Ah, the old “us”. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
So how does Valerie Plame fit into all this? She was being punished because her husband was challenging the case for war, no? We can quibble over whether or not Bush lied, but on examining the circumstances, is it fair to say that intelligence which would have lessened the argument for war was either not reaching him or was being ignored (and ad-hominem dismissed)? In typically inept fashion, though, the naysayer’s “punishment” was that his wife’s cover as a CIA agent was blown. I daresay that’s not much of a punishment for him so much as arguably an act of treason, but damaging the country to serve the ideology sounds plausibly Republican to me.
These are all thoughtful points. However, my view is that numbers 1 and 2 are better explained by the sheer arrogance of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney, as opposed to a deliberate plan to misrepresent facts. Take for example Tenet’s “slam dunk” comment in a private meeting with the President. There are probably two main explanation of why Tenet said the WMD case against Iraq was a slam dunk: first, he was perpetrating a big lie to the President. Second, he was so arrogantly confident that he had the ability to “connect the dots” that he simply was blinded to the idea that the dots could be connected another way.
I agree it is hard to distinguish between someone who is intentionally fabricating matters and someone who buys their own bullshit. But as the Tenet episode shows, it appears that the bullshit was not aimed exclusively at the public while behind closed doors, the Bush Administration was saying different things. It appears to me that bullshit was being tossed around behind closed doors, and then the same nonsense was regurgitated for public consumption. I just don’t see that as a lie.
As for point 3, can you show that Bush relied on such things after they were debunked? Take, for example, Curveball. As I remember it, the real smackdown of his reliability happened months after the war began. On the aluminum tubes, it does appear that the Administration continued to say they were for a nuclear weapons program, while intelligence analysts disagreed whether they were or not — some thought they were, some thought they were not. Resolving an ambiguous conclusion to one’s own advantage does come pretty close to lying, but if that were the case, I’m pretty sure 99% of the posters involved in spirited debates on this board have committed the same sin in a more egregious way. Shoot, I’m sure I’m guilty of that to be sure.
Again, I encourage folks to look at the summary I offered earlier. It was sufficient, ten years ago, to get Bricker to admit that, absent new evidence, Bush had told a lie. If it could convince him, I bet it could convince you :).
And such new evidence is not forthcoming, is it?
Based on this evidence, I’ll change from ‘neutral between Bush lied or Bush was grossly incompetent’ to leaning towards ‘Bush lied (while also being grossly incompetent)’.
Maybe it is theoretically possible to believe you know something that you don’t actually know, or to believe there is no doubt about something for which you have pages of written doubt directed to your attention. It’s just that I think the Occam’s Razor is not that these guys were psychopathically arrogant, but instead that they were willing to overstate their case to achieve a result they wanted. I’m sure Rumsfeld and Cheney really thought they’d find WMDs, but I don’t think they really thought there was “no doubt” or that they “knew” where they were.
And I think that distinction actually matters. It would have been one thing to sell the war as “we really think he probably has this.” But at nearly every opportunity they instead pitched it as “these are just the facts.”
I don’t recall all the timelines of debunking. I do recall that at least some of this stuff was objectively more likely than not to be false by the time they used it, including the infamous sixteen words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union, saying that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” when by 2002 the CIA and State Department had concluded that information was more likely than not false and indeed had asked for it to be removed from earlier Presidential speeches on the ground that it was likely false. We may never know how it landed back in the SOTU–perhaps Bush never learned of the previous removals and the falsity, or was just reading the script his handlers prepared for him–but such unreasonable doubt is always available.
And again my claim is that the lies were mostly about the level of certainty of their knowledge. It’s one thing to draw your own conclusion and not lay out all of the facts supporting the other conclusion. I think that’s highly inappropriate when trying to persuade the country to go to war based on secret evidence. It’s not like there’s someone else out there with the same access to make the opposite case. But it might not be a lie. It is a lie to cherry-pick your case while affirmative stating there is no reason to doubt it.
I clicked on the link to the IAEA cite you provided, and unfortunately it was dead. I looked at the other link and the article was dated March 2003, and it more or less shows that the aluminum tube story divided the intelligence community. I addressed that in my last post, but I can expand.
So we have several intelligence agencies who are saying, those tubes are probably for a nuclear weapons program. We have two other intelligence agencies (and the IAEA) who says they are probably not for a nuclear weapons program. It appeared that the number of agencies who believed it was for nuclear weapons outnumbered those who disagreed.
If one concludes from that disagreement that the tubes are for a nuclear weapons program, in my view that’s probably more akin to an exaggeration than a lie. Similarly, if one concludes that the dissenting intelligence analysts PROVE that the government knew the tubes were for conventional weapons, that must be equally untrue, because that conclusion is also removing the ambiguity.
So which is it? If the Bush Administration shaded its interpretation of the intelligence on the aluminum tubes to its convenience, then Bush critics who are using the same intelligence to argue that the Bush Administration knew the tubes were for conventional weapons are being EXACTLY as incorrect – or deceptive, if you prefer – as they are accusing the government as being.
So if I arrogantly state that I’m almost certainly the smartest guy on this board, I’m telling the truth; but if I say I’m certain I’m the smartest guy on the board, I’m lying?
I’ll take that. 
It is my understanding that there were no units tasked with finding and seizing the alleged WMDs during the invasion.
