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In the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga. That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a "clear link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was...

MTV tries it's hand at damage control, but fails miserablyMTV has rather deftly changed it's text on it's Super Bowl page from the text originally up there (and touted by news programs and websites everywhere:Janet Jackson Got Nasty at the MTV-Produced Super Bowl Halftime Show Jaws across the country hit the carpet at exactly the same time. You know what we're talking about...Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake and a kinky finale that rocked the Super Bowl to its core. P. Diddy, Kid Rock, & Nelly rounded out the halftime show in the midst of the greatest game on earth. MTV was...

Election-Year Forecast January 15, 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell now admits, or acknowledges, or however you want to put it, that he hasn’t seen a “smoking gun” proving that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or terrorist connections, though he says it was nonetheless “prudent” to suppose so “at the time.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that the Bush administration misrepresented the “threat” from Saddam Hussein. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s former secretary of the Treasury, says Bush was determined to depose Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office, long before the 9/11 attacks, and...

DECEMBER 8--A Los Angeles woman who came forward during the California gubernatorial campaign to accuse Arnold Schwarzenegger of previous instances of sexual harassment today sued the Hollywood star, claiming that he, an aide, and his campaign smeared her as a convicted felon when she made her charges. In the below Los Angeles Superior Court complaint, former stuntwoman Rhonda Miller charges that the Schwarzenegger camp told reporters that she had an extensive rap sheet, a dirty trick meant to discount her credibility when it came to the harassment charges. Miller claims that the Schwarzenegger smear began an hour after she made...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 — It was Saddam Hussein's last weapons deal — and it did not go exactly as he and his generals had imagined. For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Hussein's sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea, according to computer files discovered by international inspectors and the accounts of Bush administration officials.The officials now say they believe that those negotiations — mostly conducted in neighboring Syria, apparently with the knowledge of the Syrian government — were not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles. Instead, the goal...

<p>Senate Republicans have thrown their support behind the investigation into how internal memos written by Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee wound up in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.</p> <p>Since the memos surfaced ? revealing how Democrats planned with liberal interest groups to block President Bush's judicial nominees ? Democrats have accused Republican staffers of hacking into their computers, downloading the 14 memos and leaking them to reporters.</p>

I am increasingly impressed with the calm, mature professionalism of the elite Washington/New York media. Only recently, and for several decades, the WashingtonPostNew YorkTimesCBSNBCABCCNN entities could not resist reporting dramatic national news -- even if the information came to them by informal or questionable methods. From the illegally leaked Pentagon Papers three decades ago, to the illegally leaked Pentagon Iraq war plans of last year, the media elite senior editors never spiked an important revelation for mere want of quiet title to the document in question. They would leave it to red-faced and exasperated senior government officials to express impotent...

The leak of a Democratic document describing a strategy to highlight contradictions in CIA reports and statements by the US administration about Iraq intensified animosity at a Senate committee. Several Republican Senators accused Democrats of seeking to make political mileage out of a bipartisan inquiry relating to the quality of intelligence used to justify the US-led war on Iraq. Tension has heightened between members of the Senate Intelligence Committee with the approach of next year's election season. "Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq," the memo said. "Yet, we have an important role...

<p>November 6, 2003 -- It's one of the most serious breaches of trust on one of the most sensitive committees on Capitol Hill.</p> <p>It's a memo, drafted by Democratic staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that clearly details the manner in which Democrats hoped to manipulate privileged information regarding pre-Iraq-War intelligence to explicit partisan advantage.</p>

Madonna is being sued by the son of Guy Bourdin over similarities between her recent "Hollywood" video and photos taken by Bourdin, a Parisian fashion photographer who died in 1991, according to the Smoking Gun. Are the allegations true? Judge for yourself with screen captures from the video next to the (11)photos that they most closely resemble, posted by a site dedicated to the photographer. While many worry that the Internet creates a fertile ground for appropriating the creative output of artists, this situation demonstrates how the Internet can make clear the relationships between derivative work and inspiration, putting the...

