Well, so much for those of us who thought there was more to it an that. The Guardian quotes Paul "Bombers" Wolfowitz as: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,970334,00.html Update Thu Jun 5 10:53:51 EDT 2003: From the gulfwar-2 list:

...Guardian appears to have yanked the story - and for good reason. What Wolfowitz actually said, available via the transcript at DefenseLink, is substantively different: "Look, the primarily difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different."

What makes The Guardian's actions even worse is that they ran the AP version days earlier:

"The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil,'' he said."

The Defense Department's "Most Wanted" playing cards of Iraqi war criminals was a huge public relations success. It was only a matter of time before someone (like the Ruckus Society) turned the idea into anti-establishment agitprop.

In 1965, the the Infrastructure Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Structure (ICEX) or "Phoenix" Project was created by the CIA as an effort to disrupt the Viet Cong infrastructure through a series of civilian assassinations and systemic torture. They build torture facilities in all 44 provinces of South Vietnam, murdered disruptive citizens, and blackmailed or extorted information from South Vietnamese citizens to root out Viet Cong sympathizers. The CIA's responses to Freedom of Information Act requests suggest that they would prefer to forget the whole thing. They would prefer that everyone else forget it, as well: after Saigon fell, most of the Phoenix documents were destroyed. The only remaining documents are now safely ensconced at Langley. Fortunately, Neil Brickham was responsible for a good part of the program, and saved all of his material. Douglas Valentine (who's writing a book on the subject, and seems dedicated to implicating the Department of Homeland Security in the matter) got his hands on Brickham's library and passed it on to the good people at the Memory Hole, who have posted the documents for all to see.

WorldCom was fined $500 million by the SEC for inflating its worth by about $9 billion. That might sounds like a big fine, but it's about a week's revenue. In any case, the company was doing so poorly that it went bankrupt, and left thousands of investors out to dry. They even changed their name back to MCI, since the WorldCom name was so tainted. Strangely, someone forgot to tell the General Services Administration. The GSA continues to spend about $1 billion a year with MCI, and just days after the SEC fine, awarded MCI the Iraq telephony contract. For those keeping score at home, MCI defrauded investors to the tune of $176 billion, resulting in $3 billion in lost pensions. The Bush Administration was so impressed that they fined MCI $500 million, and then promptly handed them a license to print Iraqi dinars. It's enough to make you want to boycott MCI. Too bad you can't boycott the GSA.