Oh, if only Bush had been a tenth as personally involved in preparing the case for invading Iraq as, say, Hillary Clinton was in the planing, execution, logistics and finances of the Bengazi attack, to hear some Republicans describe it.
I had to check to make sure this wasn’t a zombie from 2004. It’s been awhile since I even thought of it but off the top of my head here’s the topics to talk about re: Bush admin lying:
Tyler Drumheller.
The Office of Special Plans.
Khidir Hamza.
Forged yellowcake documents.
Downing Street Memo.
Curveball.
CIA dissension over ignored intelligence.
Scott Ritter.
The inspectors on the ground before the invasion.
"This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime change.” - Bush
The most charitable interpretation is that the Bush administration knew in their gut that Iraq had a WMD program but they couldn’t prove it, so in their minds they were framing a guilty man. This makes sense because if they knew that Iraq didn’t have WMDs then it doesn’t make sense to claim they do because if you invade you’ll be shown to be a liar very quickly.
I remember less about the AQ lies. If I recall right, the only evidence was a meeting with someone that happened 10 years prior. There was no evidence for an ongoing operational relationship. The only known AQ presence was in Northern Iraq, which the Americans protected with the no fly zones. On a more common sense POV, there was little logic in a secularist dictator giving away nukes to religious fundamentalist non-state actors, especially ones that hated him. If he did so, he would know that the American reprisal would destroy him.
If it you makes you feel any better, OP, you can pick any war started by a Dem and find all sorts of blatant lies. WW1. Vietnam. Kosovo. Obama and his brush fire drone wars. It’s the nature of the MIC and imperialism.
Precisely. Since, WMD includes nerve gas, etc. I assumed any country with as much wealth as Iraq would have “WMD’s” if they had the will. That Saddam did have such WMDs was no secret – indeed Cheney et al had helped finance the WMDs for Saddam during the 1980’s. :smack:
My attitude was: “So what?” Lots of evil regimes were dangerous, but Saddam’s was the one already in a box. Indeed Bush’s advisors (Rice, Kissinger, etc.) stressed that Iraq was to be attacked NOT becuase it was a threat, but BECAUSE IT WASN’T. More serious threats (Iran, No. Korea) would be much harder to defeat, so Iraq was selected for the cheap (
$4 trillion and counting? ) demonstration.
Everyone was surprised when it turned out any poison gas stocks in Iraq were useless – the sanctions had been effective. But this is incidental compared with the collosal mistake to attack, and the perfidy shown by lying to get the War started, and then using Iraq as a laboratory for sophomoric idealogical experiments in the aftermath.
Hope this helps, Magellan. If you have more questions start a Pit thread.
(Magellan finds a Fox interview of Woodward and thinks it’s a Gotcha against the “liberals.” 
Mods, please move this thread to the Comedy Forum.)
If the OP wants to focus on Dem lies, you can start with the lie that Saddam Hussein kicked the inspectors out. He didn’t. Clinton did, so he could bomb Iraq.
Scott Ritter on Clinton:
There was also the rumors where Clinton had spies in the inspector teams, a violation of the agreement.
Doesn’t help much though, the Bush admin repeated the meme that Saddam kicked the inspectors out as evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its WMD program.
As I said, incompetency can explain many of those, but the number of the likely lies is what gives me pause. For me it was the lie when he told the American People that he was going to push for the second vote to authorize force at the UN:
Bush never did.
It is indeed hard to assume that that and all the items in the list were just incompetency, but it is still possible. As marshmallow points here the lies were there, but still geared in the attempt to frame what they thought was a guilty party.
Falling dominoes!
Woodward is no neo-con.
To claim that Woodward is not reporting from the Right wing of the U.S. political spectrum is to pretend that it is 1976. Woodward has been openly reporting and acting as a pundit from the Right since before Reagan was elected. He can be a good journalist (aside from his ventures into reporting the dying statements of former CIA chiefs that no one else in the world seems to have heard), but he definitely spins his opinions from the Right.
This interview is a case in point. He is on a Faux News opinion show claiming that he did not find any lies by anyone after an eighteen month investigation. Unless his investigation was eighteen months doing nothing but watching Fox broadcasts, he is either lying, himself, or defining the word “lying” in a way that no speaker of English aside from Reagan or Clinton would use it.
I am willing to grant that GWB did not, personally lie. He has demonstrated a remarkable ability over the years to perceive things in ways that are directly contrary to fact.
However, Woodward, talking to his Fox audience, was very careful, (and not particularly honest), in his description of events. It is certainly true that the invasion was the result of increasing momentum. Woodward carefully avoids noting that the momentum was engineered by Bush’s staff under the direct push from Bush. From Bush’s declaration before the 2000 election that his father had erred in not toppling Hussein and his intention to invade if the opportunity arose, through his demands to his staff on September 12 and 13 that they find the connection between the WTC/Pentagon attacks and Saddam Hussein, to the creation of the Office of Special Plans (a collection of PR flacks with no experience in gathering or analyzing intelligence) set up to select only information aligning Iraq and al Qaeda to be sent to the White House, bypassing intelligence community review, to embracing the Wolfowitz term paper (written by a twit with no knowledge of the Iraqi people or history) claiming that the U.S. would be met as liberators in the manner of European countries in WWII, to the decision to ignore the protests by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the proposed invasion force was too small to hold the country