Last week, headlines blazed that Iraqi army soldiers, with the help of the US military, killed 80 insurgents at a training camp 50 miles north of Baghdad. There was only one problem with the headlines. They were a complete fabrication.

On March 23, the day after the reports, an enterprising Agence-France Presse correspondent hopped in his car and actually drove up to the alleged training camp. He had questions about discrepancies in the Iraqi military's report and the US military. Were there 80-100 insurgents at the camp? 20 survivors? No survivors? Why did the US call in an airstrike--usually a sign a ground operation is in trouble--if the operation was a smashing success? Where were the bodies?

What he found, on a day when the US military announced that it was running clean-up operations and sifting through what they'd (supposedly) found at the base, was a bunch of insurgents still in control of the camp, sitting around, playing cards. They told a very different and more plausible story: a dozen or so insurgents (and 7 Iraqi soldiers) killed, the Iraqi army repelled, and all back to normal.

What this means, basically, is that both the Iraqi and US military is lying, to us. It's a sign of desperation that the Bush Administration wants so badly to convince us, and themselves, that the Iraqi Army is ready to take charge of the war when it's not. And mainstream US media played along; the only exception, questioning the Pentagon version of events, was a March 25 Washington Post story buried on page A13.

Remember, once again: Donald Rumsfeld told us the Pentagon would lie to us. He was telling the truth. --Geov Parrish