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"Informational anarchy."

There are two ways of keeping the truth from people. You can either withhold it from them (the old model) or you can hide it in plain sight by burying it in a sea of misinformation. This latter strategy has become the new paradigm. Whereas the autocrats of past eras would try to keep the public in the dark by limiting the flow of information, their modern counterparts operate by overloading the public with conflicting information. Damaging facts are countered by flooding the airwaves with contrary assertions and, at the same time, actively working to discredit, vilify, or co-opt any institution that might possibly be viewed as a neutral arbiter of truth (the media, academia, the judiciary, etc.). Whereas the old model sought to control what information people were exposed to, the new model seeks to render people unable to identify the truth, even when it is right in front of their faces.

And its consequences.

...a Harris Poll released July 21 found a full 50 per cent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 per cent last year — said they believe Iraq did have forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMDs.

Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-'03. This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence."

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance.

Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say.

In other words, this was no surprise.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest `factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And President George W. Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: Saddam rebuffed UN inspectors in 2002, "wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are Iraq acceded to the UN Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct 700-plus inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002 to March 16, 2003.

The inspectors said they could wrap up their work in months.

Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.