Study on Bush’s Iraq Deception and Lies: Full of Deception and Lies
The Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, and other news organizations — not to mention political bloggers from both the left and right –were buzzing Wednesday morning over an online report issued by The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and a related organization, The Fund for Independence in Journalism (FIJ).
The report, entitled Iraq: The War Card-Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, claims that President Bush and top administration officials were complicit in issuing hundreds of false statements regarding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the 9/11/2001 terror attacks in a run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.
An overview published Tuesday evening stated:
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.
And later:
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.
Critics in the conservative blogosphere were quick to note that CPI and FIJ were heavily funded by left-leaning foundations and individuals, and therefore may be acting in partisan interests.
Supporters of the report in the left-wing blogosphere were quick to trot out variations of the “Bush lied, people died” meme, stating that the study only reinforced what they’ve believed for several years.
Beyond the partisanship lies an essential question: is the two-year study based upon a legitimate, objective methodology?
The Methodology page of the report’s web site states:
Over the past two and a half years, researchers at the Fund for Independence in Journalism have sought to document every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding (1) Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and (2) Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Although both had been frequently cited as rationales for the U.S. war in Iraq, by 2005 it was known that these assertions had not, in fact, been true.
The centerpiece of this project is an exhaustive, searchable, and robustly indexed database of all public statements on the two topics by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. These statements were painstakingly collected from the websites of the White House, State Department, and Defense Department as well as from transcripts of interviews and briefings, texts of speeches and testimony, prepared statements, and the like.
Also included are statements in the same two categories that appeared in major newspapers and on television programs, were part of public statements by other officials, or were contained in government studies or reports, books, and the like from September 11, 2001, to December 31, 2007. Secondary material from reports and books was included in the two-year database only in cases where specific dates were available. Other noteworthy material was included for context and completeness.
As a general rule, only the relevant excerpts of public statements have been included in the database; deleted material is marked “[text omitted].” (In a case of a lengthy press conference in which Iraq is mentioned only briefly, for example, only the relevant passage is included.) Where deleting text might have rendered the remaining material misleading or difficult to understand, longer passages were left intact. And in some cases public pronouncements of Bush administration officials that did not include direct statements were included if they provided useful context.
As for working definitions, CPI and FIJ chose the following:
“False Statements” – Definitions
In press briefings, interviews, and other question-and-answer venues, each answer was categorized for purposes of this study as a distinct statement. In speeches or briefings, only when one statement clearly ends was the next statement considered, and then only if a “buffer” of at least 50 words separated the statements.
Direct false statements. False statements by the eight Bush administration officials were counted as “direct”-and included in the total count of false statements-when they specifically linked Iraq to Al Qaeda or referenced Iraq’s contemporaneous possession, possible possession, or efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons). In addition, any use of the verb “disarm” was categorized as a direct statement because of the literal meaning of the word. (Example: “Saddam Hussein has got a choice, and that is, he can disarm.”) These false statements can be found within the passages that are highlighted in yellow in the project database.
Indirect false statements. Statements were classified as “indirect” if they did not specifically link Iraq to Al Qaeda but alleged, for example, that Iraq supported or sponsored terrorism or terrorist organizations, or if they referred to Iraq’s former possession of weapons of mass destruction or used such general phrases, for example, as “dangerous weapons.” These indirect false statements are not included in the total count of 935.
The FIJ and CPI researchers may have purposefully compromised the integrity of the report by creating the definition “false statements” and sub-categories “direct false statements” and “indirect false statements,” which seem to be predicated upon the ultimate veracity of the statements after several years of hindsight and study.
They did not, as it would seem to be fair, base the study upon what was known at the time in the 2001-2003 run-up to the war in Iraq. The premise for the report seems to be reflected in the title of the report, that there was orchestrated deception on behalf of senior Bush Administration officials, not statements made upon inaccurate or misleading intelligence information as events unfolded.
Comparative framing analysis suggests that this report purposefully constructed a point of view that encouraged readers to interpret the “facts” in a particular manner.
