In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise.
Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself and many of my fellow journalists in Baghdad were covering in the aftermath of a fateful February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
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