*Assailants launched rocket propelled grenades at US MPs guarding a prison near Baghdad early Saturday morning, wounding a U.S. soldier. CNN reported that three explosions were heard by the 400th military police battalion at the prison (- UPI). Later on Saturday or early Sunday, anti-US forces threw a home made bomb from a pick up truck at US troops guarding a hospital in the center of Baghdad. One of them was slightly wounded. When the guys guarding the prisons and hospitals aren't safe themselves, that is a bad sign.

*Donna Abu-Nasr's report for AP about what life is like now in Baghdad for the middle class friends she had made a few years ago sheds loads of illumination on the hardships and depression assailing Iraqis under US rule. Very little dancing in the streets.

*The scale of the deception of the American people by the Bush administration about the reasons for going to war with Iraq is breathtaking. Not only are severe questions arising about the repeated claims by administration officials that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program after 1998, but the bogus link they attempted to establish between Iraq and al-Qaeda is now also being put under scrutiny: "There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Duh. Anyone who knew anything about the Middle East knew that Saddam and al-Qaeda weren't in bed with one another. It was ridiculous. And, it was pushed by Laurie Mylroie and James Woolsey in a book published by the American Enterprise Institute, which was simply a Big Lie. Mylroie appears to be some sort of shill for the Likud Party, and Woolsey is a former (very inept) CIA director. That the AEI purveyed a load of horse manure to the American people should remind them of the integrity and usefulness of university presses. That book couldn't have gotten past a double blind refereeing process by real experts. Remember, buy your books on foreign policy from a university press.