Before everyone starts bashing Americans, take a look at the things that we have been seeing in our papers.

Here is a sample:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/...p-117212c.html


Veep should 'fess up
on Iraq's nukes

Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president of modern times - more powerful than the seasoned Al Gore under the callow Bill Clinton or the experienced Poppa Bush under the inexperienced Ronald Reagan. Cheney, in fact, is sometimes referred to as President Bush's brain or, to be even more mocking, his ventriloquist. It would be fitting, then, for this most powerful of all vice presidents to be the first in American history to be censured. He has it coming.
It won't happen, of course. But Cheney ought to be made to account for his exaggerations of the Iraqi threat. I am referring specifically to his dire warning that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was working on a menacing nuclear weapons program and the United States had to do something about it. We know now that such a program did not exist.

We know it because it cannot be found. We know it because it would be impossible to hide. We know it because the experts have said so. They have told my Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman that Iraq, in his words, had "no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology ... needed for either." That, inconveniently, is what UN weapons inspectors maintained all along.

But those inspectors were not only dismissed by Cheney as Saddam's useful idiots, they were actually bullied by him. Former Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin wrote in Foreign Affairs that when Cheney met with Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the two most prominent UN inspectors, he bluntly told them that if the Bush administration found fault with their judgment, "We will not hesitate to discredit you." It now appears it's Cheney who's been discredited.

In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that Cheney dismissed intelligence that did not fit his preconceived notions and seized on reports that validated his views. Cheney, of course, was not alone. He had Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on his side. But Cheney was in a class of his own. Not only did he trample over intelligence procedures - helped, incidentally, by compliant CIA Director George Tenet - he repeatedly issued Chicken Little warnings. He put things in absolute terms. "We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon," Cheney said a year ago.

We knew no such thing.

Cheney was a University of Wisconsin graduate student during the Vietnam era and, by his own admission, took little notice of the antiwar movement. If he had, he might have discerned that it was animated by the incessant fudging and lying of the Johnson administration - everything from concocted body counts to the discredited domino theory.

Now Cheney has become a player in yet another dismal effort to mislead Americans. As with Vietnam, issues of candor and judgment are beginning to obscure worthy war aims. It's good that Saddam is gone. It's not good that the road to Baghdad was paved with deception.

It is hard to know whether Cheney's assertions were purposeful or the product of a true believer's faith. Either way, the always-smug Cheney has much to answer for.

He has failed as Bush's brain. Let's hope he is not his conscience, too.