Rightful owners

Robert Fisk, in a good piece about the out of town (well, undisclosed location) try-outs of the Saddam show trial, says that the unnamed judge presiding over Saddam is the same judge who accused Sadr of murder in April. And he wasn’t very good, either: he was trying to put Saddam in his place, but Saddam had him for breakfast.

The next several items all come from a Dana Milbank WaPo story on how Bushies are claiming we’re actually safer now.

Cheney: “After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq.” Isn’t “owner” an odd and telling word?

Rumsfeld makes another claim to have found WMDs; his story is that Polish troops found a whole bunch of warheads with sarin and mustard gas--not that they’ve been tested or anything. So low is Rumsfeld’s credibility, or the credibility of any Bushie on the WMD/terrorism issue, that it makes it into the 8th paragraph of a WaPo story on p.12. Like I said about Ashcroft and the plot to blow up a mall in... Ohio, was it?...they feel they have to print it, and can’t quite bring themselves to say, “Just ignore this story,” so they give it one 10,000th of the play it would get if they believed it (heard anything else about that mall plot?). The funny thing is, Rummy himself is equally off-hand about what would be a big discovery if anyone believed it: he announced it on a San Diego radio station (transcript).
(Later:) yup, the story was another lie.

And Cheney made up yet another connection between Iraq and Al Qaida, which no one has ever heard of before, something about one Iraqi training AQ in Sudan more than 10 years ago.

Condi says that we are in fact safer than before 9/11, which polls show most Americans do not believe, although it’s not a high standard, considering that before 9/11, we were in danger from, well, the events of 9/11. Which by definition is not very safe.

The British government announced that ambulances making emergency calls will no longer be given speeding tickets. And yes, that really was a problem.