Top Cover

According to the Washington Post:

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects

Waterboarding - making a captive experience the sensation of drowning - is not merely a technique or tactic but torture.

Cleese on Palin

John Cleese says that Michael Palin has been eclipsed as the funniest Palin by Sarah. He compares her to a (live) parrot, saying words that it has memorised but clearly doesn't understand. I've always thought the same could be said about George Bush.

How do you prove a negative?

The revelations in Ron Suskind's new book (see e.g. the Times) that the UK and US were told before the war that Iraq had no WMD are fascinating. It's not clear that the claims of Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush should have been believed but where do they appear in e.g. the Butler Review?

Trying to work out the timing is quite difficult. The Times says:

The book claimed that the former Prime Minister sent a top British spy to the Middle East in 2003 — three months before the invasion

With the invasion taking place on 20 March 2003, three months before that would be 20 December 2002.

The other main claim from Suskind's book is that after the war the CIA used Habbush to forge a letter linking Iraq with the September 11 attacks. The Times gleefully says:

The forgery, adamantly denied by the White House, was passed to a British journalist in Baghdad and written about as if genuine by The Sunday Telegraph on December 14, 2003.

Signs of a split?

In the Guardian, Andrew Sparrow has Downing Street contradicting the Observer's story yesterday that Bush and Brown were at odds over Iraq troop withdrawals.

It's hard to know who to believe, although George has a point when he reminds us that Gordon promised last October that troops would be cut in the spring.

The Observer also interpreted George Bush's comments about Brown's plan for a series of meetings on the oil price as critical of Brown:

Bush called it an 'interesting idea', but warned against expectations of any major short-term improvement and made it clear he had no plans to go. 'I'm going to go home and take a look at what it all means and I'll decide who's going to attend on our behalf,' Bush said.

He had already been urging King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to increase production. But he said: 'There's no magic wand. It took us a while to get to where we are. It's going to take us a while to get out of it. And the truth of the matter is that there's either got to be more supply or less demand. And demand doesn't decline overnight' - particularly with 'big consumers of hydrocarbons' such as China 'subsidising their populations'.

There must have been a lot of spin on this as it doesn't look overly critical to me.

So this is permanance

The Independent continues to make the running with its story about how the US wants to maintain permanent bases in Iraq. Today it reports from Washington that George Bush is having to rethink his plans after the Iraqi government stood up to him.

Patrick Cockburn says "there is less to the American "concessions" than would first appear" and that Iraqi authority would be nominal.

Don't mention the election

Gordon Brown, in the US, has said (about Zimbabwe):

"A stolen election would not be a democratic election at all,"

Let's hope George Bush, who came to power following a blatantly stolen election in 2000, wasn't listening.

Countless agenda

There are more agendas and more layers of spin than I can count in this Sunday Times story headlined Us fears that Brown wants Iraq pull-out.

Apart from the main theme, based on a US official's impression that Gordon Brown's chief foreign policy adviser was "doing the groundwork", there is further analysis around Brown's trip to the US.

We have already been told that the Bush administration dislikes Mark Malloch-Brown, the new Foreign Office minister and critic of the Iraq war. One former UN official accused him of turning a blind eye to corruption and mismanagement during his time there. UN insiders have accused the accuser of being a US government stooge.

Meanwhile "no walkabouts or matey photo-opportunities are expected when the president meets the new prime minister" we are told.

“President Bush and prime minister Brown don’t need a photo-opportunity of the two of them heading off into the sunset holding hands to prove that the US-UK relationship is as strong as ever,” a British official said.

Clearly Brown doesn't need a photo opportunity to make him look like Tony Blair.

Bright's Blog goes cryptic

Martin Bright, who broke my story on the Iraq dossier, has started to blog more frequently and to good effect.

In one piece An outrageous judgement he fiercely criticises the ongoing reporting restrictions on the recent trial of two men over a leaked memo. He notes that

in a bizarre twist, the judge has stated that the contents of the leak -- which is thought to involve a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush -- can be reported as long as they are not linked to the case and appear on a separate page of the newspaper involved.

On a different post, on a separate page, A missile for Al-Jazeera he reports an issue that he does not link to the leaked memo story at all. Apparently George Bush had a plan to bomb the Arabic television station al-Jazeera. Bright links to Richard Norton-Taylor's Guardian piece on the missile for al-jazeera story.