Poor Mojo's Newswire

WASHINGTON - In a candid admission of failures on his watch, President Bush has owned up to being "unprepared" for war upon taking office and regretted believing bogus intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "That's a do-over I can't do," Bush said of his decision to invade Iraq based on the bad intel. In an interview to air Monday on ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson," Bush said "I think I was unprepared for war" when 9/11 occurred. "In other words, I didn't campaign and say, 'Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack,'" Bush said. "In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents - one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen." On Iraq, Bush said "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," but the chemical and biological weapons Baghdad allegedly possessed were never found. Bush said the blame for the failure must be shared by other nations and members of Congress.

DETROIT — The top aide to Detroit’s disgraced former mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, pleaded guilty Monday to obstruction of justice and agreed to serve four months in jail for her part in the text-message sex scandal that led to Mr. Kilpatrick’s downfall. The settlement that the aide, Christine Beatty, reached with prosecutors is nearly identical to the terms of the deal struck by Mr. Kilpatrick in September. Both must serve five years of probation and pay restitution to the city, though Ms. Beatty, who has been unemployed since quitting as the mayor’s chief of staff in January, will owe just one-tenth of the $1 million that Mr. Kilpatrick agreed to pay. Ms. Beatty will be barred from continuing her pursuit of a law degree while on probation; Mr. Kilpatrick had to relinquish his law license.

The US Department of Defense plans to deploy 20,000 troops nationwide by 2011 to help state and local officials respond to terror or nuclear attacks and emergencies, The Washington Post said Monday... The newspaper said that civil liberties groups and libertarians had expressed concern that the plan could undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response -- a nearly sevenfold increase in five years -- "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month noted by the Post. But the recognition that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe [Hurricane Katrina might be used as an example] prompted "a fundamental change in military culture."

Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who helped supervise the Brookings Institution study, says Washington needs to focus on consumption in addition to targeting traffickers.... The indictment of Washington's counter-narcotics campaign comes in a report released this week by the Brookings Institution that advocates closer engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean.... The report, which is the work of Brookings' Partnership for the Americas Commission, offers especially pointed criticism of the way the drug war has been waged. Contrary to government claims, the use of heroin and cocaine in the U.S. has not declined significantly, the report says, and the use of methamphetamine is spreading. Falling street prices suggest that the supply of narcotics has not declined noticeably, and U.S. prevention and treatment programs are woefully underfunded, the study says. "Current U.S. counter- narcotics policies are failing by most objective standards," the report says. "The only long-run solution to the problem of illegal narcotics is to reduce the demand for drugs in the major consuming countries, including the United States."