Anybody who bothered to dig just a little knew that the case for Iraqi WMD in late 2002/early 2003 was flimsy, indeed.

Not only were the UN inspectors saying that 95% of Iraqi WMD had been destroyed during their previous tour of duty after Desert Storm, but a high-level Iraqi defector (a Mr. Kamal) was saying the same thing, that anything Iraq had was destroyed by 1995.

None of the so-called evidence presented by the Bush adminstration stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, but that didn't seem to matter to some folks, many of whom bought into repeated insinutations by the Bush League Chickenhawks that Saddam and Co. were somehow involved in 911, or had connections to the mythical Al Qaeda.

As General Wesley Clark has reported, the pressure to implicate Saddam began while the dust from the collapsed towers was still settling. The fact that there was no evidence to support such allegations seemed to matter little to those now greedily eyeing Iraq's petroleum assets, and calling first for Osama's head and then for Saddam's, especially when bellicose posturing was a lot easier than offering any coherent explantion for the complete failure of America's defense establishment on Black Tuesday, or how the supposedly indestructable black boxes could not survive the imploding towers, but Mohammed Atta's passport could.

The vaunted Free Press in this country, castigated by some as hopelessly liberal, could not bring itself to pose questions about 911 and Iraq, which some might characterize as tough, but which should have occured to any intelligent eighth grader with more than two functioning, contiguous brain cells.

Is it any surprise, then, that the nation, its Congress, and its revered Free Press don't seem the least bit interested in what the Commander in Chief was doing on 9-11-2001 when he dawdled in a schoolroom and continued to listen to stories about pet goats just after he had been informed by a top aide that "America is under attack"?

No shock, no outrage, no surprise, at all. Just business as usual in the era of the Big Lie.

sp