Explain It To Me Again?

Why does the Bush administration feel obligated to lie to the American public?

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, August 25th:

The road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called 'werewolves'—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, same day:

One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. ... They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum.

The truth, though, is far different. As Daniel Benjamin at Slate points out, "the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero." In fact, the so-called 'werewolves' were mostly terrified teenaged conscripts who were only successful in murdering the mayor of Aachen—and that assassination occurred during the war, not after it had ended. The fact is that there was no organized post-war resistance; in fact, there was essentially no post-war resistance at all, organized or not.

Could Condi and the Donald be trying to deflect attention from the fact that more U.S. troops have been killed since the end of the war than were killed in the war itself? Could they perhaps be trying to distort the historical record to cover up the fact that not one but apparently two different groups have risen up to oppose the U.S. occcupation of Iraq?

One would hope that they would know better.