In October of last year, I wrote a column about the beginning of the Niger yellowcake controversy, in which, among other things, the White House was accused of identifying a functioning Central Intelligence Agency agent, contrary to American law.

Yellowcake, you'll remember, is uranium that has been extracted from ore, purified and concentrated in the form of a yellow-coloured salt. It can be used to make a nuclear bomb. Back in the days when people were talking about whether to go to war with Iraq, a story surfaced that Iraqi officials had tried to buy yellowcake from Niger.

The CIA asked a former Ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to go to Niger to look into that story. He went in February, 2002 and, on his return, made a confidential report to the CIA. Some months later, a reference to the yellowcake story was included in President Bush's State of the Union address in January of 2003.

Claiming outrage, Wilson published an article in the New York Times in which he said he had found no evidence in Niger that justified the yellowcake claim, and accused President Bush of exaggerating the case for war with Iraq.

A few days later, newspaper columnist Robert Novak identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. A special prosecutor is now investigating Wilson's claims that Novak was able to say so because he had been tipped off by someone in the White House, as retribution for the trouble Wilson had caused.

Wilson's allegations got him his requisite 15 minutes of fame and then some. He was a frequent guest on television news shows - NBC had him on its 'Meet the Press' and 'Today' programmes half a dozen times - he gave scores of interviews to other media, he was the subject of a flattering profile in Vanity Fair magazine, he was awarded a lucrative book deal (the product has now been published as 'The Politics of Truth'), he was made a foreign policy adviser to Sen. John Kerry and he was put on the cover of Time Magazine.

Unfortunately, when he made his allegations, Joe Wilson had no idea that Lord Butler in Britain and the Senate Intelligence Committee in the United States would be looking into the causes of the war in Iraq, and publishing their findings. Now that they have, the jig is up, and he has been exposed as a man who was lying - some say in the service of the Democratic Party, but I doubt he has any cause but his own.

We now know that he was not telling the truth when he said that his final report to the CIA contradicted the Niger story. In fact, the Senate Intelligence report says, he provided some confirmation that it was true.

Wilson claimed to have recognised, before he made his report on his Niger trip, that documents provided by the Italian intelligence service, purporting to prove an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, were forgeries. We now know these documents weren't handed over to US intelligence until eight months after his trip.

And he was lying again when he insisted that his wife had had nothing to do with his selection for the Niger mission. In fact, she recommended him, and her memorandum to her superior at the CIA was referred to by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its report.

Since the publication of those two reports, Wilson's appearances in public have become rather less frequent than they were before. He did, though, publish a short op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times last week, in which he attacked the administration again, saying, "… when it comes to the Niger claim - and so many other claims underlying the decision to go to war in Iraq - it is the Bush administration, not Joe Wilson, who spoke the words that have cost us more than 900 lives and billions of dollars and have left our international reputation in tatters."

To refute the charges against him, he simply repeated that, "I went to Niger, investigated and told the CIA that the report was unfounded". Then, to use a square dancing term, he did a kind of alaman right, alaman left around the other charges, not getting to grips with either one of them. Elsewhere, I gather, he has claimed that allowance should be made for the distinction between whether his wife "recommended" or "proposed" him for the trip. That's as delicate a distinction, perhaps, as the one Bill Clinton made between having sex with that young woman and what actually occurred.

Joe Wilson isn't some minor back-room political player - he was the Ambassador to Baghdad on the eve of the first invasion of Iraq. You might think that a person of his rank telling this kind of seriously mendacious story to the press and then getting caught at it would be a Very Big Deal…grist for a full-dress media feeding frenzy. Not a bit of it.

Such comment as there has been has appeared mainly in conservative media such as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times or the National Review. The one notable exception to that pattern has been a fierce (and, shall we say, hard-to-follow) defence published in that venerable left-wing organ, The Nation. That, however, might have had something to do with its editor's sensitivity about the fact that he awarded Wilson the first-ever Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling, along with the attached $10,000 prize, at a glittering banquet back in October. (Ridenhour was the soldier who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969.)

What is it with the mainstream media that they don't seem to want to deal with this kind of story? You'd think some of them might welcome a chance to get back on the side of the angels after being taken in by the story Wilson was shilling in the first place. Instead, they treated the story as if it carried some kind of highly-infectious neo-con disease.

Whatever their problem with it was, it must be very closely related to whatever it is that allows otherwise intelligent people to believe that Michael Moore's film, 'Fahrenheit 911', is a praiseworthy attempt to tell the truth about the US invasion of Iraq.

Moore calls his films documentaries, a term that most of us understand to mean an objective presentation of the facts, without editorialising or inserting the kind of fictional matter that Hollywood scriptwriters trade in. In fact, they're nothing of the kind.

Moore established his reputation for treating the truth as a plaything in his first film, 'Roger and Me', released in 1989. As the New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote at the time, it was fraudulent at the most fundamental level because he manipulated its chronology, implying that certain events were a response to GM's large 1986 layoffs, when they had occurred years before. He hasn't changed his attitude towards the truth since then, either in his films or in his books. When he was challenged by CNN about glaring inaccuracies in 'Stupid White Men', Moore replied: 'This is a book of political humour…. How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?'

In that, he's correct - comedy to a large extent does depend on exaggeration and inaccuracy. No one expects the Three Stooges, or Monty Python's Flying Circus, to be faithful to reality. As a matter of fact, a good satirical film on the politics of terrorism and the invasion of Iraq might go down very well at the moment. There hasn't been a really cathartic American satire since 'Dr. Strangelove' back in the early 60s. Remember Brigadier General Jack D Ripper? "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." We badly needed to hear that at the time, and this, surely, is another time when we need reminding that we are apt to take ourselves more seriously than we ought.

If the movie-going public went to watch 'Fahrenheit 911' because it was a comedy, no one could object. But Moore doesn't identify his work as comedy. He calls his films documentaries, and by so doing, he leads us to believe they are objective presentations of the facts. The movie-going public doesn't go to 'Fahrenheit 911' for the laughs. They go to be told the embarrassing truth that they believe the Bush administration has been trying to sweep under the carpet. They go because they think this film will help them make judgments as to who is telling the truth and who is lying.

An American think tank director named James Piereson recently suggested the Democratic party was gradually being taken over by a bizarre doctrine that he called Punitive Liberalism.

"According to this doctrine," Piereson wrote, "America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannised minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

"Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive 'Pollyannas' who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all."

Hmmm. Is that what's going on here? Are the media shying away from the Wilson story because they think it's a shame it isn't true? Are people anxious to fall in with Michael Moore's distortions because they want the administration punished for what it has done?

That would be a sad indictment of the relationship of some in America with the truth, but I think it must be the case. There's a kind of lynch mob mentality around at the moment, in the US, in Britain and in the rest of the world. It's as if people have forgotten, or perhaps don't want to remember, who came first - Bush or bin Laden.

www.pondblog.com