Iknow that I am probably going to be ordered to go to the nearest First Amendment zone (always situated far away from whatever is happening) and stand with my nose in the corner for a long time.
But, come on.
Aren't there some questions we should be asking?
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
What ties did Saddam Hussein have to 9/11 that were stronger or more obvious than those of other countries . . . say . . . Saudi Arabia?
What really happened to Army PFC Jessica Lynch?
Those will do for now, although I have a lot more.
Let's understand a few things here.
Saddam Hussein is/was a bad man. We have to say is/was because we don't know whether he is dead or in some other country with the truckloads of cash removed from Iraq while those running it were under surveillance considered reliable enough to act as the basis for a "decapitation strike."
But we do know that the Iraqi people suffered horrible repression during his regime, and the world is no doubt better off without him.
But the night the war started, Ari Fleischer walked briskly to a podium and said, "The war to disarm Iraq has begun," added that the president would be speaking on the subject later and then scurried out of the room before any of the Washington press corps could say, "Wha . . . huh?"
Sometime later, the war to disarm Iraq became Operation Iraqi Freedom, and those pesky weapons of mass destruction never did turn up.
We said he had them. Heck even he said he had them back when he was lobbing Scuds at Israel during Desert Storm. The U.N. inspectors said they could find them if the Iraqis would just let them look where they wanted to.
So where are they? And what did happen to Jessica Lynch?
We have been told, since her capture and release, that the 19-year-old fought bravely until she ran out of ammunition and suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was stabbed; that she suffered no gunshot or stab wounds but was injured when her vehicled overturned; that she was treated cruelly in captivity; and that she was treated well and got the best care available at the time.
We have been told that she was "rescued" by special operations personnel who had to fight during the process, and we have been told that Iraqi troops had already abandoned that area and all the special ops forces had to do was walk in and get her and that, in fact, the Iraqis had tried, unsuccessfully to return her a day earlier.
Oh, yeah, we were also told that PFC Lynch had total amnesia about the events of her capture, and, by her father, that she has no amnesia at all. It was also her father who first revealed that she did not have any gunshot wounds.
True enough, much of this information came from major news agencies and outlets quoting unnamed "official" sources - which they should have learned by now is very risky business - but it breaks down this way:
Two months have now passed, more than enough time for debriefing.
All of the above, from "official sources," or not, can't be true.
In the cases where the reports are wrong, no "official source" has stepped forward to say so, except in the case of a critical BBC broadcast where yet another unnamed "official source" said the BBC piece was "based largely on speculation."
Why doesn't some real official source with a name and title stand up and say, "Here's what happened . . ."?
The sad thing is that Lynch has undoubtedly been badly injured in the performance of her duties and really isn't responsible for those who have used her agony as a political pawn without much concern about how it affects her.
And the young men and women who executed their orders in invading Iraq to take away its weapons of mass destruction or free its people or change its regime, did a splendid job from a military standpoint and should be honored for that.
But our government should stop treating us as if all or most of us have attention spans the length of MTV sound bytes, and simply tell us what is going on - truthfully.
