A spokeswoman for Caroline Giuliani explains why her membership in a Barack Obama Facebook group doesn’t mean that she isn’t backing her father’s White House run: “Before the presidential campaign got underway, Caroline added herself to a list on Facebook as an expression of interest in certain principles. It was not intended as an indication of support in a presidential campaign and she has removed it. Caroline is not commenting on the 2008 election.”

Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States explains how the National Intelligence Estimate was wrong when it said al-Qaida enjoys a “safe haven” in his country: “Now, what is the definition of a safe haven? It is a place where they can stay and plan and operate from, and there is a kind of tacit approval by the government of Pakistan. This is preposterous. We will agree there may be odd people in hideouts. But there are no safe havens.”

The ambassador explains that Pakistan doesn’t have any “mud hut compounds” where the Taliban and al-Qaida train: “This is an absolute fallacy. There is no compound like Fort Knox or Fort Benning. What a training camp in our area entails is a room about this size [pointing to his spacious office] where people can sleep at night. And then there is some space outside where they can train. And from the air it may just look like an innocent hut… . It’s not a compound, that’s totally false.”

Newt Gingrich explains what he meant when he said that the Bush administration is waging a “phony war” on terrorism: “All I’m suggesting is, if we’re serious — I wrote a novel called ‘Pearl Harbor’ about the Second World War. We were serious in the Second World War. We beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan in less than four years. If we’re going to take this war seriously before we lose an American city, we need a much larger dialogue in this country about what is victory going to take and what are we prepared to do to win.”