was it necessary to insist that if any loudspeakers were used they must be turned away from Parliament House?

This was not security, it was propaganda. As Salon reports today:

Since then, Presser charges, the Bush administration has continued the strategy of using the Secret Service and cooperative local police departments to keep protesters at bay, and not incidentally, out of easy range of the media. "People used to say that Ronald Reagan's was the most scripted administration we ever had," the attorney says, "but this Bush administration has gone way beyond that." Presser adds that he was told by William Fisher, a senior Philadelphia police captain and head of the department's Civil Affairs Unit, that the tight restrictions and decision to cordon off protesters during presidential visits have come "at the Secret Service's direction." Fisher declined to be interviewed for this article, but when asked, did not deny Presser's account of their conversation.

But then the entire visit, like the War on Terror, seems to be about politics rather than policy. Once upon a time a visiting chief of state would not have dreamed of offering political support to a domestic political leader. Times have changed. But the Russian for 'Man of Steel' has not, and it does not mean 'fair dinkum'.

Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.

This is a much more important document than a certain speech in Canberra, because it is much more truthful on progress in the War against Terror. I might have been more moved by the Rumsfeld cost/benefit metrics if they had included the human, as well as material costs. I might have been more moved by the Bush address if it took any account of reality. Instead, as Fred Kaplan
writes :

It [the Rumsfeld memo] puts the lie to the Bush administration's PR campaign that postwar Iraq is progressing nicely and that the media are exaggerating the setbacks. (If the media are exaggerating, this memo indicates, then so, too, is Secretary Rumsfeld.) It reads eerily like some internal mid-'60s document from The Pentagon Papers that spelled out how badly things were going in Vietnam (just as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, were publicly proclaiming tunnel light and victories). To use a phrase coined during LBJ's tenure to describe the ever-widening fissure between rhetoric and reality, Rumsfeld's memo marks the first unconcealable eruption of a 'credibility gap' in the wartime presidency of George W. Bush.

Notice of Motion 24 October 2003

Mr Bevis to move:

That this House:

(1)notes with grave concern the detention of two Australian citizens, Mr David Hicks and Mr Mamdouh Habib at Guantanamo Bay Cuba by the United States administration;

(2)notes that even the worst war criminals from Nazi Germany were afforded a full court hearing open to public scrutiny;

(3)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have received only very limited access to legal advice;

(4)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have been denied access to their families;

(5)notes that David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have been denied natural justice and are being held at the sole discretion of the President of the United States of America in whatever circumstances he deems fit; and

(6)calls on the President of the United States of America either to lay charges immediately against these Australians to be heard in an open court of law or release them for return to Australia where any legal proceedings can be pursued in accordance with Australian law.

I would not hold your breath waiting for Prime Minister Howard's passion for robust democracy to see this one debated.

Why is Bush avoiding the Australian media? Don't ask

George Bush's word is apparently beyond question. At least, by the Australian press.

The US President has declined a customary joint press conference after his address to the Federal Parliament tomorrow.

The media event, which normally allows two or three questions from Australian media and an equal number from the visiting press, would have been the only official opportunity for Australian journalists to quiz Mr Bush on the Iraq war and its aftermath.

It would also be the only opportunity to ask the US President about the two Australian citizens being detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay.

Australian journalists have also been denied any place in a so-called 'close-up media pool' that will follow Mr Bush on all his official stops on the day. All positions in the four-member pool have been allocated to members of the White House press corps.

The US Secret Service rejected an application from the Canberra press gallery for equal access, on the basis that the journalists did not have the required US security clearances. The Secret Service then declined to allow the journalists to apply for those clearances; no reason was given.

A marquee has been set up in the grounds of The Lodge to allow the American journalists to file their stories. No Australian media will be allowed on the grounds.

A member of the team put together by Mr Howard's department to make press arrangements for the visit conceded yesterday that Australian media will learn of events at Government House and The Lodge from news reports filed in the US.

