Have you heard of any progress on the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? No. No. No. Still no. So Colin Powell has come up with a very sad workaround: refer to WMDs that Hussein had back when he was a U.S. ally!! (Washington Post) No, really! I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't read it myself:

"If you want evidence of the existence and the use of weapons of mass destruction, come here now to Halabja today and see it. What happened over the intervening 15 years? Did [Hussein] suddenly lose the motivation? Did he suddenly decide that such weapons would not be useful? The international community did not believe so."

This may be the most pathetic effort I've seen yet.

SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS OUR ALLY AT THE TIME OF THE ATTACKS! And Powell would know -- he was working for the Reagan Administration at the time.

Asked today about the U.S. response, Powell, who was Reagan's national security adviser, told reporters that "there was no effort on the part of the Reagan administration to either ignore it or not take note of it." But when speaking to about 250 relatives of victims, Powell said there should have been a more aggressive response.

Read that to yourself aloud. They weren't trying to "ignore it or not take note of it" -- it being a major atrocity?!? Powell was there -- he didn't have to review the National Security Archive for documents showing that Rumsfeld didn't bring the gassings up at the time, and that the US followed Iraqi preferences to be gentle to Iraq when the UN wanted to pass a resolution condemning the gassing??? (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/) And the Administration he was a part of decided to take the strong steps of accommodating Iraq on the resolution and avoiding to "ignore it or not take note of it."

Holy cow.

I hope this is part of a continuing trend: resistance is increasing against the stomping of civil liberties as represented by the so-called Patriot Act (SF Gate). One thing I like about this article especially is it shows that hardcore conservative groups are finally speaking out to defend the freedoms that they also happen to hold dear. When the American Conservative Union and a bunch of right-wing think tanks are up in arms over a law with as much passion as the ACLU, something grandly democratic should happen! Well, I can hope.

Here's something I never thought I'd hear an Administration official say:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he had no reason to believe that Iraq's former leader, Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld was asked about a poll that indicated nearly 70 percent of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved.

"I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that," Rumsfeld said.

It's amazing, what a great paper the Washington Post is. Though it's interesting to note that this amazing and belated admission ran waaaay back on page A28.

Here's an interesting and frightening guess by the author of Talkingpoints.com about what he thinks the future holds for the desperate Bush Administration's ever-expanding quest for scapegoats to carry the weight of the ever-expanding list of failures in Iraq:

It would go something like this: To the extent that we're facing reverses in Iraq, we're not facing them because the plan was flawed or incompetently executed. We're facing them because the plan was sabotaged - by its enemies at home.

The saboteurs were the folks at the State Department and the CIA who stymied effective collaboration with the pre-war Iraqi opposition and members of the defeatist press who have a) demoralized Americans by exaggerating the problems with the occupation of Iraq and b)encouraged the mix of jihadists and Baathists, by creating that demoralization, to keep up their resistance and bombing by giving them the hope that America can be run out of the country.

Oh, how I hope the author isn't right. But... But... The colleague who forwarded this item out to me had pointed out some statements by members of the Bush Administration casually blaming anti-war protesters in this country for their failures in Iraq, so it's already begun.

Well, I suspect I won't be excerpting any more of my exchange with my office colleague, since we have come to an impasse. Her position is that everyone in the peace movement has to go out of their way to avoid confrontation or obstruction of anyone's path, no matter how peacefully, under a modified 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar' position, subject to a variety of exceptions that are uniquely her own.

The catch is, I don't think there is any historical support for 'niceness' alone solving the world's problems.

Women were rather nice for thousands of years without being granted voting or property rights. Even the most obedient and humble slaves weren't rewarded with freedom for themselves or others. The 13 colonies didn't win their freedom through being extra polite to George III. I recently read Nelson Mandela's autobiography, and I can tell you right now that niceness got the majority of South African peoples NOWHERE fast in their struggle against the unjust Apartheid system. Farmworkers in California, darned nice, but that didn't get them improved conditions.

So I don't think our exchange will continue, having proposed we agree to disagree on whether or not it's worth leaving the house or causing disruption to save lives. Ah, well.