There is obviously a massive gulf in knowledge between the high-level members of the US government and military and the millions of American men and women who sign up to man the battle stations of manufactured wars. From the point of view of people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and the various US military generals, they see nothing unjust or wrong about they way they wilfully deceive and sacrifice the lives of American citizens. Quite the opposite in fact.

If there is one concept to which American political and military leaders cling dearly and to which they turn as the final arbiter of their actions, it is the maxim that 'the end justifies the means'. From the point of view of Rumsfeld, Cheney et al, the very fact that they find themselves in a position where they can command 150,000 young American men and women to die fighting a fabricated "war on terror", is evidence enough of the legitimacy of their positions as leaders. Indeed, they afford the U.S. population access to the same system of "justice" and offer them the chance to prove that they have a right to freedom of any kind. After all, if young American soldiers, or American citizens, are too stupid to see through the lies of their leaders, then who is to blame when they pay the ultimate price?

It's the age-old game of "survival of the fittest", and while they would be forced to admit that all players in the game do not start out on a level playing field, reality creators like the Washington NeoCons would also bring our attention to the fact that the playing field is not not level by accident. Such is the logic adhered to by the big men and women in the halls of power, and the end result of such a grossly immoral stance among the ruling elite is never pretty for the rest of us.

Of course, all of this is a long way from the founding fathers' declaration of inalienable rights for all, and the requirement that those elected to govern should uphold those rights. Somewhere along the line (quite close to the start actually), the idea of upholding the rights of the population was deleted from the great Democratic experiment and, in its place, systematic policies of corporate and political elitism leading to economic deprivation and class structuring, followed by intellectual 'dumbing-down' of the "lower" classes (lower classes being all but the elite), and finally the promotion of jingoistic fervour as a distraction and to ensure a continuous supply of cannon fodder, were developed.

The harsh reality then is that, far from honouring war heroes and supporting the troops, the American political and corporate elite have always viewed the American population, and particularly those they see as stupid enough to fight their wars for them, with nothing but the deepest contempt. To them they are "useless eaters", good only for paying taxes and being deceived into marching off to war, to kill and maim their fellow humans for the profit of the ruling elite. Of course, there is always the option to prove them wrong, regardless of our past record. Whether we as a race do so, depends entirely on our ability to recognise the truth of everything that has been said above.

If there is one thing above all others that has lead to the precipice upon which we currently sit as a species, it is knowledge, or the lack of it, and the fact that certain small groups of so-called ‘elite’ have always sought to maintain a monopoly on it at the expense of the masses of humanity. Clearly therefore, it is knowledge that is and always has been the most prized ‘commodity’ on this planet. Unfortunately, the catch 22 to beat them all is the fact that almost no one knows this.

Why?

Because the knowledge that knowledge is key has been deliberately and rigorously denied them by the propaganda of religion where "faith" and "blind belief" in the leader is the key to salvation. The salient point is that it is, and always has been, only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction. It is only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction.

IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.

Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.

"The atmosphere in the Oval Office has become unbearable," a source said. "Even the family is split."

INSIGHT: Sources close to the White House say that Mr. Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key officials in the wake of plunging domestic support, the continued insurgency in Iraq and the CIA-leak investigation that has resulted in the indictment and resignation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.

It probably won't happen. On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who raised exactly this concern in the famous leaked memo of two years ago warning that the United States might be creating terrorists even faster than it was killing them. But Rumsfeld has locked himself into permanent wise-guy mode, and it is hard to imagine him sitting still for a question long enough to answer it seriously.

Paul Wolfowitz's answer would also be fascinating to hear -- but he is off to other projects now. It offends the rules of karma that Wolfowitz should have received Robert McNamara-style job of absolution, tending to poor nations at the World Bank, without undergoing obvious McNamara-style torments about the effects of his grand vision to liberate a particular poor nation with U.S. troops.

Colin Powell has also made a sweet karmic deal: he can be known as the most principled internal dissenter, without the muss and fuss of public dissent. And in a different way, Condi Rice has an attractive situation: she resolutely (and without nuance) defends the policy, without usually being blamed for it.

As for an answer from Dick Cheney, dream on.

So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.

But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.

The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if they would not be in Iraq through many summers!). This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I.

The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.

This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time. There would be more chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."

Comment: Some argument. It boils down to "if we had waited longer, we could have won"!

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.

The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

Stephen Hadley, Bush's National Security adviser, underlined the same point on Sunday, denying that there had been any manipulation.

