Anyone who talks about an "intelligence failure" is missing the point. The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence.

In Britain, the news media have not been shy about drawing the obvious implications, and the outrage has not been limited to war opponents. The Times of London was ardently pro-war; nonetheless, it ran an analysis under the headline "Lie Another Day." The paper drew parallels between the selling of the war and other misleading claims: "The government is seen as having `spun' the threat from Saddam's weapons just as it spins everything else."

Yet few have made the same argument in this country, even though "spin" is far too mild a word for what the Bush administration does, all the time. Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an extent never before seen in U.S. history — systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.

Am I exaggerating? Even as George Bush stunned reporters by declaring that we have "found the weapons of mass destruction," the Republican National Committee declared that the latest tax cut benefits "everyone who pays taxes." That is simply a lie. You've heard about those eight million children denied any tax break by a last-minute switcheroo. In total, 50 million American households — including a majority of those with members over 65 — get nothing; another 20 million receive less than $100 each. And a great majority of those left behind do pay taxes.

And the bald-faced misrepresentation of an elitist tax cut offering little or nothing to most Americans is only the latest in a long string of blatant misstatements. Misleading the public has been a consistent strategy for the Bush team on issues ranging from tax policy and Social Security reform to energy and the environment. So why should we give the administration the benefit of the doubt on foreign policy?

It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.

If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain's participation in the war — writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."

It's no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980's. But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.

But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.

No one in Baghdad knew who he was or the risks he was taking. Apart from a select group of trusted friends, they still don't. The telephones and the internet haven't worked here since the collapse of the regime, so the Iraqis never had a chance to read the diaries of the Baghdad Blogger.

Outside the country, many didn't even believe that the man who wrote only under the sobriquet Salam Pax truly existed. It was the great irony of the war. While the world's leading newspapers and television networks poured millions of pounds into their coverage of the war in Iraq, it was the internet musings of a witty young Iraqi living in a two-storey house in a Baghdad suburb that scooped them all to deliver the most compelling description of life during the war.

As with so much in Iraq, it was never meant to be like this. In June last year, Salam (this much of his name, at least, is real) was a recently graduated architect, aged 29, living at home with his parents and brother in Baghdad. His best friend was Raed, 25, a Palestinian-Jordanian he had met while studying architecture, who was taking a masters degree in Jordan. Raed was at best an infrequent email correspondent and so Salam started writing up his news from home on a weblog, a site on the internet where he could post his scribblings as often as he liked for his friend to read. He called it: Where is Raed?

No one else bothered to look at it. "The first two months were just: that girl got married, I had the flu, he had I don't know what. Stupid stuff," says Salam. "I never thought there would be this much of a fuss about the whole thing."

Soon, however, he began to search out other "bloggers" posting on the internet. Few were writing in English from the Arab world, and those that did wrote in heavily religious overtones. That was enough to encourage Salam to put his head above the parapet and one day he identified himself on a bloggers' website as an Iraqi. "I was saying, 'Come on, look, the Arabs here: sex, alcohol, belly dancers, TV shows, where are they?' All you saw was people talking about God and Allah. There was nothing about what was happening here."

As he wrote in more detail, he began to touch more often on the unspoken hardships of life in Iraq under the paranoid regime of Saddam Hussein. He could hardly have taken a greater risk if he had tried. More than 200,000 people went missing under Saddam, many for far lesser crimes than the open criticism of the regime that Salam voiced in his writings. Now that the regime has fallen, human rights workers are tripping over mass graves in Iraq every few days as they trawl through the legacy of 23 years of unimaginable brutality and persecution.

Like all Iraqis, Salam was familiar with the dangers. At least four of his relatives had gone missing. In the past year, for no apparent reason, one of his friends was summarily executed, shot in the head as he sat in his car, and two others were arrested; one was later freed and another, a close friend, has never returned.

Not only had Salam criticised the regime, he had written openly about the fact that he is gay. It was a frank admission in a repressive dictatorship and one that, even in the new, postwar Iraq, which at heart is still a conservative, Islamic society, represents a significant risk. And so he continues to guard his identity. "I am not going to be the first one to carry the flag. I hide behind computer screens," he says.

