And it should matter whether or not our government is either incompetent and didn't know what they were doing or were dishonest and refused to say. The unspoken truth is that either as a people we were misled, or we were lied to, about the real reason for this war. Either we made a huge - and unforgivable - mistake, an arrogant or ignorant mistake, or we are swaggering around the world like a blind giant, flailing in all directions while the rest of the world watches in horror or in ridicule.

If Bill Clinton's definition of \"is\" matters, surely this matters. If a president's sex life matters, surely a president's use of global force against some of the weakest people in the world matters. If a president's word in a court of law about a private indiscretion matters, surely a president's word to the community of nations and the security of millions of people matters.

And if not, why not? If not, surely there is something as wrong with us as citizens, as thinkers, as Christians as there must be with some facet of the government. If wars that the public says are wrong yesterday - as over 70% of U.S. citizens did before the attack on Iraq - suddenly become \"right\" the minute the first bombs drop, what kind of national morality is that?

What is the depth of the American soul if we can allow destruction to be done in our name and the name of \"liberation\" and never even demand an accounting of its costs, both personal and public, when it is over?

We like to take comfort in the notion that people make a distinction between our government and ourselves. We like to say that the people of the world love Americans, they simply mistrust our government. But excoriating a distant and anonymous \"government\" for wreaking rubble on a nation in pretense of good requires very little of either character or intelligence.

What may count most, however, is that we may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: \"Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth.\" The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.

It may be time for us to realize that in a country that prides itself on being democratic, we are our government. And the rest of the world is figuring that out very quickly.

From where I stand, that matters.

Nothing really matters. Anyone can see.
Nothing really matters. Nothing really matters to me.  

Charlie in the Trees
[QB] Jesucristo!  How many effing simulataneous threads do you folks have to maintain that keep repeating the same old same old over and over and over and over again?

Charlie in the Trees:
Wake me when you guys have a new idea.

Joe Conason's Journal
June 16, 2003  |  True believers of false claims  
The White House can't fool all the people all of the time, but with the help of the mainstream media the administration has deceived a lot of people about issues of global importance. A national survey reported in today's Knight-Ridder newspapers says that one-third of the American public \"believes U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq\" -- which means they also believed the false (and universally quoted) statement  to that effect the president made two weeks ago on Polish television. The political science professors who analyzed that survey for the University of Maryland are wondering why a substantial minority would think they have seen proof that doesn't yet exist.

Theories aside, the most suggestive fact found by the mid-May poll is that respondents who supported the war are more likely than others to believe that weapons of mass destruction have already been discovered. They won't let the facts disturb their opinions. Weak, credulous media coverage of administration claims also serves to confuse the citizenry. [snipped]

Bush and his Cabinet may face equally bad numbers if they fail to deliver on their repeated promises of proof that those fearsome weapons exist.
Meanwhile, the few scraps of \"proof\" they have offered to date don't seem to be holding up so well. Yesterday the Observer (of London)reported that those mobile \"biological laboratories\" promoted by Bush, Colin Powell and the CIA have been debunked by an \"official British investigation.\" London's own \"biological weapons experts\" have determined that the pair of trailers found in northern Iraq aren't \"mobile germ warfare labs\" but instead produced hydrogen for artillery balloons, \"as the Iraqis have continued to insist.\" Assuming that the Observer accurately reported those British government conclusions, perhaps someday the hoax of the mobile labs will be reported in the American media.

Now [Nicholas] Kristof is dismantling the administration alibi that its top officials didn't know the Niger tale was a fake, supported by forged documents, until after the President hyped it in his State of the Union address. He recapitulates the account in yesterday's Washington Post, in which Walter Pincus revealed that a former US ambassador to Niger visited the African country a year ago and reported back on the fakery and forging to the CIA. Supposedly, the ex-envoy's assessment didn't reach the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser or the Secretary of State until quite recently. But according to Kristof:

\"I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false — a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

\"Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was 'quite confident' that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department.\"
 
In other words – and this is my comment, not Kristof's – they're still lying.

While Bush, Cheney and company continue to predict vindication, the latest reports from the field aren't encouraging. Barton Gellman, the excellent Washington Post reporter who has covered this story without truckling to the Pentagon, reports that Task Force 20, a super-secret unit recruited from the Army's Delta Force, has been in Iraq looking for chemical and biological weapons, long-range missiles and other forbidden items since last March. What have they found?
A high-ranking administration official blusteringly warns, \"People who say there are no weapons are going to be quite embarrassed within weeks or months, when the material comes out.\" But Gellman evidently gives more credence to officials closer to the scene, whose views are quite different:

\"Sources with firsthand knowledge of [Task Force 20's] mission and personnel, and others with access to its reports, said the team has found no working nonconventional munitions, long-range missiles or missile parts, bulk stores of chemical or biological warfare agents or enrichment technology for the core of a nuclear weapon.\" That wasn't for want of effort. The task force \"has shipped hundreds of samples to Army and Navy laboratories in Maryland,\" a \"senior officer\" told the Post, \"including about 90 this month.\" So far, none of those hundreds of samples has turned up definitively positive.