No way, say medical experts: “American businessman Nicholas Berg’s body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.” (Asia Times)

A compiled list of doubts raised by dubious webloggers did the rounds several weeks ago; now these medical experts echo many of the same suspicions.

“Microsoft Word contains a security flaw that allows ‘web bugs’ to be included in documents. The fault lies with a Word feature called the INCLUDEPICTURE field, which references an image outside the document, either from a local file or a URL. A malicious person could secretly track who is reading a document by inserting a reference to an image from a server under his control. Every time Word loads the document, it will make a connection to the server to retrieve the image, revealing the local user’s IP address and other information.

This vulnerability was initially discovered in 2000 by Richard M. Smith. It received some press coverage at the time, but the threat was downplayed because nobody was known to be exploiting it at the time. In the four years since then, Microsoft has released two new versions of Office but has yet to correct the problem . Meanwhile, at least one commercial service has sprung up to help users exploit the flaw for surreptitious tracking.

I have written a program (available below) to scan for these bugs in Word documents and remove them. Unfortunately, the vulnerability in Word can be extended to any application that supports OLE, including Excel and PowerPoint, by embedding the tracking bugs as Word OLE objects. Since each application uses a different format for writing OLE data to disk, it would be very difficult to write a general-purpose scanner.” (via Freedom to Tinker)

This morning, a friend and I, reflecting on Bush’s free-falling poll figures, were musing about whether there might be a cut-and-run move at the Republican Convention. Could the party dump Bush and nominate someone else? The sensationalism of the news might propel a candidate over the top, and a September nomination would not leave much time for an effective Democratic counter-attack. Especially with the convention being in New York and timed to capitalize on the 3rd anniversary of the WTC attack, our speculation turned to the darling of 9-11, Rudy Giuliani. Could he pull it off? Not if this damning indictment of Giuliani gains any currency.

If confirmed, the leak would represent one of the most serious US intelligence breaches in recent years.: “According to the New York Times, the INC leader told an Iranian intelligence official six weeks ago in Baghdad that he had been informed by a ‘drunk’ American official that the US had broken the Iranian code and was reading the internal communications of Tehran’s ministry of intelligence and security.

The US discovered the breach when the Iranian agent – the ministry’s station chief in Baghdad, according to the New York Times – sent a message back to Tehran using the compromised code, apparently not believing the tip-off. According to the report, Tehran then tested the code by sending a bogus message mentioning a cache of weapons inside Iraq, presumably thinking that US forces would be immediately sent to the site. But no such action was taken, possibly because US intelligence suspected it was a trap.” (Guardian.UK)

Not only did Chalabi hoodwink the neo-cons, Patrick Nielson Hayden reminds us, but he made a fool of The Paper of Record.

But, as Josh Marshall points out, it is not just a question of a leak but where the CIA concludes it had to come from:

“If it’s possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA’s conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only “a handful” of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney’s consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

— perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President’s office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to “punish” the agent’s husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.”

Bush, of course, is trying to distance himself from Chalabi. Atrios catches him in the lie.

And now comes the delightful news that Bush has engaged a private attorney in connection with the probe into the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame. (Reuters)

‘I Was Never Angry with the French,’ Says Bush. ‘President Bush said he was never angry with France over its refusal to back the U.S.-led war in Iraq, as both countries sought to play down past tensions ahead of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

“I was never angry with the French. France is a long-term ally,” Bush told the weekly Paris Match in an interview due to be published on Thursday.’ (Reuters). Via Daily Kos, with whom I wonder whether this should be categorized as a flip-flop or a lie?