Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.

Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.

Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.

A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration -- a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That’s a comforting illusion.

Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But -- decade after decade -- the propaganda fuel for one U.S. war after another has flowed from a standard set of lies.

Some of the boilerplate lies are implicit assumptions about Uncle Sam’s benign and even noble intent. Other deceptions rely on more specific whoppers, endlessly whirling through the news media’s spin cycle. From one war to the next, certain themes are played up more than others -- but the process always involves building an agenda to start a war, trying to justify the war while it’s underway, and then claiming that the war must continue as long as the man in the Oval Office says so.

Sometimes a war begins suddenly, filling the national horizon with a huge insistent flash. At other times, over a period of months or years, a low distant rumble gradually turns into a roar. But in any event, the

Norman Solomon's new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," opens with a disturbing prologue.  The U.S. media has refused to give serious coverage to the Downing Street Memos on the grounds that they are "old news."  In the initial pages of his book, and supplemented by the rest, Solomon makes a case that both outdoes and undoes that claim. 

The POER extends our sympathy to the Bill Moss Family and our organization has you in our daily prayers.

It is a sad day in Columbus, when the largest newspaper in Columbus under the leadership of its editor and owner, John Wolfe, still finds it necessary to show his hatred and his very racist character. A great leader in the Black Community, Bill Moss, has not even been laid to rest but Mr. Wolfe feels it was necessary to disrespect the Black community with a racist and disheartened cartoon.

The POER and our Black Community do not find any humor of trying to mock one of our great leaders. Bill Moss will be remembered for his love for the children in the Columbus Public School System and for the hard work he did while serving on the Columbus Board of Education. When others on the Board of Education were too afraid to speak the truth, Bill Moss shouted the truth for everyone in the Columbus community to hear.

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General of the United States
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530


Dear Mr. Attorney General:

We write to request that the U.S. Department of Justice immediately appoint an outside special counsel to assume the Department's investigation into alleged illegal contributions by Mr. Thomas Noe to federal and state political campaigns.  In light of recent disclosures that Governor Taft's office, which is a subject of the investigation, made a direct political appeal to Karl Rove for Gregory White, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio to receive his job, there is little doubt that this is a textbook case for the appointment of a special counsel.