During the Republican debate, Mike Huckabee said he believes one of the defining issues facing the country is the sanctity of human life. Arguing that the issue is of historical importance, he invoked the Declaration of Independence's rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and said that most of the signers of the declaration were clergymen.

Not even close.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it's a little unclear just how many. The conservative Heritage Foundation said two other signers were former clergymen. The religion web site Adherents.com said four signers of the declaration were current or former full-time preachers. But everyone agrees only Witherspoon was an active minister when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

One issue that may contribute to the confusion about which signers had a history in the clergy is that during the time the Declaration was written, people who studied at universities often received doctorates of divinity, a common degree designation, even if they were not working clergy, said Mary Jenkins of the Independence National Historical Park. As for religious affiliations, all of the signers were Protestant Christians with one exception, Charles Carroll of Maryland, who was Roman Catholic.

We'd like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That's not "most," that's Pants-on-Fire wrong.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton can lay claim to many firsts: Famously, she's the first former first lady to be elected to public office and the first wife of a former president to run for president herself.But not long before she declared her intentions for 2008, Clinton was asked on "The View" if being a mother would give her an advantage as a presidential candidate. She responded in part, "We've never had a mother who ever ran for or held that position."Clinton's claim to be the first mother running for president isn't correct, according to several sources, including the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. Clinton is actually the ninth mother to run for president of the United States.

[The first was Victoria Woodhull in 1872. The last, before Hillary Clinton, was Carol Moseley Braun, the former Illinois senator. Click on the SOURCE link above to see a complete list with pictures.]

In March 2006 I submitted to the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service Ombudsman a complaint about the numerous errors and misconceptions that permeate the PBS Einstein’s Wife website material and associated Lesson Plans purporting to present evidence that Mileva Mari? made substantive contributions to (or even co-authored) Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. PBS is currently considering the complaint, based on my detailed analyses of the Australian Einstein’s Wife documentary [1] and of the PBS website material. (See Mileva Mari? 1 and Mileva Mari? 2.)

Gerald Holton, who played a major role in the inaugurating of the Einstein Archive, is one of several physicists who have concluded on the basis of the documentary evidence that, in Holton’s words, Mari? “left no evidence of originality as a future scientist”.[2] Holton was a contributor to the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary, but was given no idea of the nature of the project. His view of the documentary is amply clear from the following message he emailed me on the subject:

I was glad to read of your interest in correcting the blatant perversion of the role of Mileva Mari? in the Australian film, “Einstein’s Wife”. The essays on your websites should be required reading by all who have been taken in by this film – the NPR officials, the unsuspecting readers of the story on the PBS website, the viewers of this pseudo- “documentary”, the helpless teachers who might fall for this lie.

I suspect the Australian film crew and producers may well have known that they were producing a sorry fiction. For example, when they asked me to be interviewed for the film, they only said it was going to be (yet another) film about Einstein. If they had told me what they really were intending, I would of course not have agreed to appear, and would have told them how wrong they were.

The film’s falsification of Mari?’s role in the work of Einstein, well explained in your postings and in other sources by knowledgable historians of science, brings to mind two points: One is that if such a false product were published by a scientist, he or she would be deprived of eligibility of further funding, and (in the USA) punished by the Office of Research Integrity. As the recent unmasking of the South Korean biologist who falsified data shows, the same derogation would also be appropriate outside the USA. Equally bad is that the falsification of Mari?’s role is really an insult to her. As I wrote (page 191, Einstein, History and other Passions, H.U.P. 2000, in Chapter 8) on the relationship between Mileva and Albert :

“Ironically, the exaggeration of Mileva’s scientific role, far beyond what she herself ever claimed or could be proved, only detracts both from her real and significant place in history, and from the tragic unfulfillment of her early hopes and promise. For she was one of the pioneers in the movement to bring women into science, even if she did not reap its benefits. At great personal sacrifice, as it later turned out, she seems to have been essential to Albert during the onerous years of his most creative early period, not only as anchor of his emotional life, but also as a sympathetic companion with whom he could sound out his highly unconventional ideas during the years when he was undergoing the quite unexpected, rapid metamorphosis from eager student to first-rank scientist.”

Two other contributors to the documentary, Robert Schulmann, the historian associated with the Albert Einstein Collected Papers project, and the founding editor of the project, John Stachel, were likewise unaware of the nature of the documentary and have disassociated themselves from it. The skilful editing of the contributions by Holton and Stachel ensured that the final product contained nothing that contradicted the viewpoint being propagated, with one exception. This is in relation to what Stachel has described as his being “set up” [3] in the scene purporting (falsely) to demonstrate that the Soviet scientist Abraham Joffe had stated that the original manuscript of Einstein’s 1905 special relativity paper was co-signed by Einstein and Mari?. (The means by which Stachel was set up is recounted in my article Mileva Mari? 1.)

