THE TRUCKS OF WAR: My, the US are setting a lot of store in those two waggons, aren't they? (And, as such, Tony Blair must be hoping that we'll be happy to take the discovery of a couple of Eddie Stobart rigs as proving he wasn't lying to us, Parliament and the world). Bush was using them a reverse justification just last night, and Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel takes them as the subject for her latest sermon.
Wonderfully, by the way, she describes herself as having been out "on a pro-war limb", which in an American context is like saying "I took a risk by deciding to speak out in favour of motherhood, apple pie, and God." She also speculates that Bush's opponents "won't be satisfied until Geraldo is standing astride 5,000 drums of liquid anthrax in front of a nuclear silo. Wouldn't that be lovely?" Well, yes, it would be - providing we could also hear a loud ticking noise.
More importantly, she has this to say: "The two mobile labs recently investigated were thoroughly scrubbed down. Although a variety of inspectors have not been able to say with certitude what the labs were used for, the consensus is that they make sense for no other purpose than creation of biological weapons. In any case, they were properly equipped for that purpose. Why carefully scrub a lab unless you're trying to hide something?"
I'm sure I'm not the first person to find their eyes liquifying at just how insane this sounds. Saddam, we're expected to believe, has a huge weapons program - forty-five minutes away from being used, of course. And yet faced with the certainty of his regime being crushed and destroyed, rather than use these weapons, he decides to destroy them. And destroy them he does, wiping out all evidence of their existence from the planet. Except for the mobile labs - already made famous by Colin Powell on his 'Tonight Live From The UN' comedy Powerpoint show. These, he takes away all the biological agents themselves, all the chemical ingredients and makes them disappear entirely. But then, rather than torching the trucks, or putting them in a giant version of Life Laundry's crusher, he elects to merely get a couple of Mrs. Mops in to scrub the lorry clean.
The thing is, I don't mind so much the lying - it's pretty much the job of a western government to lie to its people - but its the fact the lies are so shoddy, so poorly thought out, so Crossroads that really sticks in the craw.
And the mind boggling insults to logic don't help - I missed which paper it was in, but I read something that said "they say we've not found WMDs, but we haven't found Saddam; that doesn't mean that he didn't exist." An interesting grasp on evidence, there.

 
AND WHAT BECAME OF IT, AT LAST?: Jon Henley of the Guardian travels to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone to find out whether the interventions there made a difference. The general verdict seems to be: British troops do a good job, but while the situation is less tense, most people haven't seen a day-to-day improvement in their lives.
As one of the troops explains in Sierra Leone, the troops can rebuild and reopen a school, but then it's the same old teachers who come back. It's a handy snapshot of the trouble of using weapons to solve problems - it's like operating with a set of hedgecutters.
Henley also shows up another of Blair's twisty falsehoods when he was bouncing us towards war with Iraq, in his attempts to use Kosovo and Sierra Leone as precedents. In those two places, there was a need for an obvious and glorious removal of imminent peril of widespread, capricious slaughter. Nobody is denying that Saddam had the amoral capacity to do the same, but it wasn't comparable. And if it was, there would probably have been scenes of joy in Baghdad on liberation day that wouldn't have needed careful stage management and selective camera angles.

 
FOLLOWING IN THE STEPS OF 'THINGS MY GIRLFRIEND AND I...' AND TV GO HOME: dear_raed makes the leap from the web to The Guardian.

 
LYNCH - IT'S STILL NOT GOING AWAY: There are now calls for a proper investigation into the claims and counter claims about the 'rescue' of Private Lynch. Some on the ra-ra-right, like Kevin McCullough, seem to have ignored the wording of the calls, which have been wrapped up in the more palatable 'are they being unfair to our team?' instead of 'did the Pentagon lie to us?' and decided that just asking the question is, well, wrong.
It's interesting that McCullough - who takes time out to lash that if it wasn't for them meddling feminists, Jessica would have been safely at home anyway - is quite happy to rail at the stories which raised the original question: "How about asking the BBC and the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune to check sources and get quotes from those it is publishing supposed facts about. Heck how about even making a phone call to the Pentagon". Apparently, for some reason, the doctor who treated Jessica doesn't count as a source, whereas the mysterious lawyer who carried out his daring nights of spying on the hospital is a fine source. And while checking with the Pentagon might have been a journalistic courtesy, it's not as if there hadn't been a lot of coverage of the Pentagon's line on the story anyway.
What we find even more curious is that everyone whose evidence would count towards the Pentagon seems to have a vested interest in sticking to that line. The lawyer in the original tale, Al-Rehaief "now has an office with a Washington lobbying firm, the Livingston Group, whose principal is the former powerful Republican House member Robert Livingston", and had been quickly flown with his family from Iraq. Nothing wrong with showing a little gratitude, of course, but you do wonder: what exactly is all this thanks for?

 
CLEAR STANCE: We've had the link for Arundhati Roy's lecture on Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy sat in our inbox for a while now [apologies to Eleanor Oguma who brought it to our attention]. In the course of taking a scalpel to the state of US democracy, Roy echoes the reason why we get worried by the dominance of Clear Channel in the US radio market (and the UK, too, the way things are going) - it's not just about what makes the Top 40...

 
THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD: Having managed to get people to swallow the WMD dossier and the need for war on Iraq, it seems the US are now trying to get them to accept the claim that Bush was all heroic on September 11th. A further attempt to try and explain why Bush was running round the country hiding when his people were under attack, and mired in fear, we're expected to believe he was being all Harrison Ford on Air Force One. Yeah. Right.
The movie has been made in Canada to get tax breaks. Nice.

 
REMEMBER THAT?: After ages, there's a new No Rock colour supplement available - with stuff on new generation mobile phones, how letter writing is the new censorship, the taking blogs out of google panic and the re-positioning of the Tories as the party of the poor. If you're interested, do visit. If you're not, be glad we shoo that sort of thing off to a side project.