What a gutless wonder! Correction, it is hard to tell whether Bush is more gutless for evading questions or Howard is more gutless for allowing him to do it. When did the US Secret Service acquire the right to close our parliament without asking permission from either house or to decide which journalists are allowed to attend a press conference?

BAD ATTITUDES

How odd of God

To choose to use

Boykin and Bush

To air His Views

Australia's Treatment Of Asylum Seekers: The View From Outside

The universal declaration of human rights is the most widely accepted international convention in human history. Most countries in the world are parties to it. Article 14 of the universal declaration of human rights provides that every person has a right to seek asylum in any territory to which they can gain access. Despite that almost universally accepted norm, when a person arrives in Australia and seeks asylum, we lock them up. We lock them up indefinitely and in conditions of the utmost harshness.

The Migration Act provides for the detention of such people until they are either given a visa or removed from Australia. In practice, this means that human beings - men, women and children innocent of any crime - are locked up for months, and in many cases years.

They are held in conditions of shocking harshness. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has described conditions in Australia's detention centres as "offensive to human dignity". The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has described Australia's detention centres as "worse than prisons" and observed "alarming levels of self-harm". Furthermore, they have found that the detention of asylum seekers in Australia contravenes Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bans arbitrary detention.

The Delegate of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner who visited Woomera in 2002 described it as "a great human tragedy". Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly criticised Australia's policy of mandatory detention and the conditions in which people are held in detention.

In short, every responsible human rights organisation in the world has condemned Australia's treatment of asylum seekers. Only the Australian government and the Australian public are untroubled by our treatment of innocent, traumatised people who seek our help.

While John Howard has never said that refugees rule the world by proxy, he has come close to it. Go read Debunking More Myths About Asylum Seekers. (PDF) Most of the government's public claims about refugees have been simply untrue or wildly misleading.

Even the famous: 'We will decide who comes to Australia' is wildly misleading because the refugee convention does not prevent us doing that. What are the real facts?

• 71 countries accept refugees and asylum seekers in some form or other
  
• Of the 71 Australia is ranked 32nd;
  
• On a per capita basis Australia is ranked 38th, slightly behind Kazakhstan, Guinea, Djibouti and Syria;
  
• Of the 29 developed countries that accept refugees and asylum seekers Australia is ranked 14th. Per capita, the US takes twice as many refugees as Australia.
  

The truth will out, eventually. Sometime. I hope.

Organic Farming Yields new Weapon against Global Warming

After 23 years of field studies on organic farming practices, researchers at The Rodale Institute have announced exciting new findings with profound implications in the battle against global warming.

The Rodale Institute's groundbreaking Farming Systems Trial, the world's longest running study of organic farming, has documented that organic soils actually scrub the atmosphere of global warming gases by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and converting it into soil material. This is the first study to differentiate organic farming techniques from conventional agricultural practices for their ability to serve as carbon 'sinks.'

'Organic farming is a powerful new tool in the global warming arsenal,' said Anthony Rodale, chairman of The Rodale Institute. 'It puts agriculture into a lead role - in regenerating the environment.'

Through a process called carbon sequestration, plants and soils act as 'sinks' for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon 'sequestered' in vegetation and soil is not readily released as carbon dioxide, providing a significant boost in the efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. While carbon helps stimulate plant growth, scientists estimate carbon dioxide may be responsible for more than 80 percent of global warming.

What organic farming cannot do is churn out large amounts of the homogenised but less value-added mush that corporate agriculture is so good at. So go eat at an organic tomato and help save the planet.

Conspiracy theories

We have uncovered one, incontrovertibly true, conspiracy involving MI6, the Libyans and the royal family. It seems that the Queen [this section has been redacted by the Guardian's legal team]. You read it here first.

I denounce the conspiracy to make 'redact' an everyday English word.

Holding leaders accountable for untruths about war

While the pot continues to boil in Washington and London over the manipulated evidence used to ''justify'' attacking Iraq, an equally passionate debate has been taking place in Australia, where former Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie resigned before the war and immediately went public about the lying.

