May 7, 1:12 p.m.: A cabal of liars

So,exactly where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?

By: Hank Kalet
   Ah, credibility. It’s not something our current presidential administration seems much concerned about.
   The six-month lead up to war in Iraq was full of a lot of misinformation, disinformation and downright lies tied mostly to the accusations that the Hussein dictatorship was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
   As Nicholas D. Kristof pointed out in his New York Times column on Tuesday, the administration essentially said the Iraqis were hiding "an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda."
   "Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don’t want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit," he said.
   I don’t want to believe it either, but what else to make of the sudden disappearance of all these dangerous weapons? The administration is now saying it will take time to find the weapons — an argument that sounds suspiciously like the one made by the United Nations weapons inspectors.
   Seymour M. Hersch in the New Yorker outlines the evidence of the administration’s deceit. (Slate’s Jack Shafer takes on the Hersch assessment in this piece, one desperately marred by his dislike of Mr. Hersch and his criticism of past reporting.)
   We’ve apparently moved on from the weapons argument — to some degree — and now offer Iraqi liberation as our rationale for invasion, pointing to the seven Iraqis who apparently are still cheering — and ignoring the simple fact that we did nothing to prevent the widespread looting of Baghdad, including a museum that contained some of the more important historical artifacts in the world.
   And yet, much of the news media remains silent, preferring to focus on the Peterson murder trial, a poisoning and murder in New England and SARS. Call it a huge misdirection play or perhaps it is just the media refusing to believe that presidential administrations may lie occasionally.
   Media critic Eric Alterman, author of "What Liberal Media?" and a columnist with The Nation, puts it this way on his Altercation weblog: "Incredible. It’s as if the U.S. media never even heard of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (or the Iran/contra scandal)."