WASHINGTON - Eight key players in the
George W Bush administration, including the
president himself, made at least 935 false
statements in the run-up to and aftermath of the
invasion of Iraq in 2003.
These are some
of the findings of a mammoth report just released
by the Center for Public Integrity, directed by
founder Chuck Lewis.
Lewis asked his
researchers to track every utterance by the top US
officials made from September 11, 2001, through September
11,
2003, regarding Iraq, "weapons of mass
destruction" (WMD), and the alleged link between
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. These officials
include Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
secretary of state Colin Powell, defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, deputy defense secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice (now secretary of state), and former White
House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott
McClellan.
What this report proves is
remarkable, even though it is now a matter of
public record that there were no WMD in Iraq and
that the attacks against the US in 2001 had no
connection to Saddam. Lewis concludes in a
statement: "Clearly, this Iraq chronology calls
into question the repeated assertions of Bush
administration officials that they were merely the
unwitting victims of bad intelligence. More
broadly, consider the timeless words of the late
historian and Librarian of Congress, Daniel
Boorstin, in his classic 1961 work, The
Image: "We suffer primarily not from our vices
or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are
haunted, not by reality, but by those images we
have put in place of reality. America went to war
nearly five years ago after an orchestrated
campaign of false statements by the nation's top
officials, a war begun under the illusion of an
imminent national security threat. We are haunted
by a war begun, in other words, under false
pretenses."
Lewis spoke with Inter Press
Service's editor-in-chief Miren Gutierrez about
what he says is "an unprecedented, 380,000-word,
online searchable, public and private Iraq war
chronology, the public statements interlaced with
the internal knowledge, discussions, doubts, and
dissent known at the time. What they said publicly
juxtaposed against what they knew internally."
Inter Press Service: You
have tagged how many false statements were made by
these top officials over the two years. How many
exactly? Can you make any comparisons?
Chuck Lewis: We found 935
false statements ... Bush made the most
statements; McClellan the fewest. No one has ever
done this for any other US war, to my knowledge, a
public and private chronology of what they said
versus what they knew internally. There is no
comparison to the past.
IPS:
What do these statements tell us about their
timing? Was it an orchestrated, systematic
operation? How do you know?
CL: The statements were made
most heavily in the weeks leading up to the
Congressional resolution and midterm elections,
and spiked up twice as high in volume between
January and March. Nine hundred and thirty five
false statements, 532 different occasions ... Yes,
it was a systematic operation. We know it now
because the saturation of statements, officials,
all saying essentially the same thing, 935 times,
always on message. It could not possibly be
inadvertent or coincidental.
IPS: Separately, you have
gathered material from more than 25 government,
whistleblower and journalist-reported books about
this subject, published between 9/11 and the end
of 2007. Do any clear patterns emerge from that
exercise? Is there any consensus?
CL: The most disturbing
pattern is that questions were raised internally,
at the White House, Pentagon, State Department and
intelligence community, about these officials'
statements and their ambitions for war, and most
important, about the intelligence being asserted.
There were dissonant views suggesting various key
parts of the "evidence" were a hoax or simply
inconclusive. Repeatedly the top officials were
told not to say things in their speeches,
repeatedly they said them anyway. The biggest news
to me is that the "consensus" was anything but
unanimous, as the White House would like everyone
to believe. Certain pro-war intelligence was
exaggerated and overstated, and cross current
intelligence suggesting there was no imminent
national security threat to the US or other
nations was ignored. All of this can be found
searching and reading through the 380,000-word
public and private Iraq war chronology.
IPS: Bush's government had
made lots of noises about Iran's nuclear program.
However, a December 2007 US intelligence report
concluded that Iran halted work toward a nuclear
weapon in 2003, and is unlikely to be able to
produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb until
2010 to 2015. Can you spot any similarities with
the situation right before the invasion of Iraq?
CL: The human intelligence
sources cited by Powell in his UN speech were not
reliable, doubts had been expressed inside the
administration, especially the intelligence
agencies. But on with the show anyway ... In the
weeks before the Congressional Iraq vote, Bush and
Cheney made flat declarations we now know were
false about the WMD threat in Iraq - and no
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) had been done
by the CIA in years, because it was not seen as a
hotspot or front-burner problem. And the White
House had not requested an NIE ... Intelligence
information in this and other past administrations
is a commodity to be marshaled for political
policy outcomes.
IPS: The
report is part of a book on which you are working
about "truth, power, the state of journalism
today". What is the state of US journalism after
the war in Iraq? Why has this war been different
for journalism from other wars in the past?
CL: Not good, emaciated
economically, thousands of reporters and editors
fired since 2000, still too easily misled, not
sufficiently skeptical of officialdom, of
government, of power. This war based on false
pretenses played out over 18 months, before our
eyes, with all the world to see, with nearly all
of the US news media stenographically repeating
what the Bush administration had said, amplifying
the misinformation with little skepticism or
original reporting. In the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution in 1964, the false pretenses about the
US being fired upon first (the opposite was true),
the Congressional lockstep response to a
president's request for war legislation and
fawning, uncritical media coverage, between
"attacks" and war legislation signed into law,
took exactly one week. Journalism didn't have a
chance - that war was remote, out on the water,
often at night, no reporters nearby, solely
reliant on the White House and Pentagon,
coordinating their messages ...
IPS: All this has happened a
few years ago. Why is it relevant now?
CL: Because the full story
of why the US went to war has still not been fully
told, memoirs and presidential legacies and
mythologies will only grow over time. What we need
are facts, who said what, when, what did they
actually know before they spoke. This chronology
sets that down in one place, accessible and
updatable for years to come.
And it is
relevant because presidents make flawed, human
decisions that affect the nation and the world,
not to mention thousands upon thousands of lives,
and there must be, in a democracy, independent
accountability and factual scrutiny about what is
true, was true, will always be true. What the
world needs most, though, is real-time truth, not
years later. Maybe, because of this debacle of the
past five years, reporters and citizens will
become more skeptical and discerning of
politicians and those in power.
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