Lies, Lies, And More Lies By Gary Starkweather 'We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.' Sydney Schanberg 'These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago. ... They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way.' John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of 'Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War' Since the press in the US has largely ignored the story, here is a good article on the outright fabrication of evidence in Colin Powell's sales pitch on the war. He was lauded for having 'delivered the goods' and for presenting 'compelling new evidence' that 'sealed the argument'. http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher102.html Powell told the Security Council the British government report was a 'fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities'. In fact it was cobbled together from a web search. It is a collection of bits of a report by a Monterey researcher published last year, and items from Jane's Review over several years. It included the grammar errors and typos from the originals and parts had been altered to sound more threatening. British lawmaker Peter Kilfoyle said, 'It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions, and over-the-top spin.' This should remind us of last September when the big push for war started. Blair spent a weekend with Bush, the high point of which was a press conference on the immediate nuclear threat to the world in Iraq. They showed a satellite photograph from 1998 report by the UN-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency and claimed it proved the imminent threat. The photograph showed no such thing, it was a commercially avaiable picture that offered nothing new to analysts. A senior White House official acknowledged that the 1998 report did not say what Bush claimed. "What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report," the official told NBC News. Add that to the tiny vial, the Power Point slides, the whole sales pitch. Don't forget the famous 'aluminum tubes' that, it seems, were not for a nuclear program after all... Then remember that these are the same people who used a 12 million dollar PR blitz including false congressional testimony (the Kuwaiti incubators), and false reports of troops massed on the Saudi border to get the US behind the last Iraq war... There was even an unprecedented dog and pony show at the Security Council - much like Powell's. 'I don't know what more evidence we need,' Bush said to Blair in September... It seems that war ought to be held to rules of evidence at least as tough as a those in a negligence lawsuit, doesn't it? 'Why of course the people don't want war… But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.' Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials Gary Starkweather Boulder Creek, CA