As the world gropes to fight terrorism, it's hardly reassuring to discover that the White House spurned a request for 80 more investigators to track and disrupt the global financial networks of terrorist groups. Some of the most important breakthroughs against terrorism have been scored by financial sleuths, including those of the Treasury Department. The need to expand the present staff of 160 investigators was expressed in a budget request from the Internal Revenue Service, but cut from the final numbers submitted to Congress.

This was a $12 million item whose value seems beyond dispute, particularly when measured against the hundreds of millions in domestic pork spending that now preoccupies Congressional budgeteers. The administration maintains that a planned 16 percent increase in the Treasury budget should be enough to adequately fight terrorism and criminal abuses of the tax law at home. But a panel of outside experts concludes that the I.R.S. will be underbudgeted across the board.

The spurned request was disclosed almost by accident at a House subcommittee hearing. Republicans were openly annoyed when the I.R.S. Oversight Board properly disclosed the original budget request in response to a lawmaker's question. The board, a bipartisan group created by Congress, endorsed the need for more terrorism investigators. It was curtly informed by Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, that antiterrorism was not part of its duties. Then whose duty is it? Congress's?

There is increasing evidence that the brutal attack on the American security guards in Fallujah, and the desecration of their bodies, was the work of Islamists seeking vengeance for the Israeli murder of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Leaflets found at the scene said the operation was in the name of Yassin. al-Hayat reports in its Friday edition that responsibility for the attack has been taken by a group called Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The group said the deaths were a "gift to the Palestinian people."

You put yourself in the shoes of an American military commander in Fallujah. He treats with the local clan leaders and Sunni clergy. He tries to get them on the side of the US. He faces hostility, but he is making some progress. And then Ariel Sharon sends US-made helicopter gunships to Gaza and has them fire missiles at people coming out of a mosque, killing 8 and wounding 24. One of the dead is a half-blind paraplegic Islamist named Sheikh Yassin. He could have easily been arrested, and had been in the 1990s. But he was incinerated in a piece of state terror instead. And all of a sudden the people of Fallujah in Iraq are pointing their fingers at the American troops and saying, 'you did this. You gave Sharon the green light.' And all the commander's hard work in building bridges collapses over night. And four US security personnel are dead, and 5 US troops are dead, and the fighting flares up. Thanks, Prime Minister Sharon. Thank you very much.

Iraq Information or Party Propaganda?

The Guardian has a story on Sunday about how the Iraq Information Office is not just a Coalition Provisional Authority way of getting the news out about their activities, but is essentially an arm of the Republican National Committee dedicated to reelecting George Bush. The goal is to keep the bad news from Iraq from hurting Bush in the presidential campaign.

I have for some time been wondering why the US press reporting about Iraq was so much sunnier and optimistic than what one hears from Iraqis or from freelance reporters on the ground in the country. To any extent that the mainstream Western press takes its cues from Dan Senor and Rich Galen, that would help explain it.