We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9-11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way.

There's a cloud over the vice president, Mr. Fitzgerald told the jury. We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud's there because the defendant obstructed justice. That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there.

Rep. Virginia Brown-Waite (R-FL): It's too little, too late, and should have been done a year ago. I just get a feeling our country is being used.

Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM): I am not a supporter of a surge to do for the Iraqis what the Iraqis will not do for themselves.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ): I have little confidence that a surge in troop levels will change the situation in Iraq in any substantive fashion. It seems clear that the violence in Iraq is increasingly sectarian, and inserting more troops in this atmosphere is unlikely to improve the situation.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH): I am skeptical that a surge of troops will bring an end to the escalation of violence and the insurgency in Iraq. I'm absolutely against the surge.

The Pentagon report listed Basra as one of five cities outside Baghdad where violence remained "significant," and said the region was one of only two "not ready for transition" to Iraqi authorities.

Once a promising beacon, Basra suffers from sectarian violence as well as Shiite militia clashes over oil smuggling. Ferocious street battles have broken out between rival Shiite Muslim groups in provincial capitals such as Samawah, Kut and Diwaniya in the last year.

We did not send our A-team to Baghdad, Smith said, recounting how O'Beirne pushed for a candidate based on the fact that he had been involved in counting chads during the presidential election recount in Florida in 2000.

In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren't succeeding. The obstacles are too great, Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.

Giles, Woodridge and ConocoPhillips vice president Donald Duncan are longtime friends who go back years. The trio purchased the lavish North Carolina home in a gated community just months before the federal prosecutor granted her friend's company a lot of extra time to comply with the law.

Justice Department officials have praised the Cunningham probe as the linchpin of their growing pursuit of public corruption cases, yet prosecutor Lam is nonetheless slated to step down tomorrow after the Bush administration cited unspecified "performance" issues in requesting her resignation late last year. Six other U.S. attorneys, several involved in ongoing corruption investigations, were dismissed at about the same time.

"The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily." Shadegg and Hoekstra warn, if conservatives are forced to debate "the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."

"We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran. What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se (specifically), knows about this," he said. "It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it's clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

This George W. Bush, this wastrel, this smirking twister of truth, this volcano of lies, this heinous torturer, this killer of innocents, this Thief-of-Baghdad, this mass murderer, this open sewer of aggressive militarism, in short, this blot on the very name of America, must be compelled by Congress and the American People to answer for his alleged and apparent crimes.

Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be.

Brzezinski damned the Bush Regime's war in Iraq as "a historic, strategic, and moral calamity." Brzezinski damned the war as "driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris." He damned the war for "intensifying regional instability" and for "undermining America's global legitimacy."

Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the armed services committee and senior member of the intelligence committee, said the report was a "devastating condemnation" of senior Pentagon officials.

"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq when the intelligence assessments of the professional analysts of the intelligence community did not provide the desired compelling case," said Mr. Levin.

To be honest, it's going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do," said Army 1st Lt. Antonio Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. "I think some people in America don't want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated.

Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract us from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war. Anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

The term, civil war, does not "adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq,'' though it certainly applies to key conflicts taking place there, including the "hardening'' of ethno-centric identities and a "sea change in the character of the violence.''