"Bush Has a Plan - Really"

So Bush has a "war aftermath plan." He only waited until more than a year after "major combat" was supposedly over to fill in Americans about his plan. Could it be because his approval rating is fast approaching single digits?

During Monday's speech Bush was reading a teleprompter and looked like he was speaking words he didn't believe. He also struggled with pronunciation of about 20 words. He choked on Abu Ghraib twice. He mentioned that Iraq has become the center of the "war on terror." Not a giant mental leap to figure out why that may be the case now. He talked about giving Iraqis total sovereignty. Does he mean the US will accept who the majority of Iraqis choose? Not in a Texas minute. www.democraticunderground.com

Is the US govt crying 'wolf'?

WASHINGTON - Usually an official warning of a terrorist attack makes people jittery and puts authorities on high alert. But the United States government's latest alert of a potentially massive Al Qaeda attack in the future has provoked as much scepticism as fear.

Declaring that the US faces a possible massive terror attack in the coming months, Attorney-General John Ashcroft and Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Robert Mueller asked for the public's help on Wednesday in providing information about seven people, including two Canadians, they said were linked with Al Qaeda.

Mr Ashcroft conceded that authorities did not know of any specific plans for a terrorist attack and had no evidence to share publicly that would tie the seven individuals identified as potential suspects to any specific threats. There were no plans to raise the terror threat level.

Adding to the doubts was the revelation that major US cities from New York to Los Angeles had not been informed of any heightened security concern.

Mr Ashcroft said several upcoming events — which include two major American holidays, a Group of Eight summit, political party conventions and US elections in November — could be attractive targets for Al Qaeda. www.todayonline.com

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Thursday, May 27th, News Update posted:

Analysts Say U.S. Threat Warning Is Back-Covering
A vague new U.S. warning that al Qaeda may be planning a massive attack smacks of political back-covering and campaigning, not just a call for heightened vigilance, analysts and former government officials say.

Sunday, May 30th, News Update posted:

State of Denial

By Tom Engelhardt

The dramatic highpoint of the speech, however, was certainly the President's strange offer to raze Abu Ghraib (however pronounced). He said in full:

"A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values. America will fund the construction of a modern maximum security prison. When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib Prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."

This is actually something we could do. After all, building maximum-security prisons has been something of a boom industry in this country for a while. In fact, I think I smell a "reconstruction" contract heading down the pike toward Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, which already has much experience under its belt working on our previous offshore maximum-security prison in Guantanamo. www.motherjones.com