Stachel has himself published comprehensive refutations of the claims about Mari?’s alleged contributions to Einstein’s publications.[4] Had the writer/producer of the documentary, Geraldine Hilton, and the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website and classroom content production team been genuinely interested in a disinterested examination of the contentions about Mari? they would have made a serious attempt to find and report the published analyses of the principal claims by Stachel and Holton. The remarkably poor level of the research undertaken for this project is illustrated by the following statement on the PBS web page About Einstein’s Wife, “The West’s first hint of Mari?’s existence came with a 1983 German translation of a Yugoslavian biography”, the falseness of which can be ascertained merely by visiting one’s local library and examining any biography of Einstein published prior to 1983....

An excerpt in the Reading File column last Sunday from an article published last month in The Times of London about the evolution of blond hair included a reference to a study, attributed to the World Health Organization, that predicted that blond hair would become extinct in 200 years. In 2002, after the first news reports about the study, W.H.O. said it had never done research on the subject and that it had no knowledge of how the reports originated.

... The administration's initial response [to complaints about the new Medicare prescription drug program] will be familiar to anyone who recalls the early months of the Iraqi insurgency or the first few days after Hurricane Katrina. "This is going very well," a spokesman at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said on January 4, with apparent seriousness. When the difficulties became too widespread for even the Bush administration to ignore, officials fell back on another well-rehearsed excuse: Glitches were inevitable given the nature of the task. "We know there are going to be bumps in the road," another CMS spokesman said. "It's a new program."

Most people probably think this makes sense, since most people think that the government always bungles such massive undertakings anyway. But consider what happened when the Johnson administration rolled out Medicare for the first time in July 1966. Back then, the obstacles were even more daunting than they are today. Rather than simply adding a benefit for a relatively narrow class of services (prescription drugs), introducing Medicare meant establishing an entirely new insurance program in just eleven months. There were concerns about hospital capacity: What if seniors held off on medical treatment until the benefit kicked in and then flooded facilities? There were also racial complications: LBJ had insisted that Medicare refuse payments to hospitals that didn't abide by federal civil rights guidelines. Since many Southern hospitals remained segregated, senior citizens there might have had no place to go.

So what happened on the day that this complex program was implemented? Thousands of senior citizens simply went to the hospital and got the health care they needed. "There were no crises that I remember," says Yale University political scientist Theodore Marmor, who worked in the office overseeing Medicare implementation and went on to write The Politics of Medicare, the program's definitive history. Newspaper accounts from the '60s back him up. Under the headline "medicare takes over easily," a Post writer described the program's first day as "a smooth transition, undramatic as a bed change." Three weeks later, the Times affirmed that "medicare's start has been smooth."

What did Johnson do right that Bush did wrong? Start with the people he put in charge. Today, the man directly responsible for Medicare is Mark McClellan, a physician and former Stanford economist. Though hardly a Michael Brown, McClellan has no prior experience when it comes to implementing social insurance programs. (His predecessor, Tom Scully, left CMS to become a lobbyist almost immediately after the Medicare bill passed.) The man Johnson tapped to run Medicare was Robert Ball, a longtime civil servant who had worked his way up through the Social Security Administration starting in 1939. He and other veterans helped design the program--urging, among other things, that the law take effect in summer, when hospitals would be least crowded.

Another difference between the two administrations is their willingness to take initiative. Last year, experts repeatedly warned the Bush administration that it had inadequate contingency plans in place, culminating in a December Government Accountability Office report that predicted with eerie accuracy exactly what has happened at pharmacies around the country these past two weeks. LBJ's team was far more cautious. Although confident that hospitals could handle any potential surges, it still drew up plans for transferring patients to overflow facilities, even lining up helicopters in Texas to provide speedy transport.

Granted, senior citizens probably need more hand-holding in 2006 than they did in 1966, because the new law channels its drug coverage through private insurance companies from which beneficiaries must choose. But that, too, is a distinction: While Bush talks of "choice" as his plan's greatest virtue, seniors seem bewildered by having to pick from as many as 52 different prescription plans, each one with different premiums, cost-sharing requirements, and lists of drugs covered. By contrast, Johnson administration officials had argued against inundating seniors with such options. "I would not have dreamed of going about this in a way that meant individuals had to choose from among all these possibilities," Ball says today. "I would have expected chaos."

And, from Maine to California, chaos is just what the Bush administration has gotten. ...

Today's New York Times reports that H.L. Mencken was "among the most prolific" American writers and social critics.

"In a career of almost 50 years, Mencken wrote more than 70 million words—many intended to expose hypocrisy, debunk received wisdom and take on all manner of sacred cows," writes Thomas Vinciguerra.

But not even Mencken could have produced that many words! Composing copy at that rate would have required him to pound out more than 1.4 million words a year—or about 3,835 words a day. That's the equivalent of a midsize New Yorker feature on a daily basis, and would have left little time to eat, drink, bathe, shave, sleep, edit, get laid, and play music, all of which Mencken was known to do.

So if 70 million words exaggerates Mencken's output, how many words did he write? Nexis and Google searches collect a range of estimates, none of which approaches 70 million.

The nearest figure to 70 million is attributed to Mencken scholar Vincent Fitzpatrick, by Brennen Jensen in the Jan. 26, 2000, Baltimore City Paper. The piece posits a conservative estimate of Mencken's printed output at about 15 million words.

