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?”

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Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 @ 11:47 pm Truth Matters
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