Ironically, Hadley himself was at the center of the scandal about the hyping of intelligence on Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program. The CIA keep sending him memos that implausible things were being alleged by Bush in his speeches about Saddam's nukes. Hadley's response was to ignore the CIA and try to find some way to keep saying the implausible things, e.g., by sourcing them to British intelligence instead.

By the way, the allegation that some, including Sen. John McCain, keep making that "the whole world" thought that Iraq had WMD is wrong for two reasons. First, most of the world depended on the US for its intelligence on Iraq and did not have a way of making an independent judgment. Second, the French ministry of defense demurred, as did several of the most important and experience arms inspectors, including Scott Ritter and Hans Blix.

This BBC item of 11 February, 2003, doesn't read like the Republicans' supposed international unanimity on the issue before the war:

' France, Germany and Russia have released an unprecedented joint declaration on the Iraq crisis, demanding more weapons inspectors and more technical assistance for them . . . "Nothing today justifies a war," Mr Chirac told a joint news conference with Mr Putin. "This region really does not need another war." He said France did not have "undisputed proof" that Iraq still held weapons of mass destruction. '

The Russians were if anything more skeptical.

It is not true that most of the Democrats in Congress saw the same intelligence that Bush saw. Democrats in Congress have told me that most of what they knew about Iraq before the war came via briefings from Bush administration and Pentagon officials. They say privately that they now feel that they were consistently lied to.

But let us look at just one area where there was clear manipulation by Bush and his high officials, and where he was not saying the same things that Clinton or the Democrats had been saying.

There are different sorts of lies. One way to lie is to have two pieces of information, and to suppress one and play up the other. Here is an example of this sort of falsehood.

The lie of omission:

The top al-Qaeda leaders so far captured are

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad

and

Abu Zubayda.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, they revealed to interrogators that Usamah Bin Laden had prohibited al-Qaeda operatives from cooperating with the secular Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein.

This crucial information was withheld from Congress and from the American people by the Bush/Cheney administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

(Although KSM was captured only shortly before the war, surely the connection to Saddam was the first thing they asked him about. His answer was not shared with us, to say the least.)

The Democrats and Bill Clinton could never have cited this information because it was never made available to them by Bush.

In contrast, the Bush/Cheney administration played up the lies of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that Saddam's Iraq was training al-Qaeda operatives, even though the Defense Intelligence Agency and other high-level intelligence operatives dismissed this information as unreliable. It should be noted that no money traces showed al-Qaeda funds coming from Iraq. No captured al-Qaeda fighters had been trained in Iraq. There was no intelligence that in any way corroborated al-Libi's story. And, it was directly contradicted by two of his superiors.

The information from KSM and Abu Zubaydah circulated widely among intelligence officials.

' The report on Zubaydah's debriefing was circulated among US intelligence officers last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by Administration officials about the evidence of al-Qaeda ties. "I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the Administration was talking about all of these other reports and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said. '

This was a community of intelligence. Those with the clearances saw those confessions. The lower-level analysts were amazed when they saw Bush and Cheney and Rice on television hyping al-Libi's torture-induced "revelations." . . . They were only putting out what they wanted . . ..

It is impossible that Bush, Cheney and Rice saw the intel from al-Libi but not from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. The only way to explain these comments is that they suppressed the latter in order to emphasize the former. This tactic was deeply dishonest.

So in September of 2002, as "the new product" was being "rolled out" in the words of Bush adviser Andy Card, this is what we heard:

Thursday, September 26, 2002 Posted: 1:28 PM EDT (1728 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's national security adviser Wednesday said Saddam Hussein has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development -- information she said has been gleaned from captives in the ongoing war on terrorism.

The comments by Condoleezza Rice were the strongest and most specific to date on the White House's accusations linking al Qaeda and Iraq.

The accusations followed those made by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier in the day said the United States has evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, but they did not elaborate."

This lie by omission was repeated over and over again by Bush and his cronies:

"Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
- Bush in January 2003 State of the Union address.

"Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."
- Bush in February 2003.

If he had said, "Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda operatives in custody, deny that there was any operational cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. But Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi asserts that Saddam Hussein is training al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons. I asked our Defense Intelligence Agency about this, and they do not find al-Libi's allegations credible. I as president have tough choices to make. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe al-Libi on this."

Then he would not have been lying to the public. But the way he did it was a lie. Some are saying that the evaluation of al-Libi by the DIA did not reach Bush and Cheney. That is not the DIA's fault. That is incompetence on Bush's and Cheney's parts. Why spend $44 billion a year on intelligence and not seek it?

