Hawks who wanted a war first shut down the public imagination using propaganda on the media. They convinced people that there is no other means of preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When information is scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover — until it is too late — how plausible the alternatives may be. The intelligence our governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein was immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such any enemy, what would we do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking rigorous of war. Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards suggested this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar, there appear to have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that, as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed... al-Qaeda". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of foreigners. But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy. As for the Kay report its just document mumbo jumbo. He is looking for a gold egg. He didn’t find it and he’s claiming that since he didn’t find it, does not mean it didn’t exist. The hen could have laid it and we have to search all of Iraq to find it. It took $300 million to come to that assessment. The famous aluminum tubes touted in the UN presentation by Mr. Powell are being used as sewerage pipes by Iraqis. Human waste is flowing through them today that in itself speak volume about Iraq’s nuclear program. What else do we have, a lil pipe buried under a rose bush in the backyard of an Iraqi scientist. Webster’s English dictionary has more proof of Iraq’s weapons program than Kay’s report. Both are filled with words written on paper without any proof.