One of Bush’s duty is to mislead his enemies. Deception is the meat of war.

The only real question was, do institutions change people or do people ultimately change the institutions over time.

Or, as the case may be. do the institutions that cause change like the NAACP, become obsolete once their purpose is fullfilled, therefore allowing others to modify the institution that changed other institutions?

Praise the Lord! Leg amputated in 2002, today he walks!

“Some al-Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks.
– President Bush. Cincinnati speech, Oct. 7. 2002.

“Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day.”
– then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.N. briefing, Feb. 5, 2005.

“From Iran Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002, where his wounded leg was amputated and the limb fitted with a prosthetic device. He spent two months recovering in Baghdad, at which time “nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there.”
– Matthew A. Levitt, senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, National Review Online, Feb. 6, 2003.

Miracles really do happen — especially over in the Holy Land. Because we have just watched the video of Iraq-based terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and, lo and behold, the once-crippled man seems to have grown two healthy legs. The 30-minute video, in which Zarqawi surfaced publicly to rally Sunnis and foreign fighters behind the insurgency, shows Zarqawi running through the desert, crouching to fire a machine gun, even sitting cross-legged in a meeting — with no hint of the prosthetic limb that he allegedly received with the aid of Saddam Hussein.

As the AP notes:

He seemed healthy, shown in one scene standing and firing a heavy machine gun in a flat desert landscape that resembled the vast empty stretches of western Iraq, where he is believed to be hiding.

The alleged amputation, that apparently wasn’t, isn’t just a small piece of medical trivia. The “fact” that Zarqawi supposedly was able to receive treatment in Baghdad with Saddam’s blessing was offered (believe it or not) as another “smoking gun” that Saddam, the secular socialist, was in fact in bed with the Islamic radicals of al-Qaeda.

In fact, we could write at great length about how the reason that Zarqawi was in Iraq in the first place had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, how he was based in that part of the country that the government did not control. But that matter has been explained to death — to anyone who will listen — since the Bush lies of 2002 and 2003.

In fact, by 2004, officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere were sheepishly acknowledging that, well, OK, maybe Zarqawi’s leg was never amputated after all. Here’s what Powell’s former aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, said about it all on Nov. 27, 2005, in the New York Daily News:

But Powell was skeptical, Wilkerson recalled. He said the peg leg tale - now believed to be untrue - proved in hindsight “how little we knew about the man.”
“There just seemed to be no direct evidence making him an Al Qaeda member and quite a bit of evidence that demonstrated he was doing his own thuggish thing,” Wilkerson said.

So now you might ask, if the “peg leg tale” was disowned two years ago, why are we harping on it again today, with the release of the video. The reason is because our initial check of the main news stories today about Zarqawi shows that not one of them even bothers to mention that the White House once used the bogus “amputation” of Zarqawi as a reason for war, and even as the guy is now prancing around on tape.

Yep, Zarqawi’s prosthetic leg has vanished right into the memory hole, and it will stay there unless we continue to pull it out and hammer away with it. Because if we don’t weed out the lies of Bush and his pals every day, even the old and dying ones, a hundred fresh, new ones will sprout tomorrow.

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/003169.html