Despite the risks, Salam soon became hooked on his daily diary. He gave simple but honest descriptions of life at Hotel Pax, as he called his family home, which was fast filling up with anxious relatives. He talked equally freely about the soaring price of tomatoes and the sudden arrival of the feared Ba'ath party militia, who, to the neighbours' horror, set up a gun position in an empty house on his street. He wrote either in the office of the architectural firm he was representing in Baghdad, or at home, in his chaotically untidy bedroom.

Screens cover the windows to keep the midday sun away from his three computers, each of which has been opened up into a sprawling tangle of wires and circuit boards. A poster from the film The Matrix hangs on the wall, looking down on a jumble of computer books and CDs strewn over the floor. Pages of website addresses and computer commands are tacked to the wall above his screen. It was here that Salam would sit and talk endlessly about the impending war with Raed, who returned to Baghdad before the war, and the friend he describes only as G - Ghaith, another young, intelligent, eloquent architectural graduate who spent much of his adult life dodging military service. They talked eagerly about the demise of Saddam, but they were scared too. Scared of being called up for military service because all young men were reservists, and scared of being obliterated by an American bomb.

But Salam's writing is remarkably free of sentimentality even as the approaching war becomes inevitable. "I helped my mother pack things today," he wrote in a posting on February 16, a month before the invasion. "We have not decided to leave Baghdad if 'it' happens, but just in case we absolutely have to. We are very efficient packers, me and my mom. The worst packers are the emotional ones. The 'Oh-let's-remember-when-I-bought-this-thing' packers, we just do it in cold blood. We have done this quite often; we are serial packers."

Salam is shy, but he has a quick and sometimes cynical humour that flows easily through his writing. Yet occasionally his wit choked on the images of death and war that appeared on the family television screen, beamed into the Hotel Pax from an illegal satellite dish on the roof. "On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering," he wrote on March 21, in the first week of combat. "My youngest cousin was muttering, 'What shame' to himself. Yes, it is better for them to do that, but still, seeing them carrying that white flag makes something deep inside you cringe."

By now his weblog had blossomed in confidence from idle chat to startling reportage that seems to have been driven by an underlying urge to resist the regime and to document its fall. He is almost offended when I ask later why he risked staying in Baghdad during the war, rather than escaping abroad which, as a well-off, educated Iraqi, would not have been hard. "I absolutely had to stay. This is your country, this is your place. I had to see what was going to happen."

Yet in the final weeks before the impending conflict, he became increasingly anxious that the men of the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence agency, were on to him. "They were not only paranoid, they were going crazy," he says. At one point the regime blocked access to the website on which he was posting his writing, blogspot.com. "There was the possibility that they knew. I spent a couple of days thinking this is the end. And then you wait for a couple of days and nothing happens and you say, 'OK, let's do it again.' Stupid risks, one after another."

Reports of his writing began to filter into the newspapers in Britain and the US. At one point during the war, while he was still able to access the internet and send his writing, the Arabic radio services of the BBC and the Voice of America ran stories on him. His father heard the reports and for the first time guessed that that it was his son they were referring to. "When he heard this, he was sure that something bad would happen." By now 20,000 people were regularly reading Salam's words and his writing became the most linked-to diary on the internet.

Then suddenly, around ten days into the war, the ever paranoid Iraqis closed down all internet access. Unable to post his diaries, Salam continued to write: "After eight months, it became a habit." Sometimes, when the generator was running, he used his computer. Mostly he wrote in a notebook, describing the bombings across Baghdad and the increasingly frenetic Iraqi army and fedayeen.

"There will be excellent, amazing, very important stories to be told by lots of people. We, sitting in Baghdad in our protected four walls, were never going to be these stories. There are people who went through much more," he says.

Two weeks ago he collected his writings together and sent them by email to Diana Moon, a trusted fellow blogger from New York, who posted them on the site. Salam is modest about what he has written, but furious, too, with those who doubted his authenticity. At one point he changed the name of the weblog to simply Dear Raed. Many thought the palindrome hinted that Salam Pax didn't exist, but was an agent of Iraqi or US intelligence. His allusions to David Bowie and Hollywood movies seemed unusually familiar and so his identity was questioned.