The United States military captured much of the archive of the Baath ministry of the interior, which it turned over to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. That is where any document would be that mentioned al-Qaeda. It does not exist, or we would have seen it by now.

It was all a tissue of lies.

"Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past," Bush said. "They're playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible."

The president spoke to cheering troops at this military base at a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

During the stopover, he also met privately with families of four slain service members.

After a Latin American trip with meager results earlier this month, the administration kept expectations low for Asia. [...]

Nearing the end of his fifth year in office, Bush has the lowest approval rating of his presidency and a majority of Americans say Bush is not honest and they disapprove of his handling of foreign policy and the war on terrorism. Heading for Asia, Bush hoped to improve his standing on the world stage.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said.

He quoted pre-war remarks by three senior Democrats as evidence of that Democrats had shared the administration's fears that were the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003. Bush did not name them, but White House counselor Dan Bartlett filled in the blanks.

- "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons." — Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

- "The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as (Saddam Hussein) is in power." — Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich.

- "Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the president's approaching this in the right fashion." — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., then the Democratic whip.

Comment: Well, hold everything! This is a momentous event! For once, we actually agree with Bush since (quite possibly for the first time EVER) he spoke the truth - about Democratic support for his war!!

"The truth is that investigations of the intelligence on Iraq have concluded that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world — and that person was Saddam Hussein," Bush charged.

Comment: Sigh! And he was doing so well...

In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted with 48 Republicans for the war authorization measure in late 2002, including 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, and his running mate, John Edwards of North Carolina. Both have recently been harshly critical of Bush's conduct of the war and its aftermath.

On Capitol Hill, top Democrats stood their ground in claiming Bush misled Congress and the country. "The war in Iraq was and remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history," Kerry told a news conference. [...]

The controversy has raged for 12 months. Ever since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents, there have been repeated claims that troops used "unusual" weapons in the assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has focussed on white phosphorus shells (WP) - an incendiary weapon usually used to obscure troop movements but which can equally be deployed as an offensive weapon against an enemy. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by international treaty.

The debate was reignited last week when an Italian documentary claimed Iraqi civilians - including women and children - had been killed by terrible burns caused by WP. The documentary, Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, by the state broadcaster RAI, cited one Fallujah human-rights campaigner who reported how residents told how "a rain of fire fell on the city". Yesterday, demonstrators organised by the Italian communist newspaper, Liberazione, protested outside the US Embassy in Rome. Today, another protest is planned for the US Consulate in Milan. "The 'war on terrorism' is terrorism," one of the newspaper's commentators declared.

The claims contained in the RAI documentary have met with a strident official response from the US, as well as from right-wing commentators and bloggers who have questioned the film's evidence and sought to undermine its central allegations.

While military experts have supported some of these criticisms, an examination by The Independent of the available evidence suggests the following: that WP shells were fired at insurgents, that reports from the battleground suggest troops firing these WP shells did not always know who they were hitting and that there remain widespread reports of civilians suffering extensive burn injuries. While US commanders insist they always strive to avoid civilian casualties, the story of the battle of Fallujah highlights the intrinsic difficulty of such an endeavour.

It is also clear that elements within the US government have been putting out incorrect information about the battle of Fallujah, making it harder to assesses the truth. Some within the US government have previously issued disingenuous statements about the use in Iraq of another controversial incendiary weapon - napalm.

The assault upon Fallujah, 40 miles from Baghdad, took place over a two-week period last November. US commanders said the city was an insurgent stronghold. Civilians were ordered to evacuate in advance. Around 50 US troops and an estimated 1,200 insurgents were killed. How many civilians were killed is unclear. Up to 300,000 people were driven from the city.

Following the RAI broadcast, the US Embassy in Rome issued a statement which denied that US troops had used WP as a weapon. It said: "To maintain that US forces have been using WP against human targets ... is simply mistaken." In a similar denial, the US Ambassador in London, Robert Tuttle, wrote to the The Independent claiming WP was only used as an obscurant or else for marking targets. In his letter, he says: "US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to use appropriate, lawful and conventional weapons against legitimate targets. US forces do not use napalm or phosphorus as weapons."

However, both these two statements are undermined by first-hand evidence from troops who took part in the fighting. They are also undermined by an admission by the Pentagon that WP was used as a weapon against insurgents.