Dr. Jim A. Kuypers, an assistant professor of Political Communication and Rhetoric & Public Address at Virginia Tech University, is an expert in comparative framing analysis and is author of %%AMAZON=074253653X Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age%% and A Comparative Framing Analysis of Embedded and Behind-the-Lines Reporting on the 2003 Iraq War, published in Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, Volume 6, Issue 1 October 2005.
Asked by PJM to comment upon the CPI/FIJ study’s stated methodology and definitions, Dr Kuypers wrote that the study was compromised by biases and prejudiced assumptions from the outset:
The study does not appear to take into account the context of the time the original statements were uttered. Instead, it seems to start with an assumption that the administration deliberately mislead America to war. If the study had started with the assumption that the Bush administration and the intelligence community had misinterpreted intelligence reports, then these statements CPI collected could be interpreted in a very different manner. The study also fails to mention that a large majority in Congress, including top ranking Democrats, believed the intelligence assessments, and were briefed in more detail than the president about the situation. They still supported action against Hussein. It would be interesting to see the study enlarged to include statements made by those Democrats who voted for military action.
Their “methodology” is short on detail, but I infer that they (who, how many?) actually performed a sort of “content analysis” using very broad categories: Direct false statements — “when [the administration] specifically linked Iraq to Al Qaeda or referenced Iraq’s contemporaneous possession, possible possession, or efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons). In addition, any use of the verb ‘disarm’ was categorized as a direct statement because of the literal meaning of the word.” The other category, Indirect false statements–”Statements were classified as “indirect” if they did not specifically link Iraq to Al Qaeda but alleged, for example, that Iraq supported or sponsored terrorism or terrorist organizations, or if they referred to Iraq’s former possession of weapons of mass destruction or used such general phrases, for example, as “dangerous weapons.” These indirect false statements are not included in the total count of 935.”
Essentially, then, someone (we don’t know who or how many) read through transcripts and speeches looking for quotes that would in anyway support the a priori belief that the Bush administration misled Americans.
On the one hand, this looks like a sloppy study; on the other, the results do fall within the categories above, it is just the “spin” or interpretation put on them that causes one to wonder about motivation.
The “study” is based upon spin, false pretenses, cherry-picked statements, and artificial limitations to the breath of scope which excludes similar conclusions reached by the Clinton administration and Democrats and Republicans alike in both houses of Congress, and assessments from foreign governments.
The study’s “Key False Statements” page is as much an indictment of the lack of integrity from The Center for Public Integrity, and lack of independence from The Fund for Independence in Journalism, as it is an assault on the Bush Administration.
The CPI’s “Key False Statements” report stated, for example:
In a speech on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney flatly asserted that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet later wrote that Cheney’s statement “went well beyond what our own analysis could support.” Tenet was not alone within the CIA. As one of his top deputies later told journalist Ron Suskind: “Our reaction was, ‘Where is he getting this stuff from? Does he have a source of information that we don’t know about?’”
As Dr. Kuyper notes in response, “Perhaps the question to ask is why did the administration believe so strongly that Iraq had WMDs? Instead, CPI contextualizes by paraphrase and citing an anonymous source. Alternatively, Cheney’s statement could have been framed as running congruent to many members of Congress and British Intelligence.”
Again, another erroneous “Key False Statement” from CPI’s study:
In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, President Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
But as early as March 2002, there was uncertainty within the intelligence community regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq. That month, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research published an intelligence assessment titled, “Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq Is Unlikely.” In July 2002, the Energy Department concluded that there was “no information indicating that any of the uranium shipments arrived in Iraq” and suggested that the “amount of uranium specified far exceeds what Iraq would need even for a robust nuclear weapons program.” In August 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency made no mention of the Iraq-Niger connection in a paper on Iraq’s WMD capabilities.
Note that President Bush said that Hussein sought uranium, not that a transaction or transfer had been completed. Seeking to complete a task and actually completing it are two entirely separate things. This statement by the President is in no way contradicted by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research assessment, nor the Energy Department’s conclusion that no shipments arrived in Iraq. This simply was not a false statement–but it was yet more evidence of misleading allegations from the CPI/FIJ authors.