In fact, his experience of the west dates back to two long periods of his childhood spent living in Vienna, where his father worked as a businessman. He lived there alone for eight years as a student, returning reluctantly to Baghdad in 1996 because his parents called him back. He regarded the doubters as culturally arrogant, unable to accept that an Iraqi in Baghdad could share their interests and write on them eloquently and with humour. "I am this little no one who actually is a kind of a foreigner in his own culture. I don't listen to Arabic music a lot, I don't read that much, I think every single Arabic newspaper is a tool to whatever government. It was making me angry, it was annoying me, I didn't see why I had to take all this shit."

Much of the criticism came from Americans who favoured the war and were riled by Salam's dismissive criticism of US ambitions in Iraq. He argued endlessly with Raed and Ghaith about whether the war was justified. He was reluctant to cheer the US invasion in his writings but, like most Iraqis, says only a foreign invasion could have overthrown Saddam and so accomplished what most of the population longed for.

But, again like most, he is bitter about the looting and lawlessness which for the past six weeks have gripped Baghdad. "The Americans are not taking control of the situation and stopping it. There is no way they could wash their hands clean of it," he says. "Two months like this is too much, three months is a disaster."

Electricity is still intermittent at best, government is a long way from restored. Most ministries are gutted, some of them are still smoking. What message does it send to frustrated Iraqis that only the oil ministry has been protected by US troops? Already some are talking of Saddam's era as the good days, Salam says.

The former dictator and his two loathed sons are still on the run. The weapons of mass destruction, the fragile premise on which the war was based, have been not been found. Now some hardline Shia clerics are becoming increasingly fractious, taking advantage of the power vacuum and threatening to ban alcohol, cinema and prostitution on pain of execution. The Baghdad blogger may still have the most important chapters of his diary left to write

Iran will continue to stir the forces within the Middle East with their intense fanatical aspirations and the potentiality of certain things will always be present. There is no doubt that Iran gently stirs a simmering pot; an insidious process which coalesces the discontents and gropes further into the masses who are filled with discontent and impatience. Time is playing on their side. They've built strong local relationships which have the potential of significantly affecting developments in the ME on an ongoing basis.

They have started a chain of events which will not be easily altered. The fundamentalists feed on hatreds and fears. Seared deeply into the souls of many is the inevitability of the coming revolution where the Gulf will be purged of capitalism and its attendant greed. Whatever can be done to destabilise the political spectrum in the Middle East will be done and I hate to think of the consequences. The religion of the Saudis is strong, but is under challenge by Moslem fundamentalists who suggest that Saudi law is not Islamic, but tribal and has no place in a modern, democratic society that Islam strives to achieve. The overt capitalism of the Saudi Princes is something that many Moslem leaders find unacceptable and therefore is under challenge. The Gulf States don't want the poisonous ideas of the fundamentalists being imported into their Kingdoms. The ascendancy of Islamic Fundamentalism should not be regarded as a temporary aberration that will disappear. Iran has pumped dollars into fundamentalist organisations but this is part of their long-term strategy to increase their influence in the region.

Intelligence services in many countries have checked and cross checked their files, pulling the strands of information together. I believe a pattern has begun to emerge. The emphasis has shifted slightly away from Iran. It is difficult to hunt the nameless. Intelligence services would give anything to learn the names of the people involved, their whereabouts and headquarters. Certainly it was a gamble by those concerned, but it paid off and not for want of planning. It proves that they have men and women scattered throughout the ME gathering not only information on targets when required, but able to use extreme and damaging terror tactics if called upon. If the two events were co-ordinated, it implies a mastermind planning things on a massive scale, much wider than has been seen before. What we have seen is only a single facet of this organisation at work. They work with others and have accomplished much more by exchanging vital information and resources. These groups have been given every possible means of assistance and co-operation which includes not only military assistance and provision of weapons, but electronic technology, training in the use of equipment and any other such means in the propagation of propaganda, dissidence and Islamic ideals throughout the world. Few realise the full extent of the danger although I know the NSC has had critical sessions on the matter.
It has become a Machiavellian business, a warfare in the darkness with few clues to distinguish friend from foe. T angled plots and endless conspiracies, leading to the inevitable question, who is using whom? There is no way the intelligence gathering can foresee even the most broad strokes. The situation remains tense and it will become more volatile and violent andthe prospect is for more terror and further counter terror.

