The Guardian reports in tomorrow’s edition:

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument “that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”. Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: “Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.”

Colonel Wilkerson has been unleashing a series of attacks on the administration in recent weeks, making the same kinds of arguments made by known and acknowledged members of the VIPS cabal of State Department and Intelligence Community doves operating in opposition to the current administration since well before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

PREVIOUS REPORT 1

PREVIOUS REPORT 2

Terrorist mouthpiece Aljazeera, with its customary pose of journalistic impartiality, aired today a videotape showing four Western moonbat hostages captured in Iraq by a previously unknown group, calling itself “the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. ”

Michael Massing in the last New York Review of Books contemplates with alarm, in the first of a projected two-part chin-stroking series, the continuing assault on the credibility of the MSM by a spectrum of alternative Conservative information sources, including AM talk radio, Fox News, and the Conservative Blogosphere, and laments the ever-diminishing readership of major newspapers:

while more than 70 percent of older Americans read a newspaper every day, fewer than 20 percent of young Americans do. As a result, he writes, “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

All this is very bad, you see, because:

If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.

Frankly, old boy, complacent Establishment organs like the NY Times, the NYRB, CBS News, and the rest of the MSM look an awful lot like those in power to me. I’m strongly tempted to insert an MP3 at this point of Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Hat tip to Eugene Volokh who wryly responds to the NYRB’s lamentations by noting mistakes typical of MSM-reporting in the same article.

LeeBert at ApognosiS provides a useful reference collection on Iraqi WMD evidence.

American Enterprise Online notes and debunks Urban Legends originated by the Left about the war.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg.

aj-Jazeera gets some women and a kid right up front for their “manipulate the dumb Americans” shot in an insolent new blog titled “Don’t Bomb Us,” devoted to cynically exploiting the recent British press story and otherwise influencing Western public opinion.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line discusses a very sensible editorial in the New York Sun: “Should Bush and Blair Consider Bombing Al-Jazeera? ” observing that the vehemence of the British government’s response [to recent press reports] alone suggests that this matter is being taken seriously both in London and in Washington.

What interests me about the conversation in dispute is why anybody… should be surprised by it. Indeed, I would be surprised if Messrs. Bush and Blair had not discussed ways of limiting the damage done by Islamist propaganda, whose main conduit is indeed Al Jazeera TV. It may well be that the thought of silencing the Arab network crossed their minds, only to be dismissed as too risky. If so, were the two leaders wrong to consider that option?

I don’t think so. That shutting down Al Jazeera would be desirable from the Anglo-American point of view is obviously true. And if Qatar, a Gulf state that is nominally an ally of America (on which it relies for its independence), has allowed its capital to become Al Qaeda’s principal propaganda base, it has no right to expect America automatically to refrain from punitive action on its territory.

The wider issues raised by the Bush-Blair Al Jazeera exchange are two. First, how far can the West tolerate the dissemination of Islamist propaganda intended to poison the minds of Muslims against Jews and “Crusaders”? Second, how much information are Western governments obliged to give about their internal decision-making process, and are they justified in suppressing sensitive information, even if this means penalizing the press, to protect Western interests?

Little Green Footballs and Bare Knuckle Politics (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) cover attacks on two liquor stores in West Oakland by “about a dozen African-American men wearing suits, white-collared shirts and bow ties — a trademark of the Nation of Islam.” Television news reports have studiously avoided mentioning the Islamic aspect of the attacks.

I’ve heard a lot about Tom Delay, but I hadn’t heard there was another campaign finance case underway. JayTea at Wizbang points to a story by Bullwinkle at Random Numbers highlighting MSM’s hypocritical double-standards in the case of Hillary Clinton‘s potential campaign finance scandal.

The White House has dismissed claims that George Bush was talked out of bombing Arab television station al-Jazeera by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And it’s really better to suppose that putting the Voice of Terrorism out of business permanently is one of those small, but important, steps in achieving victory, which the Bush Administration somehow managed to talk itself out of?

George W. Bush ought to take note that (1) he didn’t do it, and (2) the MSM raked him over the coals about it anyway. He might as well just have done it in the first place, since he was going to get attacked over it whether he did or not. There’s a moral here, folks.