Mencken biographer Fred Hobson supports a 10 million-plus figure in 1994's Mencken: A Life. Hobson writes, "In his collection at the Pratt [library] he placed schoolboy grades, commencement accounts, bank statements, records of earnings, medical histories (including an exhaustive hay fever diary), and much else. All this is, of course, in addition to the more than ten million words in print, including journalism, which in 1940 he estimated he had produced and the more than one hundred thousand letters he wrote in his lifetime."

Writing in the Feb. 2, 1990, Jerusalem Post, Peter Schertz attributes this circa 1940 quotation to Mencken: "I have probably written 10,000,000 words of English and continue to this day to pour out more and more." ...

By Rick Shenkman

Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of several books about the myths of history, including, Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History.

Thomas Friedman, the NYT columnist, is selling his newest book with a clever title: The World Is Flat. A summary of his argument was featured in the NYT Magazine on April 2, 2005.

In the article he reiterates one of the most common assumptions about Columbus. Namely, that Columbus, by sailing west to go east, proved"definitively that the world was round." Friedman doesn't say that Columbus proved the world is round. He hedges. He says proved"definitively" the world is round, as if to indicate that some people, perhaps many people, thought the world was round but didn't know for sure. But it's essential for his argument that Columbus did something about proving the world was round. Otherwise the columnist's metaphor--and he loves his metaphors--falls flat. It works only because people generally believe that it was a momentous event in history that we discovered in the 15th century that the world was round. Now in the 21st century we are discovering it's flat. Ha!

But we didn't discover the world was round in the 15th century. Whether Friedman knows the truth or not and it's hard to say because he so artfully hedges his statement by including that little modifier, definitively, it is well known among scholars that the Columbus story is, as they say, pure moonshine. As Professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explained in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger, 1991),"there were no skeptics" in the 15th century about the world's sphericity."All educated people throughout Europe knew the earth's spherical shape and its approximate circumference. This fact has been well established by historians for more than half a century."

Of course, not all historians know that the myth, which has been traced to Washington Irving's biography of Columbus, has been decisively exploded. The late librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, included the myth in all its glory in his 1983 book, The Discoverers. He even had a theory to explain why Europeans were so dumb as to believe the earth was flat when the ancients had proved it was round. They were the victims, he wrote, of the"Great Interruption," a"Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia [which] ... afflicted the continent from A.D. 300 to at least 1300."

Does Thomas Friedman know the truth? Perhaps someone can ask him and let us know.

Footnote #1: In the opening chapter of his book Friedman relates that Columbus headed to the Indies in search of spices, among other things. This is yet another myth, as HNN debunked here in the fall of 2004.

Footnote #2: In one of the stories on the Pope's funeral, the Toronto Star managed to bring up the flat earth myth. A story published on April 7, 2005 claimed:

In the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy, an Egyptian astronomer, proved mathematically what everyone had thought: The Earth was a globe. Except the early Church wanted it to be flat, with Jerusalem at the centre, like the hole in a CD, and so it became for more than a thousand years. The historian Daniel Boorstin called this"the Great Forgetting."

And so the myth goes on.

It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.

It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."

Some of the Panama school's graduates returned to their countries to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.

And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.

It's a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.

Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And the Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration's real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.

For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.

In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming."

Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.

Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility but collective complicity. The United States, though an active participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process of national soul-searching.

The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes are being erased from the record. Every time Americans repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.

This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby, who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese program."

And that's the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."

The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.

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Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

Last week, former President Bill Clinton told his staffer-turned-ABC talking head George Stephanopoulos that the U.S. government had "no evidence that there was any weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]." And Clinton has the gall to accuse Bush of lying?

Here's Clinton on July 22, 2003, on Larry King Live: "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for." And in October 2003, some six months after the war ended, Portuguese prime minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso discussed WMD with Clinton. Said Barroso: "When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

Details, details. In an interview last month with Wolf Blitzer, Clinton said of the Iraq war: "I never thought it had much to do with the war on terror." Come again? In a speech on February 17, 1998, Clinton warned of threats from an "unholy axis" of terrorists and rogue states, and declared: "There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Later that spring came this passage from the Clinton administration's indictment of Osama bin Laden: "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

That summer, no
fewer than six senior Clinton officials accused Iraq of providing chemical weapons expertise to al Qaeda in Sudan. It was this collaboration that administration officials cited to justify the destruction of the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, wrote in the Washington Times that the administration had "information linking bin Laden to the Sudanese regime and to the al Shifa plant."

Berger continued: "We had physical evidence indicating that al Shifa was the site of chemical weapons activity," allowing that al Shifa might have been a dual-use facility. "Other products were made at al Shifa. But we have seen such dual-use plants before--in Iraq. And, indeed, we have information that Iraq has assisted chemical weapons activity in Sudan."

Clinton's revisionism is hardly surprising. He has his wife's future in an increasingly antiwar Democratic party to worry about. But the next time Stephanopoulos hosts his old boss, we'd like to see him ask about al Shifa and the Iraqi collaboration with al Qaeda that the Clinton administration once claimed took place at the plant.