In a comprehensive written account of the military operation at Fallujah, three US soldiers who participated said WP shells were used against insurgents taking cover in trenches. Writing in the March-April edition of Field Artillery, the magazine of the US Field Artillery based in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is readily available on the internet, the three artillery men said: "WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions ... and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ... We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents using WP to flush them out and high explosive shells (HE) to take them out."

Another first-hand account from the battlefield was provided by an embedded reporter for the North County News, a San Diego newspaper. Reporter Darrin Mortenson wrote of watching Cpl Nicholas Bogert fire WP rounds into Fallujah. He wrote: "Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused."

Mr Mortenson also watched the mortar team fire into a group of buildings where insurgents were known to be hiding. In an email, he confirmed: "During the fight I was describing in my article, WP mortar rounds were used to create a fire in a palm grove and a cluster of concrete buildings that were used as cover by Iraqi snipers and teams that fired heavy machine guns at US choppers." Another report, published in the Washington Post, gave an idea of the sorts of injuries that WP causes. It said insurgents "reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns". A physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents "were burned, and some corpses were melted".

The use of incendiary weapons such as WP and napalm against civilian targets - though not military targets - is banned by international treaty. Article two, protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons states: "It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by incendiary weapons." Some have claimed the use of WP contravenes the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention which bans the use of any "toxic chemical" weapons which causes "death, harm or temporary incapacitation to humans or animals through their chemical action on life processes".

However, Peter Kaiser, a spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which enforces the convention, said the convention permitted the use of such weapons for "military purposes not connected with the use of chemical weapons and not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". He said the burns caused by WP were thermic rather than chemical and as such not prohibited by the treaty.

The RAI film said civilians were also victims of the use of WP and reported claims by a campaigner from Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, that many victims had large burns. The report claimed that the clothes on some victims appeared to be intact even though their bodies were badly burned.

Critics of the RAI film - including the Pentagon - say such a claim undermines the likelihood that WP was responsible for the injuries since WP would have also burned their clothes. This opinion is supported by a leading military expert. John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.org, said of WP: "If it hits your clothes it will burn your clothes and if it hits your skin it will just keep on burning." Though Mr Pike had not seen the RAI film, he said the burned appearance of some bodies may have been caused by exposure to the elements.

Yet there are other, independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn injuries. For instance, Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the testimony of refugees from the city spoke to a doctor who had remained in the city to help people, encountered numerous reports of civilians suffering unusual burns.

One resident told him the US used "weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud" and that he watched "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns." The doctor said he "treated people who had their skin melted"

Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. In the RAI film, Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete ... Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children."

In the aftermath of the battle, the State Department's Counter Misinformation Office issued a statement saying that WP was only "used [WP shells] very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters." When The Independent confronted the State Department with the first-hand accounts of soldiers who participated, an official accepted the mistake and undertook to correct its website. This has since been done.

Indeed, the Pentagon readily admits WP was used. Spokesman Lt Colonel Barry Venables said yesterday WP was used to obscure troop deployments and also to "fire at the enemy". He added: "It burns ... It's an incendiary weapon. That is what it does."

Why the two embassies have issued statements denying that WP was used is unclear. However, there have been previous examples of US officials issuing incorrect statements about the use of incendiary weapons. Earlier this year, British Defence Minister Adam Ingram was forced to apologise to MPs after informing them that the US had not used an updated form of napalm in Iraq. He said he had been misled by US officials.

Napalm was used in several instances during the initial invasion. Colonel Randolph Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11, remarked during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003: "The generals love napalm - it has a big psychological effect."

In his letter, Ambassador Tuttle claims there is a distinction between napalm and the 500lb Mk-77 firebombs he says were dropped - even though experts say they are virtually identical. The only difference is that the petrol used in traditional napalm has been replaced in the newer bombs by jet fuel.

Since the RAI broadcast, there have been calls for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the battle of Fallujah. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also repeated its call to "all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all operations".

There have also been claims that in the minutiae of the argument about the use of WP, a broader truth is being missed. Kathy Kelly, a campaigner with the anti-war group Voices of the Wilderness, said: "If the US wants to promote security for this generation and the next, it should build relationships with these countries. If the US uses conventional or non-conventional weapons, in civilian neighourhoods, that melt people's bodies down to the bone, it will leave these people seething. We should think on this rather than arguing about whether we can squeak such weapons past the Geneva Conventions and international accords."

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It's a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial. But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

The first account they unearthed in a magazine published by the US army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry's fire support element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year: "White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

The second, in California's North County Times, was by a reporter embedded with the marines in the April 2004 siege of Falluja. "'Gun up!' Millikin yelled ... grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. 'Fire!' Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call 'shake'n'bake' into... buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week."

