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The news source mired in a quagmire of irresponsible journalism is at it again.

The New York Times opens a February 8th op-ed piece with one lie:

The Bush administration offered two reasons to wage unilateral war in Iraq...

As has been demonstrated over and over again, the allied liberation of Iraq was not "unilateral".

The Times then continues with another lie:

...Saddam Hussein was stockpiling vast quantities of weapons, and efforts to contain him through sanctions and inspections were hopeless. The more time passes, the more it appears that both arguments were wrong.

It only gets worse from that opening statement. The Times actually suggests that (get this!) sanctions were working!

Really! If sanctions were "working" why was the food and medicine aid going to build palaces instead of going to the Iraqi people?

If sanctions were "working" why did Saddam Hussein think he was making progress towards weapons of mass destruction?

If sanctions were "working" why didn't the United Nations inspectors have unfettered access to Iraq after twelve years of sanctions?

If sanctions were "working" why were thousands of Iraqis being beaten, raped, tortured and killed every day?

If sanctions were "working" why was Saddam Hussein continuing to fund weapons of mass destruction programs?

The notion that sanctions were working is ludicrous, and the Times is obviously putting forth this propaganda in an effort to bolster the chances of a Democrat to unseat President Bush in November. It is yet another example of the Times giving in to propaganda, lies and disinformation instead of trying to repair its sullied reputation.

One of the most egregious claims the Times makes is:

Yet the totality of these measures, particularly the prohibitions on importing weapons and their ingredients, now appears to have worked surprisingly well, apparently persuading Mr. Hussein that he would never be able to rebuild his weapons programs so long as sanctions remained in effect.

There is, of course, absolutely no evidence that Saddam Hussein had given up on building more weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Iraqi scientists have reported that they told Saddam Hussein exactly the opposite in order to continue to get funding from the Iraqi dictator.

How then can the Times possibly conclude that Saddam Hussein had given up hope of building weapons of mass destruction?

What the Times does, in time-honored propaganda tradition, is simply make something up:

By 2001, Baghdad was collecting as much as $1 billion a year in illicit oil revenues, money that many feared Mr. Hussein could have used to import prohibited weapons ingredients. It now seems clear that he did not, most likely because he could not. Potential sellers did not want to be caught breaking the arms embargo. Instead, illicit oil money most likely went to build palaces, pay security officials and the Republican Guard, and fatten the Hussein family's foreign bank accounts.

There is, of course, no evidence that Saddam Hussein "did not" nor "could not" fund weapons programs. The actual evidence proves the opposite:

David Kay said Iraq had managed to conceal equipment related to the production of weapons of mass destruction from U.N. weapons inspectors.

Kay, Washington's chief weapons inspector and a special adviser to the CIA, leads the 1,200-strong Iraq Survey Group. In an interim report on its first three months of work presented to congressional intelligence committees last week, he said the group had found no chemical, nuclear or bioweapons, but had turned up evidence of a biological program.

"We now have three cases in which scientists have come forward with equipment, technology, diagrams, documents and, in this case, actual weapons material, reference strains and botulinum toxin that they were told to hide and that the U.N. didn't find," he said Sunday.

"What we have said, and we said it in the report, we have numbers of Iraqis who tell us that Saddam was committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," he said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." "And the issue is, how far along was that activity actually before the war?"

—CNN news item

In addition, I wrote an earlier article detailing many of the findings of David Kay in Iraq that show that Saddam Hussein was indeed pursing WMD programs.

So why does the Times tell such easily disproved lies? Well, for one thing it is hiding behind the "opinion" portion of the "op-ed" feature. The second reason is that it wants a Democrat to win in November, so it tells lies to damage the reputation of President Bush and support the allegations of the Democrats.

Why does the Times choose to engage in propaganda? Only the Times can explain why it chooses to remain in a quagmire of irresponsible journalism.

If sanctions were "working" why was the food and medicine aid going to build palaces instead of going to the Iraqi people?

The notion that sanctions were working is ludicrous...

There is, of course, no evidence that Saddam Hussein "did not" nor "could not" fund weapons programs

...it tells lies to damage the reputation of President Bush and support the allegations of the Democrats.