That the Australian Senate saw fit, in a rare move on Oct. 7, formally to censure Prime Minister John Howard for misleading the public shows that truth can win out even in a country with a largely apathetic populace and a mainstream press all too eager to parrot the official line. There are lessons for us, of course, but Americans cannot be accused of apathy in this particular instance because the U.S. media have largely ignored the story.

The Australian Senate censured Howard for producing no evidence to support his claims last March that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and for suppressing Australian intelligence warnings that war with Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks. One senator accused Howard of "unprecedented deceit."

Sadly, the deceit was all too precedented. Tampa. SIEV-X. The Nigerien yellowcake. Abbot's involvement in the destruction of One Nation. The Manildra meeting Howard forgot he had attended. The 14 February JIC report. The qualifications to the US analysis. The whole sorry invention of 'pre-deployment' - the war you've committed the nation to without telling the nation.

I've previously blogged about why Howard is escaping the popular outrage emerging in the US and Britain. We'll see whether you can found a government on fooling all of the people all of the time between now and the next election.

Time for reckoning

Intelligence is meant to inform government decision-making, not to be invoked or discarded selectively to justify predetermined political decisions. The unjustified claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities have severely damaged the credibility of the U.S. government and the U.S. intelligence community.

The Kay report offers nothing to vindicate or excuse the administration in this matter. Congress, in whom the Constitution has invested the war powers function, has the responsibility to initiate an independent investigation on how and why the administration used discredited and disputed claims to launch a war, which continues to impose a costly and destabilizing burden on this nation.

Greg Thielmann was a senior official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Daryl G. Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association.

We do not really need to look far beyond the Kay report. Comparing the contents of that report (including the botched botulism allegation) with what the coalition governments have claimed it says reveals a leadership that will say or do anything to retain power. They should all get reverse gears installed, and quickly.

The Poor Man: "The Stovepipe"

Fans of cheap irony may wish to read Pollack's "The Threatening Storm", particularly those bits (pgs. 248-280) which discuss how Saddam's unwillingness to accept intelligence he doesn't want to hear, and the willingness of his operatives to furnish him with only the stories he wants to hear, make him a particular danger. Hard-core irony fanatics should focus on page 255, where mention is made of punishments handed out to the bearers of unwanted news, and wonder aloud if these punishments ever included jeapardizing the safety of said bearer's wives by outing them as undercover agents. Those of a more serious mind should content themselves with noting the rather dismissive attitude towards the idea of objective reality implied by such an approach, and, weaving together (oh, for example) the 2001 demotion of the position of national science advisor, and the editing of EPA reports on the scientific consensus on climate change by political officials, and wonder if it wouldn't just save everyone a lot of needless aggrevation by skipping the middleman and just having Ralph Reed and Fred Barnes dictate to everyone how the world works. Most people think conservatives long for the 1950's; some radicals think they may secretly be pining for the days before the New Deal; I'm becoming convinced that their real ideal may be even a bit earlier.

Personally, I love cheap irony. I'd say the Kay report is fast turning into a third example of editing by political officials.

To Some in GOP, Bush's Troubles Become a Liability

Although many Republicans are optimistic that Bush will win reelection next year, all nonretiring House members (and a third of senators) have their own 2004 reelection campaigns to worry about. Some GOP incumbents -- especially those in the several dozen House districts that Democrat Al Gore carried or nearly won in 2000 -- are showing an increasing willingness to vote against key White House initiatives and to reassure constituents that they think and act independently of the president.

Leach was among 21 Republicans who joined most Democrats when the House voted 221 to 203 to bar the administration from implementing the overtime revisions. Scores of Republicans bucked the White House by voting to overturn a Federal Communications Commission rule making media mergers easier, and several also voted, against Bush's wishes, to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other countries.

Such erosion of GOP solidarity was rarely seen when Bush's approval ratings were higher, but it hardly signals a deep or permanent break between the White House and congressional GOP moderates. Republican lawmakers from swing districts say that Bush generally remains popular with their constituents, and that jobs, not Iraq, are number one on voters' minds. Many GOP House members are taking a cautious line: focusing on the possibility that Bush can't help them at reelection time, yet continuing to support him as much as possible.

