Seth Ackerman has written a story for Mother Jones explaining how the Clinton administration was also complicit in willfully distorting Iraq’s weapons capabilities. On the whole, citizens are at the mercy of their government when it comes to topics like this, because the government really does have lots of information that we don’t, and can claim whatever it wants based on that information. That said, the level of due diligence that interested parties are performing and posting on the Web these days is just staggering. I’m not just talking about weblog triumphalism either. There are all sorts of non-governmental organizations and think tanks that are doing great work in dissecting the what the government tells us and what we can learn through regular reporting, and the easy avialability of this information enables individuals and groups to build on the work done by one another rapidly and effectively. That said, we’ll probably still get bamboozled regularly, but at least we can be more confident in our post mortems. The article also exposes Kenneth Pollack as a liar, or at least an omitter of key facts. That’s disappointing — it was Pollack’s book, The Threatening Storm, that made me certain that eventual war with Iraq was inevitable.