Bush's address was punctuated with deception, horse hockey and propagandistic drivel throughout, again reinforcing a characteristic that was born in 2003 when Bush told the nation that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger , a claim the CIA had informed the administration was based on falsified documents ten months before it was included in the speech.

Amidst the cacophony of bullshit came this belter.

"We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."

According to numerous public officials, terror experts and intelligence personnel, this is simply not true.

Bush's is referring to an announcement made on February 9th last year in which he made the claim that an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002. The release of the news that the plot had been prevented by means of tapping terrorist suspect's phones was politically timed to coincide with the start of legal hearings on the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

Fox "News," the White House's PR mouthpiece, immediately began showing footage from the movie Independence Day, in which the famous tower is destroyed.

Hours after the announcement, the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, went public with comments of his absolute bewilderment concerning the alleged plot.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody."

The day after the announcement, twenty three separate intelligence experts, all with either CIA, FBI, NSA or military credentials, both in and out of service, angrily disputed Bush's remarks about the alleged L.A. plot, with one going as far as saying that the President was "full of shit."

The New York Daily News cited another senior counterterrorism official who said: "There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage."

The Washington Post also dismissed the alleged plot as nothing more than talk, noting that no actual attack plan had been thwarted.

The LA attack plot arose from the same discredited informant who said that Washington and New York financial institutions were being targeted, which led the White House to raise the terror alert right as the 2004 election campaign was beginning.

"The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world," said a veteran field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington."

In June 2004 John Pistole, the FBI's counterterrorism director, said he was "not sure what [the CIA] was referring to," after a CIA counterterrorism official who testified under the alias "Ted Davis" said that the US had prevented aviation attacks against the east and west coast.

Questions were raised at the White House press briefing as to the noticeably convenient announcement of a four year old alleged foiled plot in relation to the furore about domestic spying.

"But is it just a coincidence? You had February 6th circled on the calendar for the hearings, the NSA hearings. Is it just a pure coincidence that this comes out today?" asked one journalist.

"Scott, I wanted to just ask a follow-up about the LA plot. Is there something missing from this story, a practical application, a few facts? Because if you want to commandeer a plane and fly it into a tower, if you used shoe bombs, wouldn't you blow off the cockpit? Or is there something missing from this story?" asked another.

There was indeed a great deal missing from this story in that it was nothing more than hot air manufactured by the Bush administration at the most politically expedient time, a psychological fraud unleashed on the public in order to silence critics of the illegal NSA surveillance spying program.