Rats. Ship. Sinking. Enough said.

Listening to Mahathir

What became clear watching Mr. Mahathir back then was that his strident rhetoric was actually part of a delicate balancing act aimed at domestic politics. Malaysia has a Muslim, ethnically Malay, majority, but its business drive comes mainly from an ethnic Chinese minority. To keep the economy growing, Mr. Mahathir must allow the Chinese minority to prosper, but to ward off ethnic tensions he must throw favors, real and rhetorical, to the Malays.

Part of that balancing act involves reserving good jobs for Malay workers and giving special business opportunities to Malay entrepreneurs. One reason Mr. Mahathir was so adamantly against I.M.F. austerity plans was that he feared that they would disrupt the carefully managed cronyism that holds his system together. When times are tough, Mr. Mahathir also throws the Muslim majority rhetorical red meat.

And that's what he was doing last week. Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low.

Dead right. Reading the whole speech does not excuse, but does explain, Mahathir's use of racist appeals to his electorate,. As I blogged earlier, it's strange how quick Bush was to denounce Mahathir (on whom Bush has no influence) while treating Boykin to faint criticism and retaining him in office.

Instead of taking Mahathir on for his attack on Jews, I would much prefer to see the Australian government affirming the universality of human rights and the wrongness of any form of racism. But wait...

The Peoples' Voice

The Peoples' Voice is a new, broad-based civil initiative whose founders recognise that a way exists to bridge the intolerable impasse between Israelis and Palestinians.

Difficult though it may be to admit, a compromise based�on the�"two states for two peoples" formula is the only way to ensure the continued existence of Israel as a democratic state and Jewish homeland.

Palestinians�are also realising the need for compromise -- that the�abandonment of violence is their only feasible way of achieving�political independence and a stable economy.

The Peoples' Voice is intended to persuade leaders on both sides to end the conflict by means of mass signatures on a joint statement of principles.

In Israel there will be a national petition campaign, with a kindred movement on the Palestinian side. The signatures will then be submitted to the leaders of both nations as a tangible expression of the will�of the majority of both peoples, and with a view to changing diplomatic policy.

The Peoples' Voice will succeed.�Israelis and�Palestinians understand that there is only one solution!

History teaches us that the power to enact change lies with the people as well as with politicians.�Israeli and Palestinian leaders�are at present locked in situations and coalitions that do not allow them to abandon the vicious cycle of hostility. This is the time and�way to begin a sweeping, grassroots initiative�to end the bloodshed,�insecurity and economic problems affecting each and every one of us.

First hopeful sign in this conflict in many years. The remarkable thing about these principles is how obvious they sound the first time you read them. Except to the leadership on each side of the dispute.

name of blog

Sy Hersh's latest, on Iraq, intelligence, WMDs and the like. Wow.

My favourite grafs are:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic�and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book �The Threatening Storm� generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was �dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

�They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,� Pollack continued. �They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn�t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.

It is terrifying that this president does not read the newspapers. Instead, like a Qing emperor, he relies on palace staff to tell him what happens outside the walls of the Great Within. About the only difference is that Bush does not demand the anatomical sacrifice the Qing dynasty demanded of members of the inner court.

Eunuch domination was always the beginning of the end for a dynasty, because it meant the emperor could no longer make his own decisions.

name of blog

Sy Hersh's latest, on Iraq, intelligence, WMDs and the like. Wow.

My favourite grafs are:

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic�and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book �The Threatening Storm� generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was �dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

�They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,� Pollack continued. �They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn�t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.

It is terifying that this president does not read the newspapers. Instead, like a Qing emperor, he relies on palace staff to tell him what happens outside the walls of the Great Within. About the only difference is that Bush does not demand the anatomical sacrifice the Qing dynasty demanded of members of the inner court.

Eunuch domination was always the beginning of the end for a dynasty, because it meant the emperor could no longer make his own decisions.