It's not news that Saddam sought to deceive the UN weapons inspectors after the Gulf war. However, he failed, as absence of Iraqi WMD from battle in 2003 and the inability of the US military's WMD hunters to turn them up later made clear. The recently reported Saddam tapes are being spun by the major media, and by tonight's first guest, in an attempt to hide the very well-documented fact, as both UNMOVIC and Scott Ritter have shown, that Saddam was 95% disarmed by 1997, despite his attempts to rebuild his arsenal.

Both the tapes' recent appearance and your guest seem to me to be part of a larger phenomenon. In the past several days in my area we've witnessed an advertising blitz on several major TV networks, two advertisements frequently repeated during prime time, in which Iraq war veterans and their relatives repeat afresh the long-debunked linkage of Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, billboards throughout the Twin Cities area and I would guess most other major cities in the country have recently been changed to promote a variety of right-wing themes, from Rush Limbaugh's program to anti-abortion messages.  The scale of this publicity campaign is new and unusual. One fairly obvious possible explanation is Scooter Libby's recent, and long-expected, confession that his treasonous disclosure of the fact that Joseph Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA agent was authorized by his superiors, i.e., by Cheney. We now know what we'd formerly only guessed: That this act of treason was committed by Cheney in retaliation for Wilson's courageous exposure that Cheney deliberately lied to Congress and the public when he sought to justify war with the claim that Iraq had tried to buy Uranium ore from Niger.  

I'm not fooled, and I hope you aren't, either.