How far do Washington's fears go? Iran is not mad enough to risk a direct confrontation with the US - they are not that stupid. If Washington requires information on their nuclear technology, they should look to the Chinese, North Koreans and the French. It is they, especially the Chinese, who have been assisting the Iranians since the late eighties and early nineties.

For 45 desperate seconds, crew and passengers on QF1737 fought for their lives yesterday, overpowering an armed man who police said tried to hijack and crash the aircraft with 53 people on board.

Brandishing two 15cm sharpened wooden stakes as knives, the 40-year-old assailant stabbed two flight attendants who stopped him forcing his way into the cockpit of the Boeing 717 - 20 minutes after take-off from Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport. Five passengers came to their assistance, forcing the man to the floor and disarming him.

Police recovered an aerosol can and a cigarette lighter. They suspect the assailant intended to use them as a flame-thrower to disable the pilots once he got into the cockpit.

A major review of airport security began immediately and the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson - who said it was "an attempt to crash the plane" - demanded officials find out how the man smuggled the weapons through airport checks before boarding the plane, which was bound for Launceston.

Government sources said the assailant called out about "God's will or Armageddon when he was interrogated by federal police after the plane returned to Melbourne. He had been quiet but one source said that, during the attack and after he had been detained, he began talking about "God and the end of the world", saying that "God had spoken to him".

Mr Anderson said the metal detectors at the airport would not have picked up the man's wooden stakes.

Witnesses who saw the man after he was arrested, his hands bloodied and in handcuffs, described him as "just a normal looking Australian". It was believed he recently had resigned or been sacked from a job. Federal police said he would be charged under the Federal Aviation Act.

"We believe he was trying to take over the plane," said Federal Police agent Stephen Cato.

Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon said: "We do not believe at this stage that this is terrorist-related in any way."

He said the aircraft did not have one of the new "enhanced" security doors which are being installed on all Qantas planes but the cockpit door was locked.

Passengers said the hero of QF1737, which took off at 2.50pm, was the purser, Greg Khan, 38, who for 10 dangerous seconds stood between the cockpit door and the man's frenzied assault.

He was stabbed in the head and face as he fought the assailant back down the aisle, where five passengers helped subdue the man. A 25-year-old female flight attendant was also stabbed in the cheek. Keith Charlton, 59, one of the passengers who disarmed the man, said the desperate fight lasted no more than 45 seconds.

"I didn't hear him utter one word," Mr Charlton said.

"If there ever was a hero, it was Greg," said Mr Charlton. "He saved the aircraft."

Mr Charlton, from Rosebud, Victoria, was sitting in row three when he "heard a commotion behind me. I turned and this guy came rushing past, waving what looked like a wooden dagger high in the air. He charged onto the purser and began stabbing him."

But Mr Khan did not go down. Instead, with blood pouring from his wounds, he buried his head into the assailant's chest and forced him back down the aisle.

"The guy was stabbing him, there was blood going everywhere, but the purser wouldn't let go, he kept fighting him back," Mr Charlton said.

The passengers and a female flight attendant came to his assistance, overpowering the man and forcing him to the floor. "The first to help him was a passenger sitting in the front row," Mr Charlton said. "I learned later it was his brother-in-law. We got the guy down, we took the wooden stakes from him. We stood on him."

Mr Charlton said the crew got plastic restraints. They bound the assailant's legs and hands. "We picked him up and threw him on the floor between two rows of seats," he said. "Someone sat on the seat with his feet on him. I was leaning over the back of the seat in front, watching him."

One passenger injured his arm in the melee, but Mr Charlton said no one had time to feel fear. "It happened so quickly, we had to subdue him, there was no thought of anything else. But later we got very angry at what he'd tried to do."

Mr Anderson said that while Australia had "world's best practice" in airport security, "it may well be that there are lessons to be learn out of this".

A day after he stunned Israelis and Palestinians by describing his nation's long hold on the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an "occupation", Ariel Sharon backtracked, referring to Israel's "control over disputed lands".

The Israeli Prime Minister's office issued a clarification on Tuesday after he was criticised by furious right-wing MPs for using a term many believe could buttress Palestinian claims to the land seized by Israel in 1967.