AUGUST 25--As you probably recall, TSG reported last week on the arrest of a Connecticut woman who went bonkers at her wedding reception. Turns out the story is better than we thought. According to this just-released South Windsor Police Services report, 19-year-old bride Adrienne Samen spat on her wedding ring, called a fellow inmate the N-word, and queried cops on how much time she'd serve for "killing a Marine" (Samen's new hubby, a Leatherneck, had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq). The newlyweds are reportedly now honeymooning, presumably enjoying the peace and quiet missing from their wedding...

"Experts from FOI [Swedish Defence Research Agency] accompanied the Monte Carlo based production company World Television Network, when they were doing a report in Iraq with a team fronted by the Swedish journalist Wera Maria Cedrell. Wera Maria Cedrell claims that she has evidence proving that Saddam's regime produced weapons of mass destructions as late as the last year. "This is the "smoking gun" the U.S. is looking for," she says

A partial translation of an article in today's paper version of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. It should be noted that World Television Network doesn't even seem to have a site of their own and the only former mention of Wera Maria Cedrell I can find is in a dispatch on a meeting with Iraq's former information minister. But this is a big story in today's Swedish newspapers, with Expressen publishing "sensational", "world exclusive" pictures "which might prove that Saddam Hussein had WMD's" in its paper edition, for example: "Experts from FOI [Swedish Defence Research Agency] accompanied the Monte Carlo...

Swedish researchers claim to have found proscribed weapons in Iraq A group of Swedish researchers, travelling to Iraq without the knowledge of the Swedish government, is announcing that they have found missiles for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a house in Baghdad. The finds will be presented in a forthcoming production by World Television Network (WTN). The information supposedly came to Swedish WTN reporter Maria Wera Cedrell, who has worked in Iraq for 15 years, through an Iraqi scientist. She was assisted by former arms inspector and WMD expert Åke Sellström from Swedish Defence Research Agency (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut, FOI)....

Experts from the Swedish Defence have been on a secret mission to Iraq to check on information that Saddam Hussein produced WMDs as late as June last year. The mission was carried out in June - without the knowledge of the Swedish government or USA. The decision to make the journey was taken by Åke Sellström, head of the department of NBC-protection of the Swedish Defence Research Agency. Neither the acting DG of FOI or the US-led occupation forces in Iraq were informed. TT: Must not a journey of this nature receive clearance from higher authorities? -Yes, in principle, but...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Monday that a soil sample from the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory destroyed last week by U.S. missiles has tested positive for a chemical that is "one step away" from deadly VX nerve gas.</p>

<p>The CIA has uncovered components of a gas centrifuge used to enrich weapons-grade uranium, and a stack of nuclear arms documents in the back yard of an Iraqi scientist, an indication Baghdad was hiding its arms program for future use, a U.S. intelligence official said yesterday.</p>

Whom do you trustDavid Limbaugh (archive) June 11, 2003 | Print | Send With their growing cacophony of charges against the Bush Administration for allegedly lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Democratic machine and its media allies are committing the very sin they're imputing to President Bush: undermining our national credibility. Do you understand the gravity of the charge? Bush's opponents are contending that Bush, in order to snooker the public into supporting his neo-conservative, war-mongering appetite, deliberately -- not negligently -- distorted intelligence data to make Iraq's WMD program look much worse than it was. The whole pretense for...

The United States has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I know this because I read it on the front page of the very liberal New York Times. Of course, the Times was only trying to hurt the administration. In the rush to Baghdad during the war, our troops bypassed and failed to secure one of Saddam's key nuclear facilities. That facility was looted by local villagers, who ransacked vaults and warehouses looking for anything of value. Many of the villagers took home radioactive barrels, and are now suffering from radiation poisoning. According to the Times, the looted nuclear...

British military officers have uncovered an attempt by Saddam Hussein to build a missile capable of hitting targets throughout the Middle East, including Israel, The Telegraph can reveal. Plans for the surface-to-surface missile were one of the regime's most closely-guarded secrets and were unknown to United Nations weapons inspectors. Its range of 600 miles would have been far greater than that of the al-Samoud rocket - which already breached the 93-mile limit imposed by the UN on any Iraqi missiles. Saddam's masterplan for the new missile, which was being developed by Iraq's Military Industrialisation Commission (MIC), the body responsible for...