Further evidence the war is being lost

Back on May 23rd of this year,

US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and mobile phones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said.

With the Star Wars/ABM/Missle Defense project:

...the tests were set-pieces: Everyone involved knew where the mock warhead was coming from, where it was going, and when it would come into view; there were no realistic decoys, no instances of multiple warheads being fired at once (except in a few of the Patriot tests, which involved two warheads fired over a short range). Third, and most telling, the MDA [Missle Defense Agency] decided late last year to halt the test program; it even canceled two tests that had already been scheduled.
-snip-
"Beyond that, the tests weren't realistic, they didn't tell you anything about whether it could handle a real threat." The tests made no effort whatever to see if the interceptors could work as part of an integrated network in which early-warning satellites detect a missile launch, transmit the data to other radar systems that track the missile more precisely, and then aim and fire the interceptors to knock the missiles down.

And just today, NGOs were trading reports of the military situation in Iraq. Not any more.

The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls "good news"about Iraq to U.S. military bases and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country.

The common thread to all of these stories is that the Bush Administration feels that by cutting down people's information on how various projects are going, by not letting people see how these items are progressing (or regressing), they maintain "investor confidence". Kind of the way Enron maintained confidence in it's financial position even though it was far worse than it appeared to be. The investor has confidence and the stock price remains high or the president's approval ratings remain high, but the crash is hard and steep and a lot of people get hurt when the house of cards collapses.