In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

As much as I'd like to believe that something will come of all these after-the-fact revelations by people within the bureaucracy who watched the whole thing happen, I've come to the conclusion that something in the Bush-cult programming creates a mental block, a sort of automatic memory dump that blocks information like this from being absorbed at all, simultaneously triggering the vocalization center to randomly spout phrases such as "liberal media . . . 9/11 . . . freedom is on the march . . . you hate America" and the like.