Iraq

The Guerrilla New Network has "picked the administration's packaging and sale of the case for war based on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction as our Spin of the Year. The case has turned out to be so flimsy that the administration has been forced to backtrack and deflect questions about the still missing weapons. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair this summer that it was a 'bureaucratic' decision to focus on the WMD, and even Rumsfeld has repeatedly contradicted specific claims he made to reporters in the run-up to the invasion."

"It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history," writes Dana Milbank. "White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S.

Newt Gingrich, who has been advising the Bush Administration as a member of the Defense Policy Board, has gone public with his worries about the shortcomings of administration policy in Iraq, arguing that the administration has been putting far too much emphasis on a military solution and slighting the political element. "The real key here is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow," he said.

In Weapons of Mass Deception, we showed how the U.S. news media virtually ignored the use in Iraq of cluster bombs -- anti-personnel devices like land mines that leave behind a deadly litter of unexploded "bomblets." Now Paul Wiseman has written a major report in which he concludes, "The Pentagon presented a misleading picture during the war of the extent to which cluster weapons were being used and of the civilian casualties they were causing. Gen.