President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are adamant that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians last month. They have thus far provided the public scant hard information to back up their claims. Even Obama ally Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) characterized the evidence in a Sunday Capitol Hill classified briefing as "circumstantial."

Perhaps the Assad regime did commit this brutal attack. But can we expect the U.S. government to be honest about an alleged atrocity which the president is invoking to sanctify his foreign policy?

History is not reassuring on that score. During World War II, the Roosevelt administration worked ceaselessly to present Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a friendly quasi-democratic type - "Uncle Joe." However, in 1940, after the Soviets seized much of Poland, the Soviets executed 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest in western Russia. When the German army discovered the mass grave site in 1943, the Roosevelt administration rushed to blame the killings on the Nazis.