Corruption? I wouldn’t be very much surprised, simply because rich people in positions of power are like that.

The part about the informant reminded me of another informant that swore up and down that Saddam Hussein had huge stockpiles of “weapons of mass destruction” -remember that? There weren’t any.

By a trick of memory, I am also reminded of the previous Gulf war, and the harrowing testimony before Congress of a 15 year old girl about witnessing Iraqi soldiers emptying and taking incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital and leaving Kuwaiti babies to die on the cold hard floor. This also turned out to be a completely fictional story, told by (it was later revealed) the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, that had been coached by a public relations firm called Hill & Knowlton, that was at the time contracted by the Kuwaiti government.

So I guess you can’t always trust informants or evidence produced by republican activity.