At Jalalabad Airfield, in eastern Afghanistan in the summer of 2006, a young intelligence analyst named Jacob Whittaker tried with great difficulty to understand exactly what he was hearing.

The 10th Mountain Division of the United States Army wanted to do what?

Whittaker had to choose his words carefully. He was just a low-ranking specialist with the Idaho National Guard, a very low man on a very tall totem pole. A round-faced twenty-six-year-old, Whittaker had simple tastes — Boise State football, comic books — and a reputation for mulishness belied by his innocent appearance.

Whittaker stared at his superior officer, Second Lieutenant Ryan Lockner, who was running this briefing for him and Sergeant Aaron Ives. Lockner headed intelligence for Task Force Talon, the Army’s aviation component at Jalalabad Airfield, in Nangarhar Province, adjacent to the Pakistan border. Military leaders considered this area, officially designated Regional Command East, the most dangerous part of an increasingly dangerous country.

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Sharpton's attorney, Michael Hardy, told Salon on Thursday that Sharpton is serious about the lawsuit against Michigan state Rep. Marc Shulman, and will likely file it if Shulman doesn't apologize within the next month for the allegations he made in a letter to a fellow Michigan politician.

Shulman, offended by Sharpton's invitation to keynote a local African-American community dinner, cited actions and quotations attributed to Sharpton that, in his view, illustrated bigotry. They included seemingly anti-Semitic quotes by Sharpton from the 1991 Crown Heights affair where tensions between blacks and Hasidic Jews resulted in riots and a murder, as well as a reference to "Socrates and them Greek homos" allegedly from a 1994 speech. Hardy acknowledged that the threatened lawsuit was just as much -- if not more so -- about firing a warning shot across the bow of those who may attempt to use Sharpton's controversial, occasionally demagogic past against him.

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"He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted." One thing was certain, Bush said to applause, "Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States and our friends and allies."

A nonpartisan analysis of who, exactly, has been a "revisionist" on the subject of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, however, reveals that politicians from both parties have revised their positions -- and often more than once. Both Democrats and Republicans have displayed a constantly shifting rhetorical pattern that makes it impossible to figure out what, if anything, either side ever concretely knew about Saddam's weapons programs.

The one consistency: Their statements, miraculously, always seemed to fit their political agenda.

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"I hesitate to reach any conclusions until I have complete information and all sides of an issue are heard," McCain said in a telephone interview with Salon.

A supporter of the war, McCain says he is confident that evidence of WMD will be found. He allows, however, that media accounts of intelligence officials accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify an invasion reinforced his belief that the Senate needs to review the entire war, top to bottom. This would include not just questions about WMD, but friendly-fire incidents, the president's use of discredited forged intelligence during his State of the Union address, the "brilliant" battle plan, and on and on.

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This was a most remarkable Fleischerian pronouncement, if for no other reason than it's been clear that the president, since making the May 30 declaration on Polish television that WMD had been found, has been quite exact in not repeating the claim in his subsequent statements about WMD. Last week he told cheering soldiers in Qatar, with painstaking precision, that coalition forces had found "two mobile biological weapons facilities which are capable of producing biological agents," a distinctly ambiguous proclamation. On Monday, Bush stated with single-minded clarity that "Iraq had a weapons program; intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program," and he is "absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program."

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The last time Ashcroft appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Sept. 24, 2001, seems like a different era. The committee comprises members of Congress who had voted against the USA PATRIOT Act -- which gave law-enforcement agencies broad powers almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks in an attempt to prevent similar catastrophes -- as well as those who proudly voted for it, together with a few members whom he saw as revisionists: those who voted for the bill but who have since become critical of both it and Ashcroft. To add insult to injury, only two days before last week's testimony, the Department of Justice's inspector general issued a harshly critical review of the Justice Department's post-9/11 detentions of illegal immigrants.

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Before the war, Cheney asserted, the administration was positive that the weapons were there and that Saddam Hussein was refusing to acknowledge that. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise, he said; why would Saddam refuse to cooperate with arms inspectors if he didn't have anything to hide? Why would he lead his country into war?

Cheney was received warmly, and it was pointed out in the meeting that new inspectors were heading over to Iraq. Maybe WMD would be found soon, after all.

