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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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January 23rd,
2008 - False Pretenses |
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By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith Center for Public Integrity January 23, 2008 Following 9/11, President
Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully
orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. President George W. Bush and
seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick
Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years
following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an
exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of
an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in
the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. On at least 532 separate
occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush
and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell,
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries
Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al
Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush
administration's case for war. It is now beyond dispute
that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful
ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government
investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq
Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam
Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort
to restart it. In short, the Bush
administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information
that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action
against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most
opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame
the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this
first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric. President Bush, for example,
made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and
another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of
State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244
false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about
Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false
statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with
48), and McClellan (with 14). The massive database at the
heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top
officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or
should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database
includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as
official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news
organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also
interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books,
articles, speeches, and interviews. Consider, for example, these
false public statements made in the run-up to war: - On August 26, 2002, in an
address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney
flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein
now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to
use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact,
former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went
well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official,
referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction
was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' " - In the closing days of
September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the
use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio
address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is
rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British
government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45
minutes after the order is given. ... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb,
and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days
later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - an analysis that
hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it
unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it. - In July 2002, Rumsfeld had
a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with
Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that
same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by
CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence
demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda."
What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the
regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is
unclear." - On May 29, 2003, in an
interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons
of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as
journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of
civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had
concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons.
The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the
labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons. - On January 28, 2003, in
his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons
production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the
intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase
agreement "probably is a hoax." - On February 5, 2003, in an
address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're
giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite
some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out,
however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided
false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named
"Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious
about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda
detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the
CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi
told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any
information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid
being handed over to [a foreign government]." The false statements
dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a
war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even
higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion. It was during those critical
weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union
address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation. For all 935
false statements, including when and where they occurred, go to the search
page for this project; the methodology used for this analysis is explained
here. In addition to their
patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made
hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they
implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other
administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican
leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the
Washington echo chamber. The cumulative effect of
these false statements - amplified by thousands of news stories and
broadcasts - was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost
impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some
journalists - indeed, even some entire news organizations - have since
acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too
deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the
wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent"
validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq. The "ground truth"
of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit
grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush
acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And
on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the
nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that
Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass
destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and
blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations
believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the
intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for
the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from
power." Bush stopped short, however,
of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly
attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the
actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor
intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies. On the other hand, a growing
number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have
publicly - and in some cases vociferously - accused the president and his
inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the
end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information
and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this
nation's allies on their way to war. Bush and the top officials
of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare
of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of
repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been
no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on
inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has
focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government's pre-war
intelligence - not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability
of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials -
Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz - have testified before Congress about
Iraq. Short of such review, this
project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the
U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated
assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims
of bad intelligence. Above all, the 935 false
statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two
all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What
did they know, and when did they know it? External link: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/ |