On February 5 of this year, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation at the U.N., documenting what the Bush administration was pushing as “the smoking gun” that would prove the case to invade Iraq. The evidence was, according to Powell, overwhelming and ironclad.

This article at CommonDreams.org takes apart that speech item by item and demonstrates how it was just as much a collection of lies as Bush and Cheney had been spouting for the many months before.

A few comments on truthfulness in government: we have standards that are ridiculously low. A senator can be against issue A on Monday, receive a large contribution from a lobbyist who profits from issue A on Tuesday, then be all for issue A on Wednesday–and cannot be arrested for bribery. Why not? Because the law–written by lawmakers like him–essentially says that we must know the state of mind of the senator to charge him with a crime. In other words, in order for him to be arrested, he has to declare, on the record, that he changed his vote because he received money or favors.

If the same standards were applied to other crimes, the effects would be ludicrous. People could trade on inside information, and avoid prosecution simply by claiming that their stock buy had nothing to do with the hot tip they received. Police officers could openly take ‘contributions’ to a police officer’s retirement fund, and then just ‘happen’ to let the ‘contributors’ go free after having committed an offense. For these reasons, the “state of mind” defense is not often allowed. [Note that it is most used for crimes we feel are obscene but still are greatly unchecked, such as rape (“gee, I thought she was struggling and screaming ‘no’ as a game”) and discrimination (“I just happened to hire all the white people and none of the blacks; it had nothing to do with color”).]

But the state of mind loophole is open wide for politicians, and therefore we get rampant, blatant bribery. I recall one instance where Clinton accepted money from a black caucus, and met with them–but then decided to not do what they asked. When he did this, politicians from both sides of the aisle openly decried his decision. Bribery is so ingrained in politics that politicians will cut into one of their kind simply because he did not take a bribe!

At least with bribes, the cost is usually financial. It is worse when the cost is counted in lives. And so we come back to the Bush administration’s lying for the war in Iraq. Can they get away with the blatant lies simply by claiming, “gee, we really and truly believed all that stuff that turns out to be fabricated and false”? Can the ‘state of mind’ argument be used to excuse massive and obvious fraud to the people, which cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars in addition to so many lost lives?

In a just world, this would not be the case. But this is not a completely just world. So our young soldiers die, and they kill a great many more. And the liars keep on reaping the rewards.