Citing what it considers examples, the State Department, run by "aluminum tubes" Dr. Condoleezza Rice, makes mention of Thierry Meyssan, a French author and nine eleven investigator who "falsely claimed that no plane hit the Pentagon." Of course, we have no definitive idea what hit the Pentagon, precisely because officials removed and seized evidence and declared it a national security secret. I suppose the conflicting accounts of what happened on that day are "urban legends" and "conspiracy theories." Or maybe somebody put LSD in the Washington's drinking water. Check out scads of "urban legends" posted on French researcher Eric Bart's web site (he is French too, so it must be a conspiracy theory, or maybe he simply hates America since he lives in Old Europe).

The State Department scribes muddy the water by mentioning "urban legends" such as the ludicrous claim somebody "surfed" unharmed to the ground from the 82nd floor of the WTC, stories about "Americans or others ... kidnapp[ed] or adopting children in order to use them in organ transplants," claims "that U.S. forces in Iraq were harvesting organs from dead or wounded Iraqis for sale in the United States" (this "urban legend" was started, according to the State Department, by Saudi Arabia's al-Watan newspaper, once again demonstrating the neocon assertion Arabs are crazy and malicious), and (my favorite) "exaggerated fears about depleted uranium because people associate it with weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium, which are much more dangerous substances. When most people hear the word uranium, a number of strongly held associations spring to mind, including the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, nuclear reactors, radiation illness, cancer, and birth defects."

The State Department's absurd claim about DU is particularly pernicious. "In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden daily of inhabitants," writes Leuren Moret, an international radiation specialist. "In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are uninhabitable.... Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second."

But according to the miscreants at the State Department, we don't have to worry about DU because "weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium" is more dangerous, sort of like it is more dangerous to drink a few ounces of wood stripper than a fifth of bourbon. "Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples’ minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world 'uranium.' For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is." Note the words "natural" and "depleted" here, leading us to believe the stuff is more or less harmless, an assertion that is criminal and malicious, to say the least.

And the lies and distortions just keep on coming. "Another highly controversial issue is that of forbidden weapons, such as chemical or biological weapons. The United States is regularly, and falsely, accused of using these weapons," the State Department declares. Note the State Department neglected to mention nuclear weapons, for instance the nuclear weapons used on the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Moreover, I don't know what the State Department considers Agent Orange, but in my book it is considered a chemical weapon. "Agent Orange was used from 1961 to 1971 and has disputedly caused serious harm to the health of exposed Vietnamese, Australians, Canadians and Americans, their children and grandchildren," notes Wikipedia. "Agent Orange as a military defoliant was discontinued in 1971, after over 6,000 spraying missions in Vietnam and Cambodia," probably the largest and most prolonged use of a chemical weapon in history.

"There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a great deal of unreliable information," including Rense, Conspiracy Planet (where my articles have appeared, thus establishing my credentials as a scurrilous disseminator of "urban legends" and "conspiracy theories"), and the late Joe Vialls. I am also proud to be considered part of the urban-legend-conspiracy-theory clan due to participation in the "the allegation that U.S. soldiers in Iraq had killed innocent Iraqi boys playing football and then 'planted' rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) next to them, to make it appear that they were insurgents," as the State Department summarizes. In order to debunk the "urban legend" (or maybe Iraqi desert legend), the State Department takes the word of the soldiers involved in the attacks and so should we of course (and that is all the evidence we need, since the Pentagon never lies; for a taste of this unabashed truth telling, see Julie Hyland's BBC complains of Pentagon lies).

Finally, the State Department wants to "help" those of us lead astray by the blogs and alternative web sites obviously overwhelming the corporate media in its flailing indoctrination and propaganda efforts, lest this effort on the part of the State Department would not be necessary. "We can't respond to all requests for information, but if a request is reasonable and we have the time, we will do our best to provide accurate, authoritative information," the Identifying Misinformation site tells us.

As for the track record of the State Department's own back-to-back lies, consider Colin Powell's speech delivered to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, a speech replete with lies (apologists like to call these "misstatements") concerning aluminum tubes, mobile production facilities for biological agents (otherwise known as firefighting equipment), illegal rockets (never found), 8,500 liters of anthrax (never found), VX nerve gas (never found), long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons (vastly over-rated model airplanes), and the sincere and enduring "urban legend" of Osama in cahoots with Saddam, supposedly evinced by an audio message from Osama (as it turns out the Bin Laden message "expresses solidarity with the Iraqi people, advises them to remain steadfast in the coming invasion of their country and declares that Saddam and his aides are not important," writes Firas al-Atraqchi. "The audio message goes on to reveal that bin Laden believes Saddam to be a socialist and declares that 'socialists and communists are unbelievers,' thereby labeling Saddam an apostate of Islam," in other words demonstrating that Colin Powell, as Secretary of State, made "misstatements" of fact, otherwise known as calculated lies designed to facilitate and illegal and immoral invasion and occupation).

Now let's talk about the color of the kettle.