"A LONG HISTORY IN FABRICATING EVIDENCE"

The above is unfortunately a very accurate quote from Ahmadinejad. He could be referring to, I don't know, the Maine incident. Or maybe the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He might very well be referring to Operation Ajax, which replaced the democratically-elected (for Iran, anyway) Mossadegh with the repressive Shah. He could be referring to 9/11. Or he could be referring to Iraq's non-existent WMD. Or any number of other such incidents.

And now, we've proven him right again, with the release of this Iran-in-Iraq dossier, with its fake evidence that provides the basis for fake claims intended to get us into a very real war. The dossier falls right in line with all of the above-mentioned ploys.

The good news is that neither the public nor the media seem to be falling for it--at least not as much as they fell for the claptrap about Iraq. Many are speculating that this newfound skepticism will force the hand of the neocons to manufacture some sort of "terrorist incident" along the lines of 9/11 or the Bush plan of painting a US plane in UN colors and tempting Iraq with it. This seems plausible to me--maybe even probable.

Prosecute the dossier fabricators?

But I'm curious about something else--does this fake dossier evidence violate any laws? Is there any way to prosecute anyone (from the president on down) involved in this scheme to deceive the public? If not, how can we keep this kind of thing from happening over and over again?

I'm afraid it isn't possible to prosecute anyone for such acts, simply because of the difficulty of proving evidence fabrication beyond a reasonable doubt when "national security is at stake." I would imagine that every time a prosecutor would request some piece of evidence from the government, they'd claim that providing it would be a breach of national security and stonewall, stonewall, stonewall.

Bullshit infrared sensors

So maybe the best offense is a good defense. All of us need to keep our bullshit detectors--or, active bullshit infrared sensors, if you like-- on high alert 24 hours a day and expose junk like this as soon as possible, and as accurately as possible, forever--or until the fabricators catch on that pulling a fast one on the public is gonna be more work than just telling the truth.