Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers."

The key word is "timely." Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council.

"As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq," the London-based Observer reported on March 2, the U.S. government developed an "aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates." The smoking gun was "a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the U.S. body which intercepts

The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) strongly condemns the latest Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, in which Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gun ships, killed 11 Palestinians and wounded 140 in Jabalia refugee camp close to Gaza city.

Israeli forces carried out an incursion into the camp in the early hours of this morning, Thursday March 6th, 2003, targeting civilians and firing indiscriminately at residential buildings in the camp. Eyewitnesses said that Israeli tanks fired at Palestinian residents of the camp attempting to remove furniture from a woodworks shop which was set on fire by tank shells. At that point, 8 Palestinians were killed and at least 30 were injured.

Palestinian medical personnel and eyewitness accounts in Jabalia camp also confirmed that Israeli helicopter gun ships killed a 60 year old Palestinian man outside his home. Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza city finally confirmed that the total number of people killed during the assaults reached 11; with more than 140 injured (40 of whom are suffering from critical and/or irrecoverable injuries).

AUSTIN -- Texas, Our Texas, all hail the mighty state! Gov. Goodhair Perry has promised to use $10 million of state money to help map the bovine genome, the genetic code of a cow, a project to be carried out at Baylor and Texas A&M. Through a bureaucratic fubar, the Texas Department of Health failed to spend $12.5 million of the money it had budgeted to take care of the most desperately ill poor children in this state. Children with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida and heart problems were put on a waiting list -- 1,400 of them -- because the department thought the program was about to go broke.

As Clay Robison of the Houston Chronicle pointed out in a fine column, this should have been a no-brainer. Great, we've got 12.5 more than we thought we had for desperately ill children. Hurray!

If he launches an attack on Iraq without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, George W. Bush will be guilty of crimes on par with those committed by the infamous Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg in 1946, after World War II.

The law is clear. At Nuremberg, American, British, French and Soviet jurists used international conventions, legal precedent and a global moral consensus to establish a code of conduct deemed the standard for all nations.

Key was the "crimes against humanity" prohibition stemming from the conscious slaughter of six million Jews, leftists, gypsies and others by the Nazi fanatics.

But also crucial was the ban on unprovoked attack by one nation against another. The explosive fuse that set off World War II was the September 1,1939 Nazi attack on Poland, which was unprovoked by any stretch of the military imagination. By all accounts it was an act of aggression and conquest, which led ultimately to as many as 50 million deaths over the next six years.

AUSTIN, Texas -- As we wend our weary way toward war, dragging the Turks -- whose price will be our betrayal of the Kurds (fourth time we've double-crossed Kurds, counting Henry Kissinger's triple-cross only once) -- it reminds me of the end of a bad election. Don't believe anything until it's over.

Now is the time we get Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and other mind-boggling myths presented as reality. The Guardian is reporting this morning that the United States is wiretapping foreign delegations to the U.N. Security Council, and the worst thing about it is that no one is surprised.