In another exercise in understatement, this terrifying July 27 Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus is entitled "Bush order on freezing assets is unusually broad." Do those "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" include striking oil workers and other civil anti-occupation forces?

WASHINGTON -- Be careful what you say and whom you help -- especially when it comes to the Iraq war and the Iraqi government.

A three-judge panel of US Court of Appeals in Washington DC July 20 ordered the government to turn over virtually all its information on Guantanamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures. The ruling opens the way for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as "enemy combatants." It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration's detention policies that have increased the pressure on the White House to find an alternative to Guantanamo, where about 360 men are now being held.

A very amusing New York Times profile July 21 of Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the former firebrand cleric who is now exiled in Lebanon and barred from returning to his former home of Britain. The man who once praised the 9-11 plotters is now attempting to negotiate a truce in the fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. He says: "I want to support Muslims by saving their blood and their life. My job is to calm the fighting and to open a dialogue." Counterintuitively, he says that it is moderate Muslims who are most at risk of becoming jihadist cannon fodder:

"How come the moderate Muslims, not Omar Bakri, do this?" he demanded. "Because of Sheik Google," he quipped, referring to the use of the Internet to learn Islamic principles.

In a strange case of role-reversal, BBC July 20 takes the more Bush-friendly tack in reporting a new executive order on treatment of detained "terror suspects," writing in the lead that it bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," while the headline states: "Bush bans terror suspect torture." Not until six paragraphs down do we get the requisite caveats from rights observers—and then in a quote from another news agency. Leonard Rubenstein, director of Physicians for Human Rights, told AP (BBC says): "What is needed now is repudiation of brutal and cruel interrogation methods. General statements like this are inadequate, particularly after years of evidence that torture was authorised at the highest levels and utilised by US forces." Meanwhile, the establishmentarian New York Times headline on the story reads "C.I.A. Allowed to Resume Interrogations," and the lead states: "After months of behind the scenes wrangling, the White House said Friday that it had given the Central Intelligence Agency approval to resume its use of some harsh interrogation methods in questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas." Gee, doesn't sound so good after all, does it? Is the BBC still so shaken over the scandal following the 2003 Hutton Report that they are determined to be more Catholic than the Pope?

The latest piece of overwrought effluent from Kurt Nimmo once again exemplifies the fundamental flaw with the Conspiracy Industry. Those sources from the mainstream media which support the Conspiracy Theory are taken as gospel truth; those which point the other way are dismissed as disinformation. It is a fundamentally dishonest as well as pathetically transparent propaganda trick. Alas, the Conspiranoids' legions of true believers never seem to get it. Nimmo writes, July 14 (emphasis added):

From The Economist, July 5:

Don't mention the GWOT
A new vocabulary is needed to confront terrorism
The "global war on terror" is what America calls its response to the September 11th attacks. Never mind the cliché, or the fact that "terrorism" is a tactic and "terror" a state of mind; George Bush's crisp slogan helped to rally a traumatised American public. His principal ally over the years, Tony Blair, shared the sentiment, if not always the same words. Now, dealing with his first terrorist plot as prime minister, Gordon Brown is changing the choice of language.

The National Intelligence Estimate has reached such findings before. Yet more evidence of what an astonishing success the Global War on Terrorism has been. From McClatchy Newspapers, July 11:

Calling al-Qaida the most potent terrorist threat to U.S. national security, the classified draft makes clear that the Bush administration has been unable to cripple Osama bin Laden and the violent terror movement he founded.

The Pentagon said July 6 it has appealed a decision by a military judge to dismiss the case of a Guantanamo Bay detainee accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan. It is the first use of the appeals process since it was created by Congress last year to handle cases involving Guantanamo detainees. Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is one of two detainees whose military trials were dismissed because they were not identified as "unlawful" enemy combatants. The other is Yemeni detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly Osama bin Laden's former driver. Prosecutors filed an appeal in Khadr's case with the Court of Military Commission Review on July 4, a Pentagon spokesman said.