Wednesday

Iraq Deal on Airline Is Probed
AP Wire | 06/22/2004 | Ohio Democrats call on agriculture official to resign over food bank comment: Eric Bost, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for the Food & Nutrition Service, "described people who eat at food banks as 'taking the easy way out.'"

Tuesday

Inmate populations skew representation
HoustonChronicle.com - 'A Pretext For War' by James Bamford: "the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration.
Described as a kind of 'American privy council' to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a 'Clean Break' plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let 'Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit.' Under the 'Clean Break' plan, Israel would launch pre-emptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel.
Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises 'the most troubling conflict of interest questions,' he writes."
Aspen Times News for Aspen Colorado - News: "How does this sound - Vice President Hunter Thompson"
baltimoresun.com - Powell gave U.N. 'ambiguous' data on Iraqi weapons, NSA chief says
KR Washington Bureau | 06/21/2004 | Intelligence experts cast doubt on ties between Iraq, al-Qaida: "officials said they were unsure why Lehman portrayed the documents as possible new intelligence on Iraq's links to al-Qaida"
Newsday.com - National News The CIA concluded "a long time ago" that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army
United Press International: Outside View: Have you any idea why they're lying to you?

Sunday

Index: "REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION SCHEDULE"
bmj.com Lenzer 328 (7454): 1458: "Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness "
Wired News: Pentagon Seeks U.S. Spy Powers: "The bill would allow Pentagon intelligence agents to work undercover and question American citizens and legal residents without having to reveal that they are government agents."
Observer | Cheney in firing line over Nigerian bribery claims