But people thought, the President can't say he knows something if he doesn't. That was persuasive, in a way."Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... If this had been another country, one would have written a convincing analysis that this guy is lying through his teeth, that there are no weapons in Iraq. "The Gulf of Tonkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's very different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war This is an order of magnitude different. It's so blatant."Mr McGovern accuses Mr Bush of an extraordinary act of chutzpah - taking advantage of his authority as President of the United States to make people believe there must be something to his insistent allegations that Iraq possessed potentially devastating weaponry."Many of us felt there had to be something there ...

Now he is co-founder of a group of former CIA employees called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Vips for short.What the Bush White House has done, he believes, is far worse than the false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War - a reported second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin which later turned out not to have taken place. There was nothing vulgar about this; it was just like going to a dance class.''After a disastrous summer season when the scorching heatwave kept customers away, Galeries Lafayette is hoping the initiative will boost sales by attracting clients to the opening of what it claims is the biggest lingerie department in the world - 2,800 metres of floor space devoted to more than 3,000 styles.. "The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years "Once you prostitute it, it's never the same Your credibility never recovers. Your credibility never recovers. "Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past several months has been like watching your daughter being raped."Such is an indication of the extraordinary depth of feeling within the US intelligence community as the Bush administration's basis for the war in Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the dark hint of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida - has been shown to have been built on air.Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan. "But in a big department store like this it seems fine.'' Learning the art "could always come in useful", she said.Jeni Landers, a 29-year-old American who has lived in Paris for 18 months, said: "I consider myself a serious feminist and I think part of being a woman is to be proud of my body. Vital tips given to would-be strippers included wearing high-heeled shoes and not wearing knee-high stockings (very unsexy). There were also instructions on how not to get your skirt tangled up in your shoes.

Another rule of the game was to keep it brief - five minutes maximum."I'd never go to a strip club to take classes,'' said 27-year-old Brigitte de Abreu as she looked through the store's vast selection of thongs. Still less that you have to give your name to a man with a clipboard. But then Paris's Galeries Lafayette was staging no ordinary event yesterday: it was the venue for the world's first in-store striptease classes. The checkpoint at the foot of the escalator was as far as interlopers got. The threat by feminists to disrupt the event never materialised. So it was left to the ticket-holders, mostly well-dressed young women, to progress upwards.Surprisingly, in a city renowned as the world's capital of seduction, there had been no shortage of candidates who felt they needed help with these dark arts. By Friday all 400 places for the event were booked, company officials said.The four half-hour classes given by two professional striptease artists took place behind closed doors.