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By E&P Staff
Published: October 02, 2005 10:20 AM ET
NEW YORK Many observers of the unfolding Plame/CIA case lament the revelations in the federal grand jury probe but suggest it may all be in vain because the level of malfeasance may not produce a specific criminal charge. But that doesn’t mean serious charges—including far-ranging ones, connecting the offices of Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney—could not be brought, via the "conspiracy" route.
Prosecutor Patrick J. (…)

LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - The conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidental shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war reaching the American public, Reuters said on Wednesday.
In a letter to Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reuters said U.S. forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate. The letter from Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger called on (…)

Everyone is wrong — from the arrogant neo-clowns who brought you this war to the mindless bureaucrats who maintain it to the well-intentioned intellectuals that are grasping for a decent and humane way out. Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Iraq back together again.
Whether people want to leave or stay, the assumption is that they have what is best for Iraq in mind.
But there is no Iraq.
Today General Casey and General (…)

Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:
Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.
This would (…)

(CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney. It was first broadcast Oct. 2, 2005.
I’m not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States - our United States - is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.
We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.
Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?
Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays (…)

By Mary MacElveen
As a person that is against the war in Iraq, I must say that I am disappointed with that anti war protest that took place this past weekend in Washington, D.C. In my opinion it failed in its objective for several reasons.
As I viewed the front page of Truthout.org, they have featured on it a video feed of a woman who is bare breasted who marched with several other women also not wearing tops stating how they appeared was more natural than the killings that are taking (…)

At this time the FBI is identifying University of Oklahoma junior Joel Henry Hinrichs III "as the person who was killed when an explosive attached to his body detonated near a packed football stadium," according to the Associated Press. He is listed in the OU directory as an engineering student.
If this is true, it does not verify the claim of OU president David Boren that this was just an "individual suicide" with no terrorist intentions. It does not rule out the possibility of an (…)

The indictment of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, should have been an opportunity for Republicans to show the nation that they are ready to turn the page on the abuses of big-money politics and lobbyist pandering. At a minimum, you’d think the party would want to demonstrate that it had moved beyond Mr. DeLay’s philosophy that Congress should feel free to break the bank with out-of-control spending and tax cuts for the wealthy as long as it made G.O.P. contributors happy.
But no. (…)

In an exclusive extract from his powerful new book about the Middle East, Robert Fisk watches in the Iraqi capital as the US air offensive begins in March 2003
by Robert Fisk
A pulsating, minute-long roar of sound brought President George W Bush’s crusade against "terrorism" to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping (…)

by Jason Burke
It is tempting to see the bombs in Bali yesterday as part of the wave of attacks launched by the supposedly still omnipresent al-Qaeda. But Islamic militancy in Indonesia, and in the Far East generally, is not new. It certanly far pre-dates Osama bin Laden.
Islam was a rallying flag for resistance to Dutch colonisation in the 17th century. Frequent suicide attacks involved young men charging headlong into the enemy ranks to kill as many as possible before being ’martyred’. (…)