Handling

The National Spelling Bee champion this year is once again someone whose name I couldn’t even begin to guess how to spell.

Joe Conason (in Salon) asks, regarding Rummy’s claim that Iraq may simply have destroyed all that weaponry to make him look bad, “Would such massive operations really have been possible without U.S. intelligence picking up communication of the necessary orders to Iraqi field commanders? Would U.S. satellites have failed to see any of that activity? And wouldn't someone among the officers captured or bribed by our military know the details of that operation?” He also points out that if those two trailers had really had anything to do with bioweapons (and there is literally no physical evidence that they did), as the Pentagon claims, someone would have had to go to an awful lot of effort to scrub them down, when they could much more easily have been blown up.

And Slate details how all those stories on WMDs Judith Miller ran in the NYT, leaked to her by defectors sponsored by Chalabi, as we now know, were wrong.

Also, all that bombing at the start of the war when they were trying to kill Saddam. Examination of the site (which seems to have taken an awfully long time to happen) shows that there was never a bunker there.

I don’t think I’ve talked about the resignation of the governor-general of Australia, who in his previous life as an Anglican archbishop covered up for paedophiles. Or, as Radio 4 in Britain so delicately phrased it, “The former Archbishop resigned following criticism of his handling of a convicted paedophile priest.”