In War, Some Facts Less Factual

In 1990, George H. W. Bush built a case for war with Iraq by claiming that 250,000 Iraqi troops were positioned and threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. "It was a pretty serious fib," says journalist Jean Heller, who investigated the administration's claim and found no evidence for it. Now the administration of George the Younger seems to be using very similar disinformation. The Christian Science Monitor notes that the same people who invented disinformation to support the first war with Iraq are now in charge of Dubya's current war drive. "This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe."