Bob Simon interviews the Iraqi defector code-named “Curve Ball,” whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification the Bush administration used to invade Iraq.

Full text of president’s remarks below…
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President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said in yesterday’s The Washington Post, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.

The request – which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.”

“With Iraq War costs approaching $500 billion, President Bush is expected to request at least $50 billion more. He does so while offering only more predictions of an impending breakthrough on security and political reconciliation that will eventually enable us to remove our troops from the country. The American people must be patient, he explains; the surge must be given more time to work,” Christopher Preble, Cato’s director of foreign policy studies, said in a statement released Wednesday.

“No one should be surprised that the president has yet again moved the goalposts, but the extent of this particular change is striking. When he announced the surge in January 2007, the president explained that improved security would be a catalyst for political reconciliation. It now seems certain that the Maliki government will not achieve most of its political benchmarks in the foreseeable future. It has gotten so bad that some U.S. political leaders and commentators are even calling for Maliki’s removal, a process that would only further undermine the prospects for an American withdrawal any time soon,” Preble says.

“But even the president’s claims that security in Iraq has improved are dubious. The Associated Press reports that the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running at nearly double the pace from a year ago,” Preble says. “It might be reasonable to expect the American people to be patient if the president’s past promises of progress hadn’t proved so disastrously wrong. As it is, the public sees no end in sight to this ruinous war.”

Cato.Org

For nine months, the Bush administration went to great lengths to hide what would seem to be an innocuous secret, the fact that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced out of his job the day before the November election, not the day after.

The significance of the secret appears to be that Rumsfeld got the ax the same day he wrote a secret memo suggesting a de-escalation of the Iraq War — when George W. Bush already had decided to escalate.

For the full story of this troublesome secret, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

About an hour ago, the Senate caved to President Bush and sent him another blank check to continue the war in Iraq.

This is a serious blow for all of us, but no one lost more today than the troops in the field who continue to sacrifice so nobly and their families still waiting back home.

It’s a hard moment, but you and I don’t have the luxury of getting discouraged. We must remember: This is not over. For those of us committed to change, it has only begun.

This weekend, thousands of us will take action in our communities to support the troops and end the war. We will speak out in public. We will send care packages to soldiers in Iraq. We will gather letters for Congress and the president. And on Memorial Day, we will remember and honor those who sacrificed everything for their nation.

For more info and to join the effort, got to SupportTheTroopsEndTheWar.Com.

After tonight, one thing is now perfectly clear: No one else is going to end this war for us. Bush will not listen. Congress will not fight. There’s no one left to lead the country now but we the people.

Each of us has a duty and a responsibility to our troops and to each other to do all that we can to end this war. Under the Constitution of the United States of America, we the people are the sovereign and the ultimate deciders–and by all that I know is right we will succeed in bringing our troops home.

Thank you for standing up.

John Edwards

One of our favorite independent investigative and analytical reporters has been busy the past few days, covering topics like the mainstream media can’t seem to figure out.

Robert Parry has been writing about how Washington politicians are dealing with the debacle in Iraq and how disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is trying to spin his way back into the race for the White House.

“One mother sits on her son’s grave at Arlington Cemetery and reads from Corduroy, his favorite baby book. Another mom spent cold winter afternoons in a sleeping bag stretched across her son’s grave,” he writes. “Meanwhile, George W. Bush reportedly plots a new combat escalation in Iraq and some members of Congress look to give the President another blank check so they can head home for the Memorial Day recess and say they’re supporting the troops.”

Then, he writes about the Chatham House, a well-respected British think tank, which has thrown down a challenge to leaders in Washington and London to begin “accepting realities in Iraq.” The new report paints a grim picture of an Iraqi society coming apart and warns that George W. Bush’s military “surge” will fail to achieve any lasting security improvements.

“But the idea that Bush must accept reality goes against his longstanding confidence that he and his friends can shape how many Americans perceive reality,” he writes.

And, he says, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was known as a worldly and even hedonistic guy.

“But he appears to have spotted a political opening for his planned comeback, convincing right-wing Christians that they are being persecuted by ‘radical secularists.’

In what sounds like a year-round version of the “war on Christmas” complaint, Gingrich wants the fundamentalist Christian base of the Republican Party to view themselves as the victims and him as their defender.

