The White House is fighting a war in Afghanistan, Iraq and, now, against the Government Accountability Office.

Part I of this sordid tale concerns the Bush administration’s affinity for fake news. On March 11, the White House issued a memo to department heads and executive branch lawyers telling them to ignore a February GAO ruling that the “video news releases” violate federal law that bans covert, government propaganda.

Once you’ve seen the benefits of fake news – with the message bought and paid for by administration officials using taxpayers’ dollars and without the nasty filter of the legitimate media – it’s hard to go back.

The videos look like news reports. They sound like news reports. But they aren’t. They’re produced by public relations outfits with the intent of misleading viewers. Nowhere is it disclosed that the reports are government-sponsored.

Here’s what the GAO’s comptroller general, David Walker, wrote about these make-believe news clips: “They are intended to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public by independent television news organizations. To help accomplish this goal, these stories include actors or others hired to portray reporters’ and may be accompanied by suggested scripts that television news anchors can use to introduce the story during the broadcast.”

TV stations that broadcast these reports aren’t blameless. They knew the source of the material but presented it as straight news anyway. That’s a failure on the part of the television news. But it was made possible by the Bush administration’s tactics, which initiated the deceit.

In Part II of the struggle with the GAO, which is the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, the administration is called to task for its reporting of facts from Iraq.

Despite spending more than $11.5 billion on the training and support of Iraqi military and police forces, the U.S. government does not report reliable data on their status, the GAO found. Numbers are inflated, and information-sharing has simply stopped.

The GAO also found that that the United States and its partners in Iraq have failed to develop a system to assess the readiness of Iraqi forces, and many recruits remain untrained and unvetted. In fact, some are in cahoots with insurgents battling U.S. forces in the country.

The GAO report gathered information from unclassified reports, status updates and other documents from the departments of Defense and State. Investigators found that the insurgency has grown more dangerous and effective since June 2003

To accurately judge progress in the training and equipping of Iraqi forces, the government needs to have access to information. The GAO says it doesn’t, or that it is at least not releasing it. Without reliable data, the GAO concludes, the Department of Defense faces difficulties in withdrawing U.S. forces and turning security over to Iraqis.

In the past, research and investigative services in government – such as the GAO and the Congressional Budget Office – provided unvarnished facts to help the lawmakers set good public policy. Now, like in other situations with other inconvenient facts that don’t back ideological aims, their solid advice is being ignored.