Other claims made in the “Key False Statements” page are dubious in nature, presenting examples of bad intelligence, selective interpretations, and conflicting analyses that were encountered as events happened as willful deceptions by administration officials. The CPI/FIJ authors compiled their “research” through a lens of hindsight none of the actors had at the time, artificially framed the statements as either “direct false statements” or “indirect false statements,” and pushed political advocacy as legitimate research.
In an ironic twist, the greatest dishonesty captured in the CPI/FIJ study seems to be traced back to its authors.
Bob Owens blogs at Confederate Yankee.
Sadly people will only hear what they want to hear. Common sense, logic and above all, reason, has long been a thing of the past when it comes to the anti-Bush brigade.
The consequences of their hang-ups over Bush will cost us all dearly I suspect.
This “study” is just another in an endless string of manufactured news items and events that serve one purpose: To put the Liberal/Democrat talking points back on the front page as “news” when in fact it belongs on the editorial page.
I very much appreciate the analysis done in this article, but what’s really needed is some – If you will excuse a Liberal new-age term – Deconstruction. Analysis and refutation of the facts on their face does nothing to reveal the bigger picture – The efforts of the Liberal cabal in the media not just to report on events that happen but to manufacture events to their own specifications with the expressed purpose of furthering a Liberal agenda.
The cabal knows their first duty is to disseminate this custom manufactured “news” as fast and as uncritically as possible, and by the time the truth is ready to stand up and be revealed the next fake manufactured event will be ready to take flight so the truth will be ignored by the MSM as usual.
Is it any wonder that the approval ratings of the media are even lower than congress and the president?
Note that President Bush said that Hussein sought uranium, not that a transaction or transfer had been completed.
Another key point, is that within the famous 16 words, it leads in with “The Britsh government…”. The British government has stood never backed off their claim, built upon a number of intelligence sources, that uranium was sought after in Africa by Saddam’s Iraq. Both the Senate intelligence committee and a special British commission in 2004 basically exonerates the sentence from the SotU as having validity.
Other indications of the bias are the time frame selected — starting with 9/11/2001 — and the people they chose to examine. Why not also look at the statements of the previous president and other high-ranking politicians from the opposition party? They were saying the same things; were they also (as the “study” implies) lying to mislead the country into war?
If someone could get hold of the inevitable PR Newswire release that announced this “study”, I have no doubt that the press reports would turn out to be mostly re-writes of it, and that anyone quoted in those stories is either quoted in the press release, or is listed as a contact in it.
I heard these mutts get interviewed on NPR. It went on for minute after minute, with no background or context and nothing revealed about this Soros hit squad.
I had to turn off NPR when I could stand no more.
“In a speech on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney flatly asserted that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”"
This is claimed by the study to be a lie.
Many rounds of chemical munitions have been located and destroyed in Iraq since the outset of the war in 2003.
The statement that Iraq possessed WMD in 2002, and even up to the invasion and beyond is factually accurate.
Just because the numbers found were far less than posited, and the weapons found appeared to predate the first Iraq War does nothing to negate the fact that Cheney’s statement was true.
What makes this study significant isn’t the bias and attempt to frame an argument a particular way. What makes this study is the timing and I don’t mean the proximity to an election:
Consider if a study has been released say during the first President Bush’s term or President Reagan term. This would be a week long story easy, with commentators going after it and pressing the White House for comment and clarifications. The Papers would be driving the story and the administration would be on defense for a very long time.
If say President Bush has been elected as early as 1996 and the Iraq war started in 1998 it would be pretty much the same thing. An unstoppable juggernaut with the power to at the very least damage the war effort or at “best” bring down an administration.
However with the power of the internet all of that changes. It took under a day for internet bloggers to trace the study to its roots and show it for what it is, and these bloggers doing that such as Mr. Owens have credibility particularly since they were able to do the same with “Rathergate” and Scott Beauchamp so they have a record.