White phosphorus is not listed in the schedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for "Military purposes... not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm".

White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org: "The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen... If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone." As it oxidises, it produces smoke composed of phosphorus pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke "releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces... Contact... can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage."

Until last week, the US state department maintained that US forces used white phosphorus shells "very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes". They were fired "to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters". Confronted with the new evidence, on Thursday it changed its position. "We have learned that some of the information we were provided ... is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, ie obscuring troop movements and, according to... Field Artillery magazine, 'as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes...' The article states that US forces used white phosphorus rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds." The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon.

The invaders have been forced into a similar climbdown over the use of napalm in Iraq. In December 2004, the Labour MP Alice Mahon asked the British armed forces minister Adam Ingram "whether napalm or a similar substance has been used by the coalition in Iraq (a) during and (b) since the war". "No napalm," the minister replied, "has been used by coalition forces in Iraq either during the war-fighting phase or since."

This seemed odd to those who had been paying attention. There were widespread reports that in March 2003 US marines had dropped incendiary bombs around the bridges over the Tigris and the Saddam Canal on the way to Baghdad. The commander of Marine Air Group 11 admitted that "We napalmed both those approaches". Embedded journalists reported that napalm was dropped at Safwan Hill on the border with Kuwait. In August 2003 the Pentagon confirmed that the marines had dropped "mark 77 firebombs". Though the substance these contained was not napalm, its function, the Pentagon's information sheet said, was "remarkably similar". While napalm is made from petrol and polystyrene, the gel in the mark 77 is made from kerosene and polystyrene. I doubt it makes much difference to the people it lands on.

So in January this year, the MP Harry Cohen refined Mahon's question. He asked "whether mark 77 firebombs have been used by coalition forces". The US, the minister replied, has "confirmed to us that they have not used mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time". The US government had lied to him. Mr Ingram had to retract his statements in a private letter to the MPs in June.

We were told that the war with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had, among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, William Shawcross, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Ann Clwyd and many others referred, in making their case, to Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for the welfare of the Iraqis.

Given that they care so much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional weapons by coalition forces? Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who turned from peace campaigner to chief apologist for an illegal war, is, as far as I can discover, the only one of these armchair warriors to engage with the issue. In May this year, she wrote to the Guardian to assure us that reports that a "modern form of napalm" has been used by US forces "are completely without foundation. Coalition forces have not used napalm - either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time". How did she know? The foreign office minister told her. Before the invasion, Clwyd travelled through Iraq to investigate Saddam's crimes against his people. She told the Commons that what she found moved her to tears. After the invasion, she took the minister's word at face value, when a 30-second search on the internet could have told her it was bunkum. It makes you wonder whether she really gave a damn about the people for whom she claimed to be campaigning.

Saddam, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are those who overthrew him.

Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting.

"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns".

As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who had their skin melted".

He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he said.

Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."

Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.

Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.

Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were."

He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.

The author is an unembedded (Read: uncensored)journalist reporting from Fallujah

Italian communists held a sit-in to protest the reported use by American troops of white phosphorous in Iraq.

Italy's state-run RAI24 news television aired a documentary last week alleging the United States used white phosphorous shells 'in a massive and indiscriminate way' against civilians during the November 2004 offensive in Fallujah.

The United States has said it used phosphorous shells 'very sparingly' in Fallujah to illuminate the night sky.

(AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)

In a statement obtained Sunday, the lawyers did not say whether Saddam's chief Iraqi attorney, Khalil al-Dulaimi, was among those who withdrew. But the statement said other members of the team in Baghdad were continuing their duties "under complex and dangerous circumstances."

Support lawyers for Saddam's team in Jordan were not immediately available for comment.

However, the head of the investigative judges in Saddam's dozen cases, Raid Juhi, said Sunday the withdrawal of the defense team "will not affect the work of the court and it will continue its legal measures."

Comment: "Hey, we know the guy is guilty! Why does he need lawyers!"

"Suspending the members is not acceptable in Iraqi law," Juhi said. "The court will continue to give legal consultation through naming defense lawyers in case the defense team does not show up" Nov. 28, when the trial resumes, Juhi said.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial in a special Iraqi tribunal, charged in the 1982 deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims in Dujail after an assassination attempt against Saddam in that town north of Baghdad.

