US: The report this week of the presidential commission examining US intelligence on Iraq has been greeted with some scepticism by the US media.
The commission concluded that the nation's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in their assessment of weapons of mass destruction. But it did not question the president or other top administration officials about how they came to use dud intelligence to go to war, saying it was "not authorised" to do so.
Nor did the commission find any instance of political pressure causing the CIA to skew or alter intelligence, though it conceded there was an environment "that did not encourage scepticism".
The co-chairman, Judge Laurence Silberman, told reporters he got his information on Bush's relationship with the CIA from Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. The book contains the famous promise by CIA chief George Tenet to Bush that proving the existence of WMD in Iraq would be a "slam dunk".
The commission report nevertheless shows how Tenet's agency not only got it "dead wrong" in one crucial aspect but made sure they got it wrong. The CIA told the president - and the world - that aluminium tubes sought by Iraq were for reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme.
However the only US experts on the matter - in the Energy Department - had told the CIA the tubes were not for nuclear weapons but for Medusa rockets Iraq was developing. The CIA refused to follow guidelines to reconcile technical assessments when differences arise. Tenet instead commissioned an outside contractor to do separate tests.
When the contractor failed to make the nuclear connection, the CIA set up a new panel, provided it with one-sided "evidence", got the desired conclusion and brought their "slam-dunk" case to the White House.
Colin Powell said this week that he is "furious and angry" about being misled over WMD. The president expressed no such anger, then or now. Indeed, in December he awarded Tenet the presidential medal of freedom, the nation's highest honour. The commission also found that Ahmed Chalabi provided a defector who gave "dead wrong" information about a secret nuclear facility, and that the CIA elected to believe the hard drinking, lying "Curveball" who spun yarns to German intelligence about biological weapons labs. The commission pointed out that the positive assessments of these two sources are still on US national intelligence databases.
Colin Powell's disclosure that he was furious about being misled over WMD came in a magazine interview this week. "I will always be the one who presented it" at the UN, Powell told Stern in Germany, "I have to live with that." Powell is clearly furious with Tenet, who sat behind him at the UN as he gave his power-point presentation on Iraq's non-existent WMD.
That morning the CIA chief failed to tell Powell of an urgent midnight call from a senior intelligence officer warning that Curveball's evidence was unreliable. The CIA chief had replied "Yeah, yeah" and that he was "exhausted", according to testimony the official gave the commission. Powell also had a dig in Stern at Donald Rumsfeld, who famously said that even a "trained ape" knew that Iraq had WMD. The defence secretary's rhetoric about Old Europe and New Europe before the war "contributed to pitting European public opinion against us", Powell charged.
The US State Department released its annual report this week on global human rights and democracy. It ranged over the world but had nothing to say about human rights in the United States itself.
As always China came in for a bashing. Beijing's human rights record remained poor, it said, and China was guilty of "torture and mistreatment of prisoners, abuse in custody that resulted in death, forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, incommunicado detention and denial of due process".
The Chinese government decided to get its retaliation in first, and make good on the omission of the US from the State Department survey.
It issued its own report, called "The Human Rights Record of the United States". The US should reflect on its own "erroneous behaviour", it said. American society's shortcomings included high crime levels, a record number of citizens in prison, the manipulation of democracy by the rich, soaring poverty, racial discrimination, post-9/11 restrictions on liberties, and child sexual abuse by priests.
"In 2004, United States Army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi prisoners of war, which stunned the whole world," it went on. "The United States forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi POW's.
"They made the POW's naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women's underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds."
The Volker report on the oil-for-food scandal at the UN reveals that UN secretary general Kofi Annan was in Dublin in January 1999 when he first heard that he had a big problem with his son Kojo.
Later that day, Kojo falsely assured him he had left Cotecna, the Swiss firm involved in the $6 million deal.
Mr Annan then travelled to Geneva where he met Cotecna executive Michael Wilson in the Hotel Beau Rivage. Wilson also denied Kojo was still employed by the firm when in fact he continued to get paid by Cotecna until 2003.