David Corn, author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, laments in Capital Games that he keeps coming across more Bush lies that would have been perfect for his book. Fortunately, someone else has been capturing and cataloging the Administration’s mendacity…

[Representative Henry Waxman] just released a report that identifies 237 specific misleading statements made by Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 125 separate public appearances. There’s even an on-line database.

Sure enough, Iraq on the Record is hosted on the house.gov website, and contains a slick interface that lets any average Joe look up Administration misstatements on Iraq by speaker, subject, date, and keyword. The page also links to the Iraq on the Record Report (pdf), a 36 page document that includes a graph entitled “Number of Misleading Statements Made Each Month, March 2002 – January 2004.” There’s a curious spike on the graph around September 2002. One can only assume that the first anniversary of 9/11 was a solemn event for the Administration. They must have been really trying to reach out to America, to promote healing and stuff like that.

The report is packed with footnotes and lists the categories of misleading statements – Claims about the Aluminum Tubes, Claims about Uranium from Africa, and so on – as well as misleading statements by individual officials.

The report is a rib tickler from beginning to end, but the biggest guffaw I got out of it was when I read the Methodology section. The report, which was peer reviewed by two independent experts, was compiled, as mentioned above, “from 125 public statements or appearances in which the five officials discussed the threat posed by Iraq.” Out of those 125 events, 237 misleading statements made it into the report. However, the authors tell us that…

To be conservative, the Special Investigations Division excluded hundreds of statements by the five officials that many observers would consider misleading. For example, the five officials made numerous claims that Iraq “had” stockpiles of chemical weapons. Many of these statements were misleading in that they implied that Iraq possessed these stockpiles currently and did not acknowledge the doubts of intelligence experts. Nevertheless, these statements were not included in the database when they were expressed in the past tense because Iraq did possess chemical weapons at least as late as the early 1990s and used them during the 1980s.

Investigators also excluded scores of statements of certainty that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” prior to the war. To many observers, these statements would be misleading because they implied that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons without acknowledging the divisions among intelligence officials about whether this was the case. The Special Investigations Division excluded these general “weapons of mass destruction” assertions, however, because of the ambiguity inherent in the phrase. [My emphasis.]

What else do you have to do to prove to people that the Administration lied its way into war? I mean, really, what do you have to do to wake people up? Doesn’t anybody care? Is there no shame? Is there no one to ask the question of George Bush, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Hit & Run: Lying About Drugs OK, Says GAO

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) wonders, to the General Accounting Office (GAO), whether it’s OK that the Office of National Drug Control Policy uses taxpayer money to spread lies about drug use in order to influence state elections. GAO says, sure.

Short background: In November of 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) sent a letter to all local prosecutors in the United States. The letter contained certain statements about marijuana use that were claimed by the ONDCP to be “truth,” but several of which are false or at least seriously disputed by reputable thinkers on the subject. Unfortunately, the statistics in the ONDCP’s letter are not sourced, but you can read one response to the points raised in the letter here.

So, about a year ago, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) send a letter to the GAO asking that they investigate the actions of the ONDCP in sending this letter in relation to whether the agency “violated the ban on using federal funds for ‘publicity or propaganda.’” The GAO responded (PDF) with a six-page letter that said, in short, that the ONDCP is basically just fulfilling its mandate to rid the country of drugs, and if lies happen to be a part of that, that’s not something the GAO can do anything about.

So it seems to me that all the GAO is saying is that they can’t stop the ONDCP from doing what its doing based on any violation of GAO policies. (Though I do wonder why lying isn’t against GAO policy… perhaps because the GAO shouldn’t be in the position of making that call?) The GAO response points to the ONDCP’s “statutory role,” which is to oppose efforts to legalize marijuana. So, if you read between the lines, the GAO is saying that Congress is going to have to be the one to squelch the ONDCP. Which means that some Congressperson is going to have to actually take a stand against drug prohibition. Any wagers on when that’ll happen? (We’ve stopped accepting bets on “When Hell Freezes Over.”)

