Apparently, the Bush administration can't quite decide who and what a terrorist is right now either. The Cheney/Rumsfield camp believes Arafat is. The Powell/maybe Rice camp believes Arafat isn't.

The Cheney (Bush) administration took most of it's "war on terrorism" propaganda campaign pre-packaged from the Likud party white papers of the last several years (going back to Netanyahu in the mid-90s at least). In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and especially during the US campaign in Afghanistan, that rhetoric seemed to work well enough to let the US get away with a bombing campaign that left many innocent Afghan civilians dead, homeless, and/or exiled. Afghan civilians who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, al Qaida, or Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. But we got away with the slaughter of innocents anyway.

A new rurmor has just emerged on the 24/7 network news programs (C-SPAN State Dept briefing, MSNBC), that the Bush administration's anti-terror intelligence team reports that Sadam Hussein is sending pin money to the families of suicide bombers, for new houses for their families, for college funds for siblings of the bombers, etc.

Sounds like a CIA planted fabrication if I ever heard one, and I've heard quite a few of them over the decades. The mainstream network media hacks have torn into this story like a pack of wolves on a wounded caribou.

I'm sure the next step will be the Bush administration's use of the "Sadam is funding the suicide bombers" story as justification for invading Iraq. And they might even get away with it, just like the US has gotten away with the slaughter of innocent Afghan civilians, while the Taliban and al Qaida leadership continue to evade capture.