Iraq

As an employee of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, Lauri Fitz-Pegado helped coach Nayirah, the 15-year-old daughter of Kuwait's ambassadors whose false testimony about Iraqi atrocities helped build public suport for the first U.S. war in the Persian Gulf. Participating in one of the most scandalous PR scams of the 1990s hasn't hurt her career, though. After Operation Desert Storm, she went to work for Iridium LLC, a satellite phone company that went bankrupt a few years later.

"President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and knowingly deceived the American people in order to gain support for an unprovoked attack on Iraq," writes writer and college communications instructor Dennis Hans, who tallies 15 "techniques of deceit" that Bush has used "to deceive the very people most inclined to trust him."

"If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise," reports Luke Harding. "The US Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq - run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam - as a 'terrorist chemicals and poisons factory.' Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill.

"Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on 'intelligence material' - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old," the Guardian writes.