TIME for a change...

Time magazine's latest cover story is a well overdue mainstream media front-page exposition of the Bush administration lies and ineptitude which have made the whole Iraqi fiasco such a woeful saga. A few months ago, this sort of story was only being peddled in this sort of detail on Internet "conspiracy theory" websites (like this one *smile*).

Hopefully this is just a sign of increased media readiness to tell it like it is. Dare we believe that - as US electioneering heats up - the mainstream media will go into a feeding frenzy as the Bush neo-con web of deceit unravels? Bush and his neo-cons should be impeached then tried for war crimes in the Hague, where US citizens would be able to appreciate the true (European) democratic values which have held the world back from the brink of madness in the last year.

The latest Bush scandal has already been served up on a plate by the Washington Post and is now ready for general public consumption. The UK Independent picks up the story:

"The Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband disparaged claims by the White House that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons... Ms Plame, a weapons expert, is the wife of the former US ambassador Joe Wilson. It is alleged that her identity was revealed in retaliation for comments he made about Iraq's alleged scheme to buy uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons."

Wilson has suggested publicly that he believes Bush's senior adviser, Karl C. Rove, broke his wife's cover. He says "naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.... the desire to implicate my wife in this was intended to intimidate others from coming forward. The idea that someone would do this is an anathema to me and should be an anathema to a president who came to office promising to restore honour to the White House.

Wilson told a public forum in suburban Seattle that it is of keen interest to him "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

Naming an undercover operative is a federal offence which carries penalties of $50,000 (£30,000) and up to 10 years jail.

Meanwhile, what about that big power cut across the whole of Italy yesterday? Suspiscious? Coming in the wake of similar massive power cuts in the US and Britain, there was a familiarity to the immediate goverment response - "this has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism." How do they know that when the incident has just occured and they haven't established a reason? As usual, it took them quite a few more hours, and a lot of erroneous finger-pointing, before they could agree on a logical cause for the outage. You can't help thinking that if these outages were due to sabotage, the governments would be very relectant to admit it. Particularly if the sabotage was part of on-going negotiations...

Does that sound like more nutty consipracy theory?