This assures that although the study will be used as a propaganda tool among those who already believe its conclusions, or in unfree countries where contrary information is restricted it will have little or no effect on the administration or the conduct of the war.
That is the power of the internet, it is the ability of the common man to see behind the curtain, combined with the cultural norm of freedom that allow inquiry. We can see things for what they are and make an informed choice to disagree or agree with such conclusions.
We may not realize how lucky we are to have that combination of technology and freedom and the western culture of inquiry passed down from Ancient Greece to use it. We only have to choose to use it and accept the responsibility that knowledge brings.
Who funds The Center for Public Integrity?
Direct from the horse’s mouth:
“Full disclosure: The Open Society Institute, which was founded by George Soros, is a funder of the Center for Public Integrity.”
http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=196
George Soros is a lying propagandist. One is wise to suspect any so-called report that is released by an organization he is funding.
Here we go again – diehard apologists for Bush-Cheney and naive fools spinning reality. OF COURSE the administration knew there was only a small chance that Saddam had the kind of arsenal that would justify a unilateral attack and invasion of Iraq. What part of OIL and LAND GRAB do you find hard to understand?
Committed fascists continue to bend over backwards and contort their arguments into shining examples of twisted logic to defend Bush-Cheney. Yet, at the same time they will use any small excuse to demonize the Democrats and anyone even slightly left of center. I hope people like you understand that your intentional ignorance is destroying America.
What’s amazing about this “study” only mentions twice (and in the bullet points only) the one man critical to both the Clinton and Bush administrations, George Tenet. He isn’t even listed as one of the key people in all of this, yet it was the intelligence from the agency he led that determined both administrations to militarily assault Iraq under Saddam (Clinton with missiles, and doing so without congressional authorization; and Bush with the 2003 invasion). This ignoring of Tenet’s impact completely invalidates this report and adds to the proof that it is nothing more than a political hatchet job.
It’s amazing to watch such a dubious “study” get fed into one outlet and then spread across all the rest of the MSM. It only takes one entry point, one reporter at a major media company and nonsense like this “study” becomes “fact”. Yellow journalism at its worst?
Ray Robison is the author of Both In One Trench: Saddam’s Secret Terror Documents
http://www.bothinonetrench.com
If the NRA had funded a pro-Gun study, it’s association with such and whatever results of the study that emerged would be loudly linked and decried from every MSM rooftop.
Huh? Does anybody dispute that? How can a statement which is undeniably true become “indirectly false”?
Hey, for the left, facts be damned. All that matters is establishing a narrative.
What a complete and utter crock! Let’s accept for a moment that these hacks are correct in defining a lie as “any statement made in the belief that it is true, but which ultimately cannot be proved.” It would not be difficult to literally bury all of the Bush administration’s statements with comparable statements made by the Clinton administration and other Democrats. THE WORLD BELIEVED SADDAM HAD WMD!
So were we better off having leadership that believed Saddam was dangerous, but did nothing about it except lob a few Tomahawks his way?
This study has all the credibility of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study that overstated Iraqi deaths by a factor of 10 or so. At what point does this deliberate distortion against our nation’s security interests go beyond simply rough and tumble politics and enter the realm of perfidy?
It is becoming clear to me, and perhaps others, that George Soros should not be a US citizen.
Given his background, one would have expected him to eschew the Marxist dogma and anti-American program his “philanthropy” obviously is.
What is also clear, is that this Hungarian born gutter trash would be dead now had he tried this crap in the Eastern Europe he came from.
It is incredible to me that this man, to whom America has offered every advantage, should show such animus to the basic freedoms that US citizens clain by right of birth.
Revocation of his citizenship and deportation to the Stalinist nation of his choice is the remedy I would seek, had I the authority to do so.
Evil, underhanded falsehood, brought to you by George Soros, The father of liberal liars, who obey his every distorted whim as the brainwashed robots that they are, eager to please their evil master or suffer excommunication from the First Church of Media Bias and be cut off from the filthy lucre of his all powerful bankroll.