The 1,100 lawyers repeated their call for canceling the trial in Iraq, which opened Oct. 19. The lawyers do not recognize the Nov. 28 date for its scheduled resumption.

The lawyers said they pulled out because "there was no response from the Iraqi Government, U.S. forces and international organizations to our demands for providing protection to the lawyers and their families," according to the statement released Saturday in Baghdad.

The lawyers have been unable to carry out their defense tasks, including contacting witnesses and preparing defense argument, because of "organized, intentional and systematic threats," the statement said.

Two Iraqis defending Saddam's colleagues have been killed since the trial started.

A defence lawyer in the Saddam Hussein case who was wounded in a fatal ambush today said he had fled the country and was appealing to the ruler of the Gulf state of Qatar to grant him asylum.

The move is another blow to the troubled case.

Thamir al-Khuzaie was injured in the 8 November ambush in western Baghdad in which another defence lawyer, Adel al-Zubeidi, was killed.

Al-Zubeidi was the second defence lawyer involved in the case to be assassinated since the trial opened on October 19.

"I was only a lawyer who practiced his profession in Iraq. Yet I was subjected to an assassination attempt and to danger that might have even touched my family," al-Khuzaie said. "So I decided to leave the country."

He said that he had written to the ruler of Qatar asking for "humanitarian asylum" for him and his family.

Al-Khuzaie represented two of Saddam's seven co-defendants in the trial, which resumes on 28 November.

British troops have come under attack in Kabul and Nato forces were targeted in two co-ordinated suicide car bombings in which at least four people died.

The attacks took place as ministers revealed that units are preparing to extend Britain's role in Afghanistan when it takes command of the international peacekeeping operation next year.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, told Parliament that Britain faced a "prolonged" involvement in the country. But MPs warned last night that British troops faced being mired in a long-term military commitment to a country in the grip of a growing insurgency.

They insisted yesterday's extension of Britain's role in Afghanistan, four years after troops first arrived, also reflected the size of the task facing coalition forces in Iraq.

Fears for Afghanistan's future emerged in the wake of suggestions, by the British and Iraqi governments, that British troops could begin pulling out of Iraq by the end of next year. For British troops, however, yesterday's violence in Kabul was a taste of what they will face next year when they deploy to the turbulent province of Helmand as part of a move by Nato to take over security in the Taliban heartlands.

At least four people were killed in the attacks, including one German soldier and an Afghan child, but the implications of the attacks were far wider. The insurgency that has been worsening while the world's attention has been focused on Iraq has now reached Kabul.

Mr Reid said British troops had to open fire to defend their camp in Kabul against "unauthorised entry". Few further details emerged, but Mr Reid said British troops were not targeted in the car bombings.

A German soldier died when the Nato vehicle he was travelling in was rammed by a Toyota Corolla stuffed with explosives just after 3pm local time. Two German soldiers and three Afghan civilians were wounded.

An hour later, another Nato vehicle was rammed in a near-identical attack on the same road. Three Afghan civilians were killed, including a young boy, and two Greek soldiers were wounded. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks.

"We have plans for more of the same," Mullah Dadullah, a top-ranking Taliban commander, said by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

The insurgency in Afghanistan has been largely confined to the Pashtun area in the south and east. Until now, British troops have operated in Kabul and the north, where international forces have been largely welcomed by Afghans who suffered persecution under Taliban rule.

But in the south there is widespread support for the insurgency and opposition to any Western presence in Afghanistan. Helmand in particular is notorious even among Afghans for the ferocity of its tribesmen. British troops are moving into the province under a plan for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) to take over security in the area. And it was no coincidence that yesterday's attacks specifically targeted Isaf troops in Kabul.

The message from the Taliban was clear: this is what is waiting for Isaf in the south. But the message was also that the Taliban can now strike in Kabul, which until now has been an oasis of stability largely unaffected by the insurgency.

Kabul is home to 3,000 foreigners, most working for NGOs, who live in an city that often seems utterly disconnected from the rest of the country. Replete with bars and expensive restaurants that sell alcohol to foreigners, but not Afghans, Kabul even boasts two designer boutiques for women's clothes. Yesterday another Afghanistan came crashing up against that world. Both car bombings came on the Jalalabad Road, which has long been the scene of the most serious attacks in Kabul.

