Titled "Apparatus of Lies," the 32-page broadside masquerades as a factual summation of Iraqi evil, but in fact is little more than a laundry list of irrelevancies and distortions that do not make a case for war and tell us nothing we didn't already know.

The document - cast in the same vacuous mold as the unconvincing "Dossier" published last year - contains much mind-poisoning and hypocritical self-serving blather, but not a single shred of exigent evidence justifying war. Yes, Saddam has done some awful things - as have the US and a lot of other countries - but the government's argument is closely akin to the sleazy tactic of defending a serial murderer by asserting his victims were promiscuous and therefore deserved to die. The White House spinmeisters even go so far as to assert that the public funerals of Iraqi children killed in the 1991 Gulf War and its 11-year aftermath were staged events conducted with "stored" corpses brought to Baghdad for the occasion, with most of the deaths fabricated as a public relations ploy. It's as though the White House would just as soon forget - and have the rest of us forget - the infamous public acknowledgement of Madelaine Albright that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children had been "a price worth paying."

"Apparatus of Lies" has the flavor of a small child slandering his playmate to deflect attention from his own misbehavior, but one of the things that makes this prejudicial attack so Alice-in-Wonderland-like is that the United States is guilty of the very same sort of lies and distortions it cites in its indictment of Saddam Hussein - and on a far grander scale. While accusing Iraq of engaging in showmanship and of exploiting its horrific Gulf War- and sanctions-related-losses in the media, the Bush White House is in control of the world's greatest propaganda and misinformation machine - a machine that feeds a compliant and unquestioning press a never-ending stream of self-serving effluent - much of it patently false or highly misleading - for the sole purpose of advancing its own political agenda.

I recommend reading this document, but not on an empty stomach and only if you think you can avoid being taken physically ill by its absurd irrelevancies and hypocrisy. This thing reads like crude and cheaply-produced World War II propaganda ... crude and cheaply-produced World War II NAZI propaganda.

The pdf document is available from the White House server (very slow download) at

http://www.whitehouse.gov/ogc/apparatus/apparatus-of-lies.pdf

Are you telling me that the rumours I've heard about Saddam Hussein eating little white girls for breakfast aren't true?

Does that mean we don't have to go to war afterall?

They've lied before about babies being pulled out of incubators (Gulf War Act 1), and now a dead baby parade (Gulf War Act 2.) If Bush & Co really care about Iraqi babies they won't bomb them. And Hey, maybe they could get the sanctions lifted, so Iraqi babies could eat and have medical care!