The flap over how the falsehood about uranium purchases from Niger made it into the president's State of the Union message should not obscure what for me is the most troubling fact: Key members of the Bush administration, convinced in their hearts that America needed to destroy Saddam Hussein, thought it reasonable to exaggerate the threat and deliberately stretch the facts in order to sell the American people on that necessity.

The cleanup, fix-up, coverup effort now underway is an attempt to say to the electorate: This was an aberration; we do trust you with the truth.

Except they don't. The Justice Department is in the midst of a mighty campaign to blunt criticism of the Patriot Act, the key legislative response to 9/11 and, according to civil libertarians of various stripes, a major incursion on our constitutional rights.

The truth -- at any rate what I suspect to be the truth -- is that they believe it may be necessary for ordinary folks to give up some of their civil liberties (temporarily, of course) in order to facilitate the fight against terrorism.

But that's not what they say. They are insisting that the Patriot Act -- in particular its controversial Section 215 -- is no threat whatever to Americans, and a threat to foreign nationals only to the extent that they are involved with terrorism or terrorists.

To the extent that a defendant's nationality now determines the quality of justice due him, Moussaoui - citizen of a country that, notoriously, did not support the U.S. war on Iraq - loses out. (Indeed, the jingoistic Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling for Moussaoui's trial before a military commission that described the fact of his French citizenship as "an added bonus.")

But in making this choice, the Administration should be aware of its ultimate consequences. If Moussaoui, without having had access to potentially exculpatory testimony, were to be sentenced to death by a military tribunal, France would not be alone in condemning the United States. The entire world would condemn the proceedings, and rightly so.