Is President Bush Out of Touch With Reality or Just a Liar? & American Airlines Cancels Flights Due to Fuel Prices in Today's Details 10/1/05

- President Bush said Saturday he is encouraged by the increasing size and capability of the Iraqi security forces, touting progress on a key measure for when U.S. troops can come home. The upbeat remarks in Bush's weekly radio address came two days after the top commander in Iraq said only one Iraqi battalion is ready to fight without U.S. support.

- Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

- Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, spent Friday morning testifying to a federal grand jury investigating whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative.

- President Bush has no adviser more loyal and less self-serving than Karen Hughes. As governor of Texas, he trusted the former Dallas television reporter-turned-press secretary with the tending of his image and words. She was mother hen of his persona. In the White House, Hughes devoted heart and soul to Bush as his communications director until, suddenly, she returned home to Texas in 2002, citing her son's homesickness. There were reports that Karl Rove, jealous of power, had been sniping at her. "It is stunning to the extent Hughes is helping bin Laden," says Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted extensive research into the motives of suicide terrorists and is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. "If you set out to help bin Laden," he says, "you could not have done it better than Hughes."

- The U.S. military launched Operation Iron Fist in Anbar province early Saturday in an effort to dislodge a stubborn insurgency in western Iraq, a military statement said. The Marine-led operation is taking place in the town of Sa'da, about 12 miles from the Syrian border, and involves about 1,000 Marines, soldiers and sailors from the Regimental Combat Team-2.

- American Airlines, the No. 1 U.S. air carrier, on Friday said it decided to temporarily cancel 15 daily roundtrip flights from its two largest hub airports because of the skyrocketing price of jet fuel.