That the supremely confident vice president even felt the need, in a room full of loyal Republican officials, to reassert that the administration wasn't lying is an acknowledgment that the as yet undiscovered WMD is emerging as a major problem, even if polls indicate that a majority of Americans still don't seem to care. And Cheney's attempt to allay any fears -- in what is, by all accounts, an extremely admiring coterie of senators -- is but one recent example of the administration's slow but steady realization that the failure to find any WMD could pose a real problem for the Bush administration and the United States in general. From the Pentagon to the British House of Commons to President Bush's appearance Thursday in Qatar, the American and British governments are responding, sometimes reeling, in the face of some harsh accusations.

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A Graham spokesman tried on Monday to pooh-pooh their importance as an issue, noting that a Democratic rival keeps a campaign diary on his Web page. But Republican operatives are already pointing out an inaccuracy in how Graham has said he has archived the diaries, and suddenly the respected, mild-mannered candidate's personal "quirk" threatens to be a full-fledged story.

In Graham's journals -- which he's been keeping daily since 1977 -- the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee records everything about his day. Though Graham's notebooks are packed with important information about serious senatorial business, they are also interrupted by notations about the application of scalp ointment, the eating of tuna fish sandwiches and the rewinding of videotapes.

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Polls indicate that the American people care little that such discoveries have not been made. Bush administration officials thus continue to act as if none of this is an issue, while moving on to focus on other conflicts, like Iran and the Israel-Palestine peace process. But in nations allied with the U.S. -- from Australia to Denmark to Ireland to the U.K. -- opponents of the war are using Rumsfeld's remarks about the MIA WMD as evidence of duplicity by the Bush administration. It all creates a sort of parallel-universe feel, where other men in far-off lands suffer recriminations because of remarks made here.

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A picture caption on April 12, 2003, with an article about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, featured a photograph of a turkey from the annual White House Thanksgiving "pardon the turkey" ceremony. Mr. Erdogan was Turkey's first Islamist prime minister, while the turkey pictured is a North American Meleagris gallopavo ultimately eaten by a family in Scranton, Pa., despite the presidential pardon it received. We regret the error.

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Foley, according to a source familiar with the conference call, told reporters that he was hosting the call because he'd heard that one of the biggest newspapers in his district -- the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, whose reporters were not invited on the call -- planned on being the first newspaper in the "mainstream" press to write about his sexual orientation, following on the heels of some alternative newspapers that had raised the issue. Some things -- like a politician's religious affiliation -- are for public consumption even though there are people who don't think they should be, said Foley, a 48-year-old bachelor. But some things just aren't for public consumption, he said, and with that in mind, Foley declared that he was not going to answer the question as to whether he's gay. People have a right to privacy, he said, and that's his position on the matter and how it will remain throughout his campaign for the Senate.

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But it was with characteristic loyalty and abject refusal to admit anything but sheer delight with the Bush administration that Whitman finally resigned Tuesday, writing to President Bush that she wanted to "return to my home and husband in New Jersey, which I love just as you do your home state of Texas."

The letter, released Wednesday morning, claimed "significant improvements to the state of our Nation's treasured environment" and announced a departure date of June 27. In a statement, President Bush called Whitman "a trusted friend and advisor" and "a dedicated and tireless fighter for new and innovative policies for cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land."

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The providence of that bust seems only to have grown over time, as five of the six, one after the other, have accepted guilty pleas with the U.S. government. Just last Monday, Yasein Taher -- voted "friendliest" of Lackawanna High School's class of '96 -- entered into his agreement, pleading "guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda, a designated foreign terrorist organization," according to the Justice Department, and prompting some chest thumping from Attorney General John Ashcroft. "With today's conviction, the Department of Justice continues to build on its strong record of prosecuting those who provide material support to our terrorist enemies," Ashcroft said. "The cooperation we secure from defendants who trained side by side with our enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere is valuable as we continue to wage the war on terrorism."

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Bush officials heralded his service. "Ari was a good soldier," said Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon. "He has been a very steadfast carrier of the Bush message and delivered a very solid performance across the board in one of the most difficult jobs in Washington. His message discipline was extraordinary."