There was a suicide bombing on that road in September, and there have been countless improvised bombs hidden along it - partly it is because there are several Western and Afghan military bases, and the UN's headquarters, on it. The road runs through a Pashtun suburb of Kabul where the Pashtun Taliban can operate freely. The fact that so senior a commander has claimed responsibility for the attacks is a sure sign the Taliban are stepping up their actions. Known as Dadullah-I-Leng, or Dadullah the Lame, he is known for his part in massacres of Hazara Shias, which have been described as attempted genocide.

One of the main failures of the Taliban's insurgency has been its inability to attract support among other ethnic communities.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.

Vice President Dick Cheney was heckled by protesters Tuesday as he spoke at the groundbreaking for a public policy center honoring former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.

During Cheney's brief remarks, about a half-dozen people protesting the war in Iraq yelled, "War, what is it good for?" and held up a large banner saying, "Peace Now."

Cheney continued speaking and didn't acknowledge the protesters, who were escorted from the ceremony inside the University of Tennessee's basketball arena.

About 50 protesters, most of them appearing to be college age, demonstrated outside the arena. Several carried signs, including one that read "Honor Baker, Impeach Cheney."

Cheney said that Baker, a Republican who was President Reagan's chief of staff and ambassador to Japan, has brought tremendous credit to the university, to Tennessee and to the nation.

"It's good to know that far into the future people will come to this place and learn of Howard's career and his deep belief in the nobility of public service," Cheney said.

About 400 people attended ceremony, which coincided with Baker's 80th birthday.

The $25 million privately financed Baker Center is being created to foster greater appreciation of public service and understanding of government.

Baker is still remembered for posing a key question during the 1973 Watergate hearings that rocked the Nixon White House: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

CNN Senior Analyst Jeff Greenfield talked with anchor Wolf Blitzer after the speech, analyzing the Bush administration's fresh strategy to target opponents of his Iraq policies.

JEFF GREENFIELD: I think the point here is for the president to try to make the case that there's an undermining going on.

Those are very strong words the president used, that it sends mixed signals to the enemy and mixed signals to the troops. [That] is a way of saying, if you now go back and say that I, the president of the United States, misled or lied us into a war, you're encouraging our enemies and you are discouraging the troops.

Comment: And if you encourage the enemy, then you're a terrorist yourself!

That is always the strongest card that any president has to play when public support for combat diminishes -- as every poll shows it has been [for the Iraq war].

I think the idea is to say, look: [Critics] were saying the same things I was about Saddam Hussein. And for them now to go and say they were misled is just wrong.

Now, there's going to be a real debate going on, on two levels. One, did the congressional leaders have the same access to intelligence that the administration had? There's a real debate about that one.

And, second, the White House is arguing that commissions have said that there was no twisting of intelligence. That's not exactly what those Intelligence Committees were finding. They found that the administration did not pressure intelligence operatives to change the intelligence. What they did with that intelligence, those committees have said, was not in their purview.

But, clearly, in Pennsylvania and again [in Alaska], the president is really trying to turn the tables and say, it's you Democrats who are partly responsible for the uncertainty out in the land.

I think, by the way, it's also a way to say, that that's why my poll numbers are going down. It's because Democrats are misleading people about the history.

WOLF BLITZER: It sounds like some of the campaign rhetoric that we heard last year, going into the election. It's still a year away from the midterm elections. But it certainly has that ringing give-and-take, that back-and-forth.

GREENFIELD: You may remember [this] was a line much quoted at the [2004] Republican Convention. And, obviously, it's overstated, as journalists are wont to do.

But one journalist, Roger Simon, said that the message of the Republican Convention was, vote for Bush or die. His satirical point [was that Republicans] were trying to make the case that, if John Kerry were put in the White House, his uncertainty would weaken the United States.

What you're getting now, almost a year to the day after the reelection of the president, is an argument from the White House saying: We know things ... are tough. We just heard the president acknowledge that. But if you Democrats try to re-fight the basis for going into this war, you're misleading the people.

And that, I believe, is what the White House wants people to focus on. They read these poll numbers. I don't care what any politician says. They know what the poll numbers say. And they are trying to change those numbers.

NEW YORK · Much of the nation has had a lovely real estate boom for the past five years, but the house party is almost over and the cleanup won't be pretty.

That's the word from economists and investors who have watched housing prices march ever higher.

"The collapse of the housing bubble will throw the economy into a recession, and quite likely a severe recession," warned a July report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

In recent weeks, many major investment firms have concurred. Said a Lehman Brothers report, "[A] turn in the housing market is central to our economic forecast. "

"The demographic story behind the housing market boom, as we always thought, was a giant hoax," wrote Merrill Lynch & Co.'s North American economist, David Rosenberg, in a recent report.

