So onward into 2003 we go, amid INS roundups of Middle Easterners in Southern California and the grand hunt for Saddam's "material breaches," which could be a song out of Gilbert and Sullivan. As Hilaire Belloc wrote in his "Lord Lundy," "The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:/The Middle Class was quite prepared." The press is certainly squared, with no one encouraged to challenge the grand consensus on our national virtue, confronting the satanic forces.

Back in early 1991, I was the first journalist, right here in The Nation, to question the charge, promoted by Amnesty International, that Iraqi soldiers had taken more than 300 babies from incubators in Kuwait and tossed them on the cold hospital floor. In the end the incubator atrocity turned out to have been concocted by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, with its main witness being the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. The story was the best advertisement from that war of the old line about truth being the first casualty.

You can't keep a good lie down. As FAIR recently reported, HBO did a retrospective on CNN's coverage of Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath, and--guess what--there was the incubator atrocity, large as life, without a blemish to its name. Most such news "management" is entirely voluntary.

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