Nice to see that the Government has its priorities right:

If that’s not an Ass, I’m a horse

a gentle and respected friend got 28 days in chink for digging graves as an anti-war protest, and was therefore one of the 271 extra prisoners on Monday who took the prison population through the 80,000 ceiling...

So, a man who was due a six month sentence for downloading child porn (a crime, we are constantly being reminded, involving the actual abuse of actual children) is set free pending good behaviour. Another whose ‘crime’ is to protest against an illegal war - with particular regard to the killing of innocent children (the protest was on the feast of the holy innocents) goes down at huge cost to the taxpayer.

John Reid’s guidelines that were in the news yesterday were not new - they have been in place for quite some time. Reid’s letter was simply a reminder of a policy which was firmly in place on Monday - prison should be reserved for ’serious, repeat and violent offenders’.

[InMyHumbleEtc]

Who knows what kind of threat this serious offence might pose? Next they'll be serving Fairly Traded Tea, and then where would we be?

Next time TB et al claim we went into Iraq to remove a repressive dictator and therefore we're on the side of the angels, let's all point to this. These are the Craig Murray memos to the FCO, detailing why our 'ally' Uzbekistan is as bad as Saddam's Iraq ever was. Just as in pre-Kuwait Iraq, we're prepared to put up with just about anything as long as they're useful.

http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/714

The Kay Report, delivered along with Kay's resignation, concludes that there were no WMD worth talking about in Iraq since the first Gulf War.

Seems like the MinTruth troops have been at it again. In the aftermath of GulfWarI, Bush Senior and his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote an essay for Time magazine, explaining why an attempt to invade Iraq and topple Saddam was pretty much dismissed out of hand.

For some reason, the Time archives no longer carry this essay, and it has been erased from that edition's Table of Contents.

If you want to read the germane section, click the 'Read More' link below. Thanks to The Memory Hole for spotting it - they've got the full missing essay plus a scan of the original paper copy.

Today's Iraq Survey Group Report to the US Senate and Congress joint Intelligence Committee is expected to reveal that while Saddam didn't actually have any WMDs, he may have been pretending to have some, for the purposes of getting us to invade and depose him, kill his sons etc.

Well that's alright then, no harm done. As long as you don't mind unjustified wars, believing the misinformation of dictators and so on.

From the BBC report:

Committee chairman Pat Roberts, a Republican, said he was increasingly uncertain about Iraq's alleged possession of WMDs.

At one point I'm sure they did. Where they are now and what point they are now, I just don't know.

Of course he used to have them - in the late 1980s. After the US and UK sold them to him.

The last week or so have seen a number of interesting things come out of the Hutton investigation, pointing increasingly strongly towards the Government (in the broader sense) having dramatically exaggerated the available intelligence to support the drive to war. Let's take a look at some of the dramatis personae and what they considered to be the credibility of the evidence.

The saying is that the lie goes around the world before the truth gets its boots on. I think I'm seeing traces of bootpolish every day.