and
 promptly proceeds to bury the story at the bottom of page 32!

The newspaper of reference does more to hide the fact that five top international weapons experts discount the theory of the WMD threat being nothing but an infamous scare tactic. This it does by presenting the major news item on its "media" page as the matter-of-fact review of the latest issue of a periodical currently on the newsstands (actually, available mainly by subscription). Obviously, Le Monde considers the new fashion of fictitious documentaries and Prisma’s new TV channels (among other items placed above the WMD article) of far wider interest than the possibility that the ravings and rants against George W Bush may be unfair.

And needless to say, the title as well as the subhead is low-key to the extreme (The Issue of Iraq’s Weaponry Is Not Clear-Cut: In the review Politique ÉtrangÚre, five experts keep the debate on the existence of WMD alive).

And no wonder: the gist of the April 2, 2004, article — "just the facts, Ma’am", if you prefer — undermines, undoes, and shatters the entire controversy that has been damaging Bush and Tony Blair with regards to their alleged lies when they mentioned Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as a reason for launching the March 2003 attack on the butcher of Baghdad’s régime. Insofar as the issue of fibs must be addressed at all, the article not only states that if "outrageous lies" were made, they were made by the dictator’s top henchmen (when answering questions by UN weapons inspectors); it also suggests that to go around carping about Dubya’s alleged lies is extremely misleading, to say the least, something which could be called a lie in itself.