This is a transcript of a public conversation between Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, and Seymour Hersh. Pretty interesting background on Iraq, and Ritter argues that we need to look beyond the Bush administration, back to Clinton, back to the first Bush administration to uncover the totality of the situation. Lots of interesting stuff here I'd never been aware of it. And lots of brutally honest finger pointing:

"Congress has abrogated its responsibilities under the Constitution, and they've abrogated it for years. Then there's the media, and, yes, we can turn this into a media-bashing event. But you know what? The media only feeds the American people the poison they're willing to swallow. And we the people of the United States of America seem to want our news in no more than three-minute chunks with sound bites of thirty seconds or less, and it can't be too complicated. So what we did is allowed ourselves during the decade of the 1990s to be pre-programmed into accepting at face value without question anything that was negative about Saddam Hussein's regime, and this made selling the war on Iraq on the basis of a lie the easiest task ever faced by the Bush Administration."

Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh: Iraq Confidential (The Nation)