How utterly ridiculous, right?

For the full story of the contrasting interests of grieving moms and Washington pols, the real story of how Bush’s cult-like followers reject reality in Iraq and for the full story of Gingrich’s up-is-down world, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

A Canadian parliamentary panel has taken an unvarnished look at the war in Afghanistan and concluded that it is a “hard mission” that is slipping out of control. The legislators fault heavy-handed U.S. tactics for alienating the population and an inadequate NATO commitment to pacify the country.

The Canadian report represents a grim bookend to the Iraq Study Group’s assessment of a “grave and deteriorating” situation in Iraq. Both fronts are now in danger of being lost.

For the full story of how the Bush administration is engineering a two-front war disaster, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

Also, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern gives mostly failing grades to the President’s strategy of using the Axis of Evil term, and writer and political organizer Michael O’McCarthy explains why the latest disclosures about mistreatment of Iraq War veterans at Walter Reed shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise to the Pentagon or the White House in: Killing U.S. Soldiers Slowly.

Senate Republicans effectively blocked debate on a resolution to oppose President George W. Bush’s Iraq troop surge in what amounts to a filibuster. Only seven Republicans voted for a motion to have a full debate, leaving the Democrats 4 votes short of the 60 needed. The vote was 56 for debate, 34 against.

AP: Senate Gridlocks on Iraq War Resolution

Sen. John MCain, R-Arizona, missed the vote. He was back home in his district courting evangelical Christians in his run for president. He will be in South Carolina on Sunday talking about “abstinence” from sex, according to the AP.

Which brings up another point. We absolutely refuse to run the story today that Britney Spears may or may not have been in and escaped from a drug rehab program – and shaved her head. Who cares?

Was that the lead story today on your Internet Service Provider’s home page? I’ll bet a six-pack of Yuengling it was.

Hey BellSouth, I mean AT&T. Hey Charter and Comcast and Cox. Hey AOL and MSN. What is more important? Britney’s shaved head or a war debate in the U.S. Senate?

Make the Locust Fork News your home page, and read about the most important things going on in the world in the Locust Fork Journal. Add us to your browser favorites today!

by Glynn Wilson

The debate is on live on C-SPAN2 in the U.S. Senate in a rare holiday Saturday session, with the new Democratic Party majority determined to send a message to President George W. Bush that his escalation of the war in Iraq with a troop surge of 21,500 soldiers is unacceptable to Congress and to an overwhelming majority of the American people.

Republicans offered a number of amendments to the Senate version of the resolution in an attempt to reject any possibility of a reduction in funding for the troops.

Since it will take 60 votes in the 100-member body for the resolution to prevail, the Associated Press and other news sources say passage in the Senate is unlikely.

Since the mid-term elections in November, 2006, the Democrats hold 49 seats and the Republicans hold 49, but two independents lean Democratic, including Sen. Joe Leiberman, who caucuses with the Democrats. That gives them the majority they need to control all the Senate committee chairmanships – and the agenda.

The troop surge has already begun, of course, since President Bush has made it clear that he has no intention of listening to Congress – or the American people – and will continue the disastrous course of putting troops in harms way in the middle of an Iraqi civil war.

The vast majority of military and political experts, including Republicans, say the war in Iraq has already been lost and that the continuing U.S. presence there only exacerbates Islamic militant anger at the West and makes America less safe, not more so.

Bush’s ill-concieved war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence has taken time and resources away from the war on terror and turned much of the world against the United States as a beacon of freedom around the globe.

We have urged the president and members of Congress to get out of this war as soon as possible and turn our resources and attention to problems that threaten the entire planet and the human species, not just the American people and multi-national corporations.

Even if somehow Bush could find a way to win the war in the Middle East, global warming and climate change threatens the entire planet, including not only humans but all the beautiful birds we are documenting this weekend in the Great Backyard Birdcount.

Please, Mr. President, won’t you listen to the voices who are trying to lead you in a more productive direction?

For any birders checking in here to see our most recent photographs, we know many of you are moderates, independents, libertarians and even Republicans. Won’t you consider voting on the basis of your love of birds? There are at least 15 million Americans who participate in birding activities. That constitutes a constituency large enough and powerful enough to change the course of American politics – and the world.