LIE OF THE WEEK: 04-14-2006

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on the retired generals who are now his critics:

"Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States it would be like a merry-go-round," he said.

THE TRUTH: This is not about a couple of people disagreeing with the secretary on a policy and spinning it this way can't hide the facts. This is all about an administration (and especially a department of defense) that does whatever it wants despite all of the corrective institutions put in place to make sure government agencies do the right thing. If they don't like the intelligence coming out of the CIA, then they ignore that and gather intelligence through the Defense Intelligence Agency. If they don't like the techniques used by the FBI to interrogate domestic suspects, then they ignore that and use military interrogators to accomplish their goals. Our government has gone through many periods of corruption and other problems - the difference between our system and others around the world is that we try to learn from our mistakes and put safeguards in place to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated. This administration needs to learn it's place in history and respect the constitutional controls and institutions created after each historical mistake and realize that they don't have the right to create policy as if they have a blank slate to do whatever they want.