More news out:

Remember the Congressional Report on 9/11 which the Bush White House ripped 27 pages out of? We always knew that the redacted pages were about Saudi Arabia, but we probably assumed that it just talked out secondary relationships between the terrorists and that country.

Not quite. According to Florida Senator Bob Graham, part of the 27 pages censored by Bush spoke of two 9/11 hijackers who got support from Saudi agents–and the Bush administration blocked an investigation into the matter. Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassan worked for the Saudi government when they gave substantial financial support to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhdar (hijackers on AA Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon), and found them apartments in San Diego when they began flight training there.

When the staff tried to conduct interviews in that investigation, and with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who also helped the eventual hijackers, they were blocked by the FBI and the administration, Graham wrote.

The administration and CIA also insisted that the details about the Saudi support network that benefited two hijackers be left out of the final congressional report, Graham complained.

Bush had concluded that “a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,” Graham wrote. “It was as if the president’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.”

Bush’s statement about nations that aide terrorists is completely opposite to Bush’s post-9/11 policy which he used to justify invading Afghanistan.

Graham also reveals that, according to General Tommy Franks, the Bush administration started shifting resources out of Afghanistan and into a position to be used against Iraq as early as February 2002, just four months after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and more than a year before the invasion of Iraq–not to mention long before Bush had congressional authority to do anything of that nature. Franks told Graham at one point, “Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.”

All of this gives even more credence to the case made in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, in which the extensive ties between the Bushes and the Saudis is outlined; far more detail is given in the Craig Unger book, House of Bush, House of Saud. The short story is, Bush is covering up the Saudi connection, perhaps even illegally so, committing obstruction of justice.

What odds you want that the mainstream press ignores the story?

Fighting in Iraq has surged, bringing the 1000th death of an American soldier close to reality frighteningly faster than expected. 12 fatalities in the past 36 hours have brought the toll to 998. It is sad that only this milestone may bring even a little attention to how badly things are going for our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 7,000 more have been wounded, many losing limbs or otherwise becoming handicapped. And still, they’re being short-changed and left in the cold (make that heat) in regards to everything from bottled water to body armor, while looking at Bush administration VA funding cuts of almost a billion dollars. These among a host of issues plaguing the troops. We say we support them, but few seem willing to focus on these vital issues. To know more about what’s happening straight from the source, visit Operation Truth, a web site by soldiers in Iraq.

Was Saddam Hussein worth the lives of 1,000 Americans?

Concern has been growing over the quick-and-dirty post-convention polls from TIME and Newsweek which show Bush enjoyed a double-digit bounce. Not so fast, though; Rasmussen polls, tracking the numbers day by day, see only a 4 to 5 point lead over Kerry, which is backed up by reports of internal poll numbers from both campaigns. Rasmussen attributes the discrepancy between TIME & Newsweek and the new numbers to the news magazines’ giving more weight to Republicans’ responses in the polling data; the L.A. Times, apparently, made the same mistake by counting too many Democrats when the paper reported a huge Kerry lead earlier in the year.

A new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll shows an even smaller bounce: according to this poll, Bush got no more than a 2% increase in the poll numbers relative to before the convention. If true, this would equal the bounce Kerry got after the Democratic convention.

More dirt on Bush?

Well, it looks like it. More and more people have been noticing the long-known fact that the Bush National Guard document dump may have had lots of pages, but it left out key documents, such as the mandatory report detailing why Bush missed his physical exam. The White House response? Texas Air National Guardsmen were sloppy record-keepers. Really, that’s what they’re saying. This as Ben Barnes’ 60 Minutes interview is getting ready to air.

And now Kitty Kelley, author of the Nancy Reagan Bio, is publishing a book on the Bushes, in which she reports witnesses who say that Bush used cocaine at Camp David when his father was president, and that he and Laura Bush both smoked marijuana. The 700-page book titled “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty” is reported to contain “five bombshells,” including the drug information and apparently new information on Bush and the National Guard.

Bush has still not answered the cocaine issue save to say that he didn’t use illegal narcotics after 1974; frankly, it is rather obvious he did use cocaine, else the clumsy obfuscation he attempted in 2000 about how he would clear background checks in former white house administrations makes absolutely no sense at all.

New allegations of cocaine use won’t really affect those already voting against Bush much, but it could hurt his support among his base, fundamentalist voters who might be less inclined to go to the polls in November if this gets enough coverage in the press.