I would expect to see many such occurrences. It's a fairly desperate sell this war with Iraq. Being that we live in the "Information Age" it's sort of a boom time for those that create propaganda. You can distribute it to a larger audience in less time than ever before. You can propagate a myth, a rumor, a notion, plant it in the collective consciousness with such impact that it becomes a heavy task indeed to combat it. I was a victim myself with the North-bin Laden story. That's the thing about a solid piece of propaganda these days, it does it's damage so quickly it's full time job to fight it.

 When you have an administration that is moving as rapidly as this one is to plunge us into war the propaganda game is important. I'm sure they've calculated the shelf life of what they are disseminating. How quickly some of it will be shown to be borrowed, stolen, or just plain fabricated. They are working with a deadline. Later they can claim they too were the victims of misinformation. Cute isn't it?

    Case in point, have a look at the date they began deploying troops to fight this war with Iraq. Did anyone here know that military personal can only be  "front deployed" (which is their current status) for a period of 6 months without being sent into battle? This information was given to me from my friend in the Army. He told me he was convinced we were going to war with Iraq the moment they began deploying troops to the region. It's in their contract that we've got to bring them back if we don't start shooting in this period of time. That means Bush has until the end of March to start shooting or he's got to start recalling troops. With the amount of money we've already spent on getting them there and establishing operations, it would be sort of an embarrassment to bring them back now. My Army friend said that never happens, if they set it up there's gonna be a fight. 

 Maybe that's why there's been some stalling from the "doves". Maybe that's why the Bush administration seems so desperate to get this going right now. They can't hold off much longer because they'll have to call the boys home if they do. The propaganda is starting to curdle.

   Powell took it down to the wire before becoming a "hawk". He a soldier, not a politician, he knows what it means to send men to die and he's seen it with his own eyes. He knows at the end of the day he's only as good as his word in the eyes of his troops. He fought a good fight to try to prevent this, that may come out when they look at this mess later. He fought for his boys so they wouldn't die just for politics. Soldiers have to follow orders though and it seems that's what this came down to.

  Saddam is under our thumb now. There's no chance in hell he's going to be creating or selling WOMD to anyone right now or in the near future. Yet we persist. Sure he may be hiding some materials but North Korea is hiding nothing. They are also going to sell to whoever they please and flip us the bird if we complain. Hell, they've already been caught red handed. We still sit focused on Iraq with little but stories about terrorists having legs amputated by Iraqi doctors as a smoking gun. Jesus, the stupidity and ignorance factor here is overwhelming.

 There will be no smoking gun. The United Nations will never agree with us going to war with Iraq. This garbage about France and Germany being anti-American is little more than a distraction. Desperate times call for desperate propaganda and that's what the article you posted shows David. It looks like Pat Brown can put on his cowboy hat, put his boots up on the coffee table, and settle in in front of the tube with a plate of ribs and a Lonestar, to watch our country do something I don't believe it's ever done before. We're going to attack a country that did not attack us, or anyone else for that matter, for the simple reason that we want a regime change. We're going to couch our reasons under the banner of the "War On Terror", which will set a precedent for all of our further relations with the rest of the planet. In other words we'll be saying to the rest of the world with this little military action, "Do business the American Way or pay in blood."

We're about to become a very popular nation thanks to a boob from Texas that couldn't even run a baseball team.

                                          Pray for peace,

                                                                    Reg