• CIA field officers who intercepted aluminum tubes bound for Iraq reported that the tubes were for use in uranium centrifuges to make nuclear bomb fuel, even though the officers had no expertise in bombmaking. Agency analysts and outside experts hired by the CIA then faced bureaucratic opposition to the suggestion that the tubes might have been bought to build ordinary rockets.

• Despite aggressive efforts to contact scientists involved in Iraqi weapons programs, the CIA never got further than a handful of distant relatives who repeated the official line that Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction. Agency spies never reached the scientists themselves.

• The CIA’s intelligence reporting on Iraq warned that information about its weapons was inconclusive, yet the agency went on to reach firm conclusions about those very weapons. About 80 pages of the report have been censored at CIA insistence out of security concerns, an issue that sparked intense negotiations between the committee and the CIA.

"Baby killer!"

"Murderer!"

"Boooo!"

Related note: I wonder what’s keeping Israel from taking out Iran’s nuclear bomb-making plants. Either they know it’s too late, or they know the facilities can’t be destroyed by the conventional means, or they have good enough intel to know there’s still some time and they can wait until after the election. And then they’ll go no matter who wins. If they attack now, and Bush gives them the thumbs-up, it could cut either way domestically. Kerry would have to approve or disapprove, for example. I would guess the latter, lest he want to make the UN and the IAEA look like the dithering fools they are. If Kerry approves, then he’s thrown his lot in with the cowboy-unilateralist axis, and if people want that they’ll vote for the genuine article. The far-left fringe will howl that this is all a Zionist plot to influence the election. The far-right fringe will howl that this is all a Zionist plot to influence the election. Most Americans would look at satellite photos of demolished nuke-bomb factories and think: good thing.

We’ll see. When it comes to Iran, I fear that either the bombs get bombed or the bombs get used. The latter is what I always thought would be the end result of the forces set in motion by 9/11, and I still hope I am wrong. I’ve been wrong enough to be hopeful.

Ammari Saifi - known as Abderrezak - is accused of leading a group which kidnapped 32 European tourists in Algeria last year.

"The Libyan secret service gave us 48 hours to hand [him] over ... or said we will suffer the full wrath of Libya’s armed forces," a rebel spokesman said.

There has been no comment on these claims from Libya.

Mr Saifi allegedly leads the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which is blamed for abducting the tourists, many of them Germans, and which is also allegedly linked to al-Qaeda.

The Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJC) say they arrested him in March but have no means of handing him to the West.