Hillary Clinton in her just released “tell-but-not-all” book finally confirms what most of us have believed all these years — that Bill Clinton lied to the American people during the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Keeping up with these deceptions in the US government, his successor, Mr. Bush, duped a nation about a threat to their very existence from the east.

Facts emerging today tell of unreliable intelligence reports being questioned by members within the current administration as early as six months before Mr. Bush began his offensive on Iraq.

But as interviews and documents reveal, those who rebelled against the build-up of the invasion were scuppered by high-level administration officials in the White House because Mr. Bush had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration embroidered intelligence and pushed murky “facts” in order to get Congress and the public to back him in this war, and most honest Americans believed that he was telling the truth.

But business for some of Mr. Bush’s friends has been brisk. According to a recent AP report, Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, has been rewarded with an expanding role, costing taxpayers $184.7 million as of last week, up from $76.7 million a month ago, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced this week.

Isn’t it perhaps a bit ironic that this same man who unyieldingly refused to grant Hans Blix and the UN inspectors a little more time to unearth WMDs is today asking his constituents to be patient and give him more time? More time for what? To plant evidence when none existed?

Americans today are searching for justifications, good and honest Americans who perhaps have begun to feel the stirrings of conscience that something does indeed smell rotten. They cling to reasons for the carnage that took place, reasons such as the people Saddam gassed and killed, the mass graves and torture chambers.

But most of those heinous crimes took place in 1991, while Mr. Bush Sr. had over 600,000 coalition troops a stone’s throw away in the Gulf, yet chose to turn his back on them as the UN Security Council mandate “limited” his role into just setting Kuwait free. An obscene human tragedy, to put it mildly, has taken place at the hands of Mr. Bush Jr. The loss of the innocent, including soldiers from the invading forces who were misled, points toward a crime of huge proportions.

It is a shame that the Presidency of the United States has been tainted by lies and deceit successively over the past decade. From Rice to Rumsfield, from Fleischer to Wolfowitz, lies and deceit have taken over the US government.

Will it in due course make liars out of all their constituents? I pray not.