Critics in the conservative blogosphere were quick to note that CPI and FIJ were heavily funded by left-leaning foundations and individuals, and therefore may be acting in partisan interests.
Why not cut to the chase and say “funded by George Soros” ?
As was the bulk of the 2006 Iraqi deaths study from Johns Hopkins, published in The Lancet.
As are so many other events, reports, “studies”, whatever…whose source for funding/reason for existing at all seem to come out of thin air but really don’t ?
http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275526219598836#
Interesting that the Soros-funded CIP hatchet job didn’t see it relevant to include statements like these from a certain political party…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_CepS8u9wQ
…wonder why.
For those who imagine that the new media somehow trumps the old media, all you have to do is watch stories like this and see how they are treated. The “Big Lie” technique predicts, and we can all see, that even if people think the media lie and act out of a political agenda (>75% in a poll), they will still be strongly swayed by that same media.
This study will simply help to sustain the false history that the Iraq war was predicated on lies, and will add to the overall public distrust of public officials which has led to so much cynicism and the desire for “change.” Obama must love it.
BTW, 60 minuts just “revealed” that the interrogation of Saddam showed that he intentionally worked to create an impression that he had operational WMD’s right up until he was overthrown. This little fact has actually been available for 3 or 4 years, and is one more thing that puts lie to this “Bush Lied, People Died” fantasy.
Bob,
Awesome breakdown and smackdown.
As the manager of a site about Saddam and al Qaeda/terrorism, http://www.regimeofterror.com, I was particularly disgusted with the latest stunt from the liberal sockpuppets at the AP.
I actually have called them about seven times since this story “broke” as their lede story at AP.org and have let multiple editors hear what I think of their partisan dishonesty.
Funny they never wanna hear about the hundreds of Saddamists in custody who were caught working with al Qaeda, many of whom admitted prewar links or the hundreds of WMD shells that WERE found in Iraq.
It’s quite ironic that some of the most dishonest people have the audacity to challenge the honesty of others, and of course only challenge the honesty of one political party while both were saying the same thing.
The whole thing reeks of an unprofessional and partisan hit job.
In the book, Zinni writes: “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.”
If you have not read, “Fiasco” by Thomas Ricks, The Iraq Study Group Report, or “The Israel Lobby,” Mearsheimer and Walt, “Imperial Hubris” Michael Scheuer, you will not understand that in fact they DID directly mislead America into a war based on false premises. To state otherwise is mere foolishness and stupidity, and you might well believe the laughable statements presented in this article.
Iraq could not even sustain a conventional war against the US, much let alone deliver WMD on US soil, idiots. “What we knew then, what we know now,” is ludicrous to suggest as some type of excuse to cover up for the EXACT individuals that should be in jail or hung for high crimes and misdemeanors. Rove, Wolfowitz and Feith should be in prison for treason because they are the ones that pushed the war into existence, are you all stupid enough not to even face the bare facts? Are the dissenters going to state that the insurgency was the fault of the Iraqi government, or of Paul Bremer? What of ZERO plans made for the occupation of Iraq? What of the possibly over 1/2 million dead? The lancet report is just one report, others are higher. What of the millions that are refugees that can not even return to their homes? What of the 1,000′s of dead American GI’s led into a trap, and multi 1,000s with life changing disabilities? What of Israel using American munitions to destroy Lebanon, over 2 soldiers while OUR soldiers where in a destabilized Muslim country…???? Yet you sick clowns make excuses for a president that is the worst in American History? A true fool ready to attack another country that has a REAL army when we are loosing ourselves in Iraq as it is…A president that kisses the ass of Israel before serving our country?
What of the constitution that guarantees personal posterity, common defense, etc…How do you get those by invading a country that has not attacked you? Democracy can only come from the free will of a sovereign people, not forced through war, aggression and occupation.
The dissenters to the report are exactly what Gen. Zinni called Paul Wolfowitz in “Fiasco,” “Dangerously Idealistic and CRACK SMOKING STUPID!”