Former President Jimmy Carter warns that a 'core group of conservatives' are using the war against terrorism to realise 'long-pent-up ambitions'. The 'belligerent and divisive voices' in Washington are trampling over the basic principles of democratic life both in the US and abroad. [Washington Post].

CBS has a story that notes written by a Rumsfeld aide just after the attack last year on the Pentagon show how the Defence Secretary's thoughts turned immediately to the possibility of taking out Iraq despite the lack of evidence linking Hussein to the terrorists.

According to the note, Rumsfeld wanted: 'best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]. . . Go massive. . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.' [CBS].

Paul Krugman details the Bush administration's ability to carry out doublethink, its fluency in newspeak:

'Once an administration believes that it can get away with insisting that black is white and up is down — and everything in this administration's history suggests that it believes just that — it's hard to see where the process stops. A habit of ignoring inconvenient reality, and presuming that the docile media will go along, soon infects all aspects of policy.' [NY Times].

Scott Peterson remembers that one of the justifications for the 1991 war against Iraq, that Iraqis troops were massed on the boarder with Saudi Arabia, turned out to be a 'fib'. And the witness to alleged Iraqi atrocities turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington following a script written by PR firm Hill and Knowlton. [Christian Science Monitor].

If it's pretty obvious to anyone leaning at all to the left - Jimmy Carter even - that the Bush administration isn't too bothered with the truth, is ready to lie, then a key question is: what's Tony Blair's game? Why is Blair so ready to pay a 'blood price' to stay friends with a bunch of Republican crooks?