Little such admiration awaited Fleischer, 42, in the White House briefing room where the bald, bespectacled Bush-backer has been a controversial figure; by one account, the applause greeting Fleischer at his morning gaggle with reporters fit the very definition of "smattering." Some were sympathetic. Said one White House reporter, "Ari had an impossible job. He was supposed to talk to the press in a White House that does not talk to the press." A senior Republican congressional aide pointed to one of Fleischer's higher-ups as the reason so many reporters found Fleischer wanting. "All [Bush senior aide Karl] Rove wants is just a P.A. system," the aide said. "It's not really a job with a lot of art to it in this administration. Ari is just a guy who goes out there and reads some version of congressional campaign committee talking points. It's something that anybody with a larynx could probably do."

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In his textbook, "Principles of Economics" -- a new edition of which was released just this year -- Mankiw argued against Arthur Laffer's theory that tax cuts, in encouraging economic growth, are self-financing. Mankiw also argued in that book that rising deficits are extremely harmful to the economy, by driving up interest rates and severely inhibiting growth.

There was a time when such arguments weren't controversial -- and in fact, they were commonplace among Republicans. But times change. And Mankiw -- as a potential Bush administration official -- endorses the president's most recent tax-cut proposal, $550 billion in the House version and $350 billion in the Senate, saying that the slow economy necessitates bold action.

"I hate to see a highly competent professional turn himself inside out, twisting like a pretzel," said Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

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"If he'd done that in 2000 we wouldn't even be here tonight!" a non-Lieberman staffer snarled at a Lieberman spokesman after the debate, referring not just to the disappointing conclusion of the 2000 election but to Lieberman's oft-derided performance opposite Dick Cheney in their one debate face-off.

With a crowded field of nine sparring with each other, no one could really emerge as a clear victor. But Lieberman -- who caused the debate to be pushed back to a 9 p.m. start, after the sun had set and he had completed his weekly Sabbath observance -- strongly argued that he was the "one Democrat who can match George Bush in the areas where many think he's strong -- defense and moral values, and beat him where he's weak," on the economy and other domestic items -- and while doing so seemed to slightly rise above his peers, at least this night.

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And with that, the furor seems all but over. A story broke in the Wednesday Philadelphia Inquirer that showed Santorum -- shortly after 9/11 -- fundraising for an anti-gay group promising to protect heterosexual marriage from "homosexual activists." The letter, mailed in early 2002, could be "truly the most important letter I ever write you," Santorum said, acknowledging that that "may sound like a huge exaggeration, particularly in light of the attack on America."

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No longer was the U.S. necessarily on the hunt for the actual weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, the president said. Rather, the investigation of suspect sites in Iraq by coalition forces would prove that Saddam Hussein "had a weapons of mass destruction program." The same day as the interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that "whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."

This, of course, follows months of reassuring Americans that WMD would be found. Earlier this month, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer called the weapons "what this war was about"; and just Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that with the help of captured Iraqi leaders, the WMD "will be found." But now the administration seems to be preparing the country for news of evidence that WMD once existed in Iraq -- with no actual WMD -- and calling it a victory.

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Having served as director of the United States Information Agency's Near East and South Asia bureau, with previous posts in Cairo, Egypt, Damascus, Syria, and both Jedda and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Rugh is an expert on "public diplomacy" -- providing information to foreign audiences that casts the U.S. in the most favorable light. He and several of his fellow USIA alumni were chagrined at how the government had slowly been destroying the USIA in the past 15 years or so, and how worldwide public opinion was turning against the United States. So long before the war in Iraq -- before 9/11, even -- they scheduled a meeting with undersecretary of state for public diplomacy Charlotte Beers.

But Beers, former chairwoman of both J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, was a product of Madison Avenue, and didn't know what she was doing, Rugh felt. "Beers was in way over her head," he tells Salon. "My understanding was that she knew she was a square peg in a round hole from the very beginning," he says. "She was not happy from day one in the job, and the people who worked for her were not entirely happy. She was from an entirely other culture."

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"I wear a hijab in the classroom where I teach. I have never had any child that thought it was weird or anything like that," Ismail says in the TV spot. "Islam in the United States could be followed just as well as I can follow it in my village where I was raised." Adds Hammuda in the commercial: "Religious freedom here is something very important, and no one ever bothered us. Since 9/11, we've had an overwhelming sense of support from our customers and clients."

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