Four years ago, the candidate called the CIA a "rogue organization"; now he's advised by a former Chalabi promoter and Agency basher. No wonder the spooks are spooked.

These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. 

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Newly released documents show that officials knew a satellite falling towards Earth posed no threat.

When the Pentagon ordered a Navy ship to shoot down a crippled U.S. spy satellite last February, it claimed the operation was necessary to prevent a harmful fuel from being dispersed in the atmosphere. At the time, critics charged that the Bush administration was using the toxic fuel as an excuse to demonstrate missile-defense and antisatellite capabilities.

Now, there is new evidence that the critics were very likely right.

TVNL Comment: Is anyone counting the lies? The Bush administration has lied about everything. I can not think of a single example where they were honest. Not one.

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The GOPer in question is Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams, who accidentally made the admission when describing the GOP's war room in Denver set up to hammer Obama during convention week.

Wadhams described the GOP's outfit thusly to the Denver Post: "Just consider this the Ministry of Truth."

Um, as anybody who has ever read George Orwell knows, the Ministry of Truth exists to disseminate false propaganda about how great the ruling regime is, continuously rewriting both history and the present-day facts in order to maintain total control over the population.

"The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation," Orwell wrote. "These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."

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Even as the Bush administration appeals a recent federal court decision requiring former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to appear before the House Judiciary Committee in order to raise an executive-privilege claim, lawyers for the two sides are holding "confidential talks" about resolving the legal impasse, although those discussions have yielded little so far.

The Justice Department also accused the Judiciary Committee of improperly leaking details of those negotiations.

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