What’s new? The United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, appears to have always been the sponsor of evil. Was there ever a time when we were the good guys?

The Army now admits that since the First World War we’ve secretly dumped at least 62 million pounds of nerve and mustard gases into the sea off our own coastlines, along with 400,000 chemical filled bombs, land mines, rockets, and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste from World War II and forward. These illegal caches of old weapons are now showing up in places like New Jersey and the military doesn’t even know where all of these rusting containers were dumped. The oceans were considered large enough to absorb it all. (Save the whales)

Today, we’ve attacked and occupied a country where its leader was typified as an evildoer because, under our guidance and support, he used illegal biological weapons against our common enemies and his own people. And we are carrying out this invasion and occupation by using napalm, cluster bombs, white phosphorous and depleted uranium; all weapons that are classified as illegal under the Geneva Convention or the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons because they indiscriminately kill civilian men, women, and children as well as combatants.

Depleted uranium has, by itself, a half life of millions of years and even poisons our own troops. We’ve used it to defeat and displace the leader of a pipsqueak nation who poisoned his own people – a leader who after more than a decade of embargo, UN inspections, and oil-for-food programs, didn’t have a chance of doing us the slightest damage.

And let’s not forget that we still don’t know the origin of the anthrax that was mailed to members of Congress and the media, although the government assures us that they’ve checked all of their own supplies and found nothing missing. Also, that it was Bill Clinton who refused to sign the ban on land mines because they are a necessary component of our military protection.

How far back do you want to go?

Remember the Maine? Sinking this U.S. battleship in Havana Harbor became the justification for delivering the final blow to the failing Spanish Empire under Teddy Roosevelt’s famous charge up San Juan Hill, a victory that got us Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii and the Phillippines, all in a matter of months. A hundred years later, it’s been conclusively proven that the Maine blew up from a boiler explosion, not a mine floated against her hull. It was an inside job or malfunction.

Of course, we gave back Cuba and the Phillippines as long as we could leave dictators favorable to our intentions and policies in charge. Heaven forbid the people should rise up and overthrow these tyrants. Sound familiar?

How about World War II? After our allies and Russia had been begging us for two years to help, we entered the war only after violating thousands of years of naval tradition that had existed from the days of the Phoenicians by putting an entire fleet in one harbor. Then we embarked on a mission to beat Germany in the development of “the bomb” because we knew Germany had Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist of the time and the founder of quantum physics, so it was important to beat them to it. Only after defeating Germany in March of 1945 and once communications between scientists were reestablished did we find that Germany had no plans to develop the bomb. Heisenberg had taken the moral high ground and told Hitler it “couldn’t be done.” Then he accepted the chair of the physics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Munich, deep in the eastern or Russian zone of occupied Germany. Within two years, Russia had the bomb. Gee.

Did anyone call George Washington a “terrorist” or “insurgent” when he rowed his ragtag and uniformless army of revolutionists across the icy Delaware in the dead of night to wipe out the enemy camp at Trenton on Christmas morning as they slept in their beds?

Today, one of the justifications for annihilating people in Iraq is that they don’t wear dog tags, uniforms, or form battle lines like the “redcoats” and the only way to put fear into their hearts and get them to tell us their secrets is to torture them. And it’s all OK because they aren’t real soldiers. Conventions and treaties don’t apply to them. They don’t play fair.

As if on cue, Ahmed Chalabi has returned to Washington as a representative of the newly installed Iraqi government we're so enthused about. And during his visit, another torture chamber has been discovered in the heart of the "safe zone" of Baghdad. This time, the tools of torture and death are being administered by the new Iraqi forces we're so proud of and hope will eventually take over security in their country.

All’s fair in love and war is no longer our slogan – unless it’s being applied to us and the use of illegal weapons.