The press gives Bush a free ride on his lies

Columnist Nicholas Kristof has advanced the story more than the Times news staff. The inimitable Maureen Dowd declared, ''The president and Condi Rice can shuffle the shells and blame George Tenet, but it smells of mendacity.'' Mendacity is a polite synonym for lying. Even Bush's toughest critics find it hard to print the words, ''Bush lies.'' But that's the larger story

Boston Globe OpEd

White House silenced experts who questioned Iraq intelligence info six months before invasion

"Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote this week. "A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation."

In September, USA Today reported that "the Bush administration is expanding on and in some cases contradicting U.S. intelligence reports in making the case for an invasion of Iraq, interviews with administration and intelligence officials indicate."

Online Journal article


Key points: Inspectors' report

Inspections were not free from friction, but inspectors were able to perform professional no-notice inspections and increase surveillance.

[...]

The IAEA had investigated Iraqi attempts to buy high-quality aluminium tubes. No evidence had been found that the Iraqis had tried to use these for other purposes than the stated one - for engineering rockets. The process was "well documented".

The IAEA has concluded that the efforts to buy aluminium tubes were not likely to be related to attempts to manufacture gas centrifuges for enriching uranium. But it will continue investigate the issue.

On the subject of magnets - also suspected of use in a nuclear programme - experts had verified that none could be used directly to produce nuclear material.

BBC article


Clock runs out on mendacity at the Bush White House

What’s gotten those 16 words so much attention is that they are just the clearest case so far in which the administration’s mendacity and recklessness with the truth can be demonstrated in a straightforward manner. What makes them so important is that they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

For much of the past year, the press stood by in a state of mystification as administration officials peddled all sorts of claims that anyone who’d been closely following the debate had to know were either wildly overblown or just downright false.

The Hill article

In the final analysis, the Bush adminstration began agitating for war against Iraq before the dust settled on Black Tuesday. Taken in total, there was a relentless, unwavering, and largely successful attempt to scare the American public about an immediate threat from Iraq, and sell the idea of war against that country, despite the fact that there is not a single, clear-cut piece of evidence that Iraq posed any military threat at all to the United States of America.

In plain language, such willful attempts to deceive are known as lies.

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