Hersh writes:

"Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997... A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program - part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops - was known to a few senior officials in Washington. "I knew that was going on," the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. "We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."

On the forged documents, Hersch asks: "What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message - the threat posed by Iraq - more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?"

As thousands die at this moment in Iraq, the US public should ask for an answer, instead of pledging allegience to the Wall.