The dispute over language came as the fragile new peace process appeared to struggle to make headway. Israeli and Palestinian leaders postponed a meeting planned for yesterday ahead of talks with President George Bush in Jordan next week.

With the US urging the two sides to push forward on the "road map" peace plan, Mr Sharon has faced continued criticism from right-wing politicians for persuading his cabinet to endorse it on Sunday and for his comments defending it.

"You may not like the word, but what's happening is occupation," Mr Sharon told angry MPs from his Likud party on Monday. And occupation, he said, repeating the word throughout his comments, "is a terrible thing" for both Israelis and Palestinians.

On Tuesday Mr Sharon said he had been referring to Israel's rule over Palestinians, not the occupied territories themselves.

Palestinian officials had described Mr Sharon's original words as a watershed for a man long viewed as unlikely to cede territory or forge peace.

The Palestinian Information Minister, Nabil Amr, and other officials voiced concern, however, about emerging details of Israel's objections to the peace blueprint that Mr Sharon's cabinet insisted on attaching before it voted to endorse the plan.

Israel has demanded a "complete cessation of terror" before it begins implementing the plan. Palestinian officials say this would hold the process hostage to anyone with a bomb or gun.

The demand is among 14 amendments, leaked to the media on Tuesday, that the Israeli cabinet is seeking to the plan.

However, the Israelis say they should not be subject to similar conditions.

"The road map will not state that Israel must halt violence, incitement against the Palestinians," the document says.

Other minimum demands include a requirement that the Palestinians waive any right of return to Israel for refugees, and the dismantling of Hamas and other "terrorist" organisations.

Israel also demands a bar on any discussion within the plan of the fate of established Jewish settlements or Jerusalem until final-status talks towards the end of the process, and acceptance before talks begin that Israel will control the borders and other aspects of a provisional Palestinian state.

Crucially, Israel objects to the concept of the sides implementing commitments in parallel. Instead it wants "performance benchmarks", and the right to decide if these have been reached.

The Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, said yesterday that Israel should drop its reservations and embrace the peace plan as a historic opportunity.

THE NEXT STEPS
• Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas to meet as early as today.
• Israel's US ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, meets George Bush today.
• Bush to meet Arab leaders in Egypt to promote the plan.
• A summit with Bush, Sharon and Abbas in Jordan next Wednesday.

The Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers planned to hold preliminary talks today ahead of a meeting with President George W Bush next week to push forward a US-backed Middle East peace plan.

Israeli diplomatic sources confirmed the meeting between Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israel's Ariel Sharon. Earlier, the White House announced both men would meet Bush in Jordan when he visits Egypt, Jordan and Qatar from June 2 to 5.

In Washington, a Bush administration official said two senior officials in charge of Middle East policy would leave for the Middle East to prepare for Bush's meetings.

Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council director responsible for the Middle East, would go first to Cairo, then Amman, Riyadh and Jerusalem, the official said.

In his first Israeli newspaper interview since taking office, Abbas said he would not settle for a temporary ceasefire by militants in a 32-month-old uprising for Palestinian statehood.
He demanded "absolute calm".

In continued violence early today, a 20-year-old Palestinian militant was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Jenin, Palestinian medics and military sources said.

Yesterday, Palestinian witnesses and security sources said Israeli forces shot dead a member of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Force 17 security unit yesterday as he sat in his car. Israeli security officials denied any connection with the slaying in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

In the interview published yesterday in Israel's daily Haaretz, Abbas urged Israelis to shed their fears over the US-backed "road map" to peace.

"This is a historic opportunity to return to a track of normalcy," Abbas said. "Follow the map and don't waste time over details."

In their second meeting since Abbas took office in April, Sharon will focus on ways the Palestinian premier can reduce violence against Israelis so Israel can restore normal life to Palestinian towns, Israel radio said.

The road map outlines reciprocal steps leading to an end to violence and the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. The Palestinians embraced it. Israel accepted it after Washington agreed to address most of its 14 reservations.

In an interview with Reuters, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas, said the road map was "a trick" and Washington could not be trusted.

Islamic militants have claimed responsibility for most Israeli civilian deaths during the uprising.

Yassin said Hamas might suspend attacks inside Israel if Israel ended a military crackdown on Palestinians and released some 7000 prisoners, a proposal Israel has rejected.