PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tags bush & america

War has this nasty habit of being unpredictable. Those who start it invariably do so with optimism, but a full measure of unanticipated heartbreak then accompanies victory, to say nothing of defeat. Even allowing for the inevitability of the unexpected, there cannot have been many wars when the victor was so ill-prepared for triumph as the Americans in Iraq. As George Packer demonstrates in The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, his splendid and detailed account of life in Iraq under the occupation, just about every assumption the Bush administration made about the country was wrong.

President Bush continued on Sunday to defend both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order.

President Bush today mounted his third defense in two weeks of his secret domestic spying program, calling his order authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens a limited, legal program that Americans understand is protecting their security.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

Torture's Terrible Toll Abusive interrogation tactics produce bad intel, and undermine the values we hold dear. Why we must, as a nation, do better. By Sen. John McCain

As news analyst Michael Gawenda, writing in the Australian daily the Age, noted incredulously, "When the president of the United States, under repeated questioning and under pressure, has to declare, as he did [during a stop in Panama], 'We do not torture,' you know that even his allies in Congress no longer believe him."

In his weekly opinion column, Harold Evans considers rising concern in the US over the Bush administration's hostility to science.