by James Glaser
September 11, 2006

The American people don't trust Washington. Time after time politicians from both sides of the aisle, those in the White House, and its administration get caught saying things that are not true.

Last week U.S. generals were telling us that the death rate in Baghdad and Iraq as a whole was down. They claimed that was because of their new policies. This week Baghdad's morgue came out with a report that violent deaths almost tripled during August, going from 550 to 1,536.

That 1,536 is just the violent deaths and just the violent deaths in Baghdad. We won't have a body count for the rest of the country for a few more weeks, if ever. Both the Pentagon and the new Iraqi government are slow about giving out bad news.

One thing the new Iraqi government is planning to do is to build two new branch morgues in Baghdad. What they want, is to be able to handle 250 corpses a day. Maybe that is the progress that the President Bush keeps talking about. Another announcement by the Iraqi government talks about doubling the pay for the morgue's overworked doctors and that they will now be awarded bonuses.

Just a couple of weeks ago Major General William Caldwell claimed a 46 percent decrease in the murder rate in Baghdad for the month. He said, "We are actually seeing progress." The President and his administration have been making that "progress" claim for weeks now. The sad thing is that the progress wasn't true. The death rate is going the other way, and now estimates are that Iraq will have close to 50,000 violent deaths this year. With the way things are reported over there, there could be a hundred thousand innocent deaths, and we would never hear about them. Washington might just go right on claiming progress no matter how many die.

Joseph Goebbels, the father of Nazi propaganda wrote this:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It almost seems that the Bush administration has taken Goebbels' advice to heart. Now they continue to lie even when the facts tell a different story.

Most Americans would love to back their President, and before Bush's lies became public, he had incredible poll numbers with support from both the Republican and Democrat voters. George could claim some of that support again if he would start telling the truth about what is really happening in his war on terrorism. Until then, every thing he says will be doubted. What Bush has failed to learn, is that the truth has a way of coming out.

This weekend the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified report about the War on Terror. The Chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts left town so he wouldn't have to answer questions. Senator John Rockefeller a member of the committee said after reviewing the report, that the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. "The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion, and 69 percent of the people, at that time said, 'we want to go to war.'"

Rockefeller admitted that he had been duped along with the American public, and he voted to go to war. Now this politician makes the bold statement that Iraq and the world would now be better off if we had never attacked—even if Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

George Bush and his administration have fallen back on the idea that even if everything else was wrong with the war, that fact that Saddam is gone makes everything else all right. All the lies and falsehoods, in their eyes are justified by the capture of Saddam.

Most in the world would agree that over 100,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed, several hundred thousand have been wounded, a half million have fled the country, and no one can even estimate the number displaced out of their homes. Psychological damage to the population of Iraq certainly reaches into the millions. . . . but we did get Saddam.

George Bush and politicians from both Parties lied their way into this war, some how convincing themselves that we would never catch on, but some how, some way, the truth always comes out in the end. I am sure George Bush and Dick Cheney were hoping it would stay buried until the end of their term.

This Senate report is just the start of the truth coming out. More and more politicians, like Senator Rockefeller, will see the writing on the wall. They all can't leave town, like Senator Roberts, every time bad news hits, and we will start hearing from others what a crime George Bush's wars have been.

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