taking bogus defectors the information from him giving him to the pentagon and the iraqi national congress then giving him to the journalists and they said if you don't believe us iraqi national congress call the pentagon so you have the circular reporting and you had the new york times admitting that it was using one source for all of its information and weapons of mass destruction and it was you know self affirming by going to the pentagon which to put this stuff on paper it was. a lot of exaggerations partial information sometimes the whole information but on balance a very one sided view of iraq's w m d program and a lot of these stories the journalist didn't want to look into because the editors told them to run with it we're going to be supportive of the administration it's the patriotic thing to do i think that there was on the part of the media too much of of in a sense getting into the upcoming war and not enough look at do we really need to go there were some journalists out there raising the alarm bells the seymour hersh is the walter pincus of the world but unfortunately those

, iraqi national congress, excuse me. which, of course, was never going to happen and didn't happen. and when he got there, he didn't have any base of support, but he did have the americans, and he was able to leverage that. but he was, he was as much running us as, and the israelis, as we were running him. the one thing that wasn't happening is that we weren't getting the best intelligence and the best advice. so as a result and an example of the outrage of this is the fallujah campaign. you know, there was a lot of -- first there were some contractors kill inside fallujah, then there were a lot of american marines killed in fallujah, and it was unnecessary. because as general petraeus would eventually show, if you do business with the sunnis and you try to make deals with them, you can. but this isn't conjecture because before the war -- and it's in the book -- there was a contact made by the head of of the fallujah clan, probably one of the most important clans in iraq who was in germany for medical treatment. contacte