In 1964, the US military came before the US Congress and claimed that US ships had been fired upon by North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. They asked for the Congress to give the military the right to go into Vietnam and fight. Congress agreed and passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which marked the beginning of the bloody Vietnam War. And it turns out that the military’s claims were false. The Vietnamese never fired on any US ship. It was a lie made up to give the military what it wanted, a free hand to wage war.

In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, a little girl testified about Iraqi atrocities before the UN. Her name was “Nayirah.” She said that she had been a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital during the invasion, and told a story about Iraqi soldiers storming the hospital, taking premature infants out of incubator machines, throwing the newborns onto the cold stone floor to die, and then shipping the incubators back to Baghdad. It was a horrifying tale that helped galvanize US support for the Gulf War. Except it later turned out that “Nayirah” was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., had never been to that hospital, and the entire story of the incubators was completely made up to convince the U.S. military to come in and give Kuwait back to its wealthy dictators.

And now in 2002, the government tells us that we are in immediate danger of a chemical or biological attack by Iraq. They tell us they have damning evidence, but they can’t show it to us.

Maybe it’s time to be a little skeptical.