If housing prices decline sharply, the effects could be broad. Lehman estimates one-third of the past year's U.S. economic growth was a consequence of the housing boom. Housing construction is equal to 5 percent of the national economy.

A downturn in housing could mean more than 1.3 million lost jobs, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts, bumping up the national unemployment rate by 1 percent and the unemployment rate in house-mad California by 2 percent. Those numbers don't include likely job cuts in housing-dependent businesses, such as banking, furniture and building materials.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research predicts worse, saying a bubble burst would mean the loss of 5 million to 6.3 million jobs.

The housing run-up has financed consumer spending, creating more than $5 trillion in bubble wealth, the center estimates. Consumers have used "cash-out" mortgages to pay for everything from new kitchens to college tuition.

A final nightmare scenario: A federal bailout of the mortgage market is likely if housing crashes, the center predicts. So, if corporate pension funds continue to falter and this dire prediction does come true, the Feds could conceivably be holding your mortgage and your pension.

While there's disagreement on what a downturn will mean, it's widely held that a number of factors could bring prices down. A decline in prices will track interest rates: If rates go up sharply, prices will plummet, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, an independent provider of financial research. If rates rise slowly, housing prices may ease gradually.

Others point to simple supply and demand. Bubbles have their own psychology -- a neighbor tells you at a party that her house has tripled in value and you feel like an idiot for renting -- but supply and demand operates on logic, which has to kick in at some point.

The supply and demand picture for housing looks out of whack. For six straight months, ending in September, builders started work on more than 2 million new homes. This has only happened three other times in the postwar period, according to Merrill Lynch: 1971 to 1973, 1977 to 1978 and early 1984.

Those periods were fundamentally different from today in at least one respect: More people were forming households. Household formation is the growth rate in the number of households and it's boosted by new immigration and twenty-somethings leaving their parents' homes. It is currently half what it was for most of those peak periods.

"At no time in the past three decades has the gap between household formation and housing starts been as wide as it has been over the past 12 to 24 months," Rosenberg wrote. "We've become accustomed to hearing about how housing is in a new paradigm, that the fundamentals are sound, so on and so forth. But please, just don't tell me that the sector has managed to divorce itself from supply and demand realities."

Another indicator, unsold homes on the market, also points down. The ratio of inventories to sales has been rising rapidly in recent months and stands at its highest level since 1996, according to Wachovia Corp.

Rents provide more evidence of an imbalance between supply and demand. Since World War II ended, sale prices for homes have generally kept pace with the overall rate of inflation, and rents moved at the same pace. That hasn't been the case for the last eight years, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Fifty-nine percent of companies say they won't be giving out holiday bonuses in any form this year. And of those that will, only 13 percent said they will be giving out bonuses in cash.

The rest will opt to give food gifts, gift certificates or retailer gift cards, according to a survey released Monday by Hewitt Associates.

Among the companies that said they would be giving cash, the average holiday bonus planned is $683, but the cash bonuses slated range between $25 and $2,500.

Employers said they would spend between $10 and $150 on gift certificates; $10 to $50 for food gifts; and $10 to $100 on retailer gift cards, according to Hewitt's survey.

Nine percent of companies surveyed, meanwhile, said they would donate some or all of the money they would have spent on holiday bonuses to charitable organizations in light of the many natural disasters that have occurred, from the tsunami in Southeast Asia to the Gulf Coast hurricanes to the devastating earthquake in South Asia.

Whether or not a company gives out a holiday bonus in any form is no indication of whether the company gives out other bonuses as well. In an earlier survey, Hewitt found 78 percent of companies offer performance-based bonuses.

Of those companies that said they eliminated their holiday bonus, 25 percent said they did so because they created pay-for-performance programs.

In addition, 50 percent said they eliminated the holiday bonus because employees had started to feel entitled to the bonus rather than see it as a way to create loyalty or excitement for the new year.

"Employers recognize that the value in tying awards to performance, as opposed to the holidays, better connects employees to the company's goals and objectives, eliminates 'entitlement' issues, and leads to increased productivity and improved business results," said Ken Abosch, a business leader for Hewitt Associates, in a statement.

Ah. Well, then ...

May your holidays be highly productive.

Most net users probably do not spend a lot of time worrying about who runs the resource they are using, but there is a global battle brewing over that very question.

The internet grew out of US military and academic research, and the US government still has certain measures of control over it.

Other nations, however, are clamouring for a bigger say and are pushing for significant changes at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society.