The first cut is the deepest

This was the newspaper article that set me thinking about Nick Berg. & sometime later, sitting outside, having a cigarette, thinking about lies & deception.....

A long time ago, from a country not so far away, in a war that the current conflict is coming more & more to resemble, at a time when the first unconfirmed rumours of drug-taking by U.S. servicemen were just starting to trickle through, there came a story picked up by all the major agencies & so carried by every major newspaper whose headlines were permutations of the words HEROIN, JUNKIES, DRUG-CRAZED, NORTH VIETNAMESE, COMMUNISTS. The story was about how glassine envelopes of a white powder purported to be heroin were being found on the bodies of dead North Vietnamese soldiers & how the rumours about them being crazed commo junkies impervious to human feelings had finally been proved true. It ran for a day or two, & then died in the press but still remained impressed upon people's minds.

Sometime, about a week later, in the small print paragraphs inside one single newspaper, there was a report that the white powder had been analysed &, surprise,surprise, turned out to be an anti-dysentery medicine completely free of opiates, real or synthetic.

Sometime, a little time later, they also weren't bombing Cambodia.