What this points out, then, is that the ONDCP isn’t a neutral body (big duh) but a propaganda office (big duh). Rather than okaying lying, the GAO has only pointed out the innate, federally mandated hypocrisy of the drug policy.

Lying to enforce policy isn’t okay, but an even bigger problem is that we never engaged in sufficient debate or study before adopting this drug policy, and in fact the kind of research that might enlighten us on the real dangers of drugs, if any, has been directly hampered by US drug policy (see here, for example).

I’m looking forward to seeing this kind of debate shape up – how do we make sure that government agencies are as value-neutral as possible? Or should they even attempt to be?

You know Richard Hoagland, right? He’s the guy that claims that there is or was life on Mars, as evidenced by things like the Face on Mars. He also says that NASA is covering up the truth about this and other so-called evidence.

Well, watch out, Richard Hoagland, because now the real scientists are striking back. Space.com gave us this article about myth-debunker Philip Plait, who’s giving Hoagland the intellectual spanking he so richly deserves.

War of the Words: Scientist Attacks Alien Claims

Plait has two words for the latest claims of alien objects on Mars. The first is “garbage.” The second and more scientific word is “pareidolia.” This is the same phenomenon that makes us see animals or other familiar objects in clouds.

“It’s pretty common,” Plait said of pareidolia. “Just a few months ago, a water spot on my shower curtain took on the uncanny form of the face of Vladimir Lenin.” Plait took a picture of the liquid Lenin and uses it illustrate his contention that, though objects on the surface of Mars can sometimes take on interesting shapes, they are just a bunch of rocks.

“Hoagland’s claims irritate me because he is promoting uncritical thinking,” Plait told SPACE.com . “He doesn’t want you to think about what you’re seeing. He’s trying to bamboozle you into believing what he’s saying.”

Critical thinking is the foundation of science, but Plait thinks it’s also an important skill for anyone trying to navigate modern society. “Hoagland is eroding away at that ability.”

Oh, yeah! Critical thinking. I’d totally forgotten about that.

In the age of instant access to information, it should be relatively easy to check the validity of claims like the ones Hoagland makes. The problem is the desperate lack of critical thinking education. This is something I’ve talked about writing more about on this blog, and I fully intend to. In the meantime… You go, Plait!

By way of Brad DeLong we find this…

Center for American Progress – In Their Own Words: Iraq’s ‘Imminent’ Threat

The Bush Administration is now saying it never told the public that Iraq was an “imminent” threat, and therefore it should be absolved for overstating the case for war and misleading the American people about Iraq’s WMD. Just this week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan lashed out at critics saying “Some in the media have chosen to use the word ‘imminent’. Those were not words we used.” But a closer look at the record shows that McClellan himself and others did use the phrase “imminent threat” – while also using the synonymous phrases “mortal threat,” “urgent threat,” “immediate threat”, “serious and mounting threat”, “unique threat,” and claiming that Iraq was actively seeking to “strike the United States with weapons of mass destruction” – all just months after Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that Iraq was “contained” and “threatens not the United States.

I’m a little annoyed that the site is long on quotes and short on actual sources. I tried to track down a couple of the quotes and I could only find them repeated on blogs. I’d like to believe this is true. I’ll send them an email and see if they can’t come up with some sources for these. I’ll let you know what happens.

The nature of truth is something that fascinates me. Read Aaron Swartz’s posts Up With Facts: Finding the Truth in WikiCourt and Down is Up: What This Stuff Is, then head over to Calpundit for Conservative Lysenkoism….The Definitive Report (mentioned previously at this blog).

Here’s my comment on Aaron’s first post here, with some reflection on and by the others…

[Update 2/23/04 7:49 pm] Here’s a very interesting and thoughtful response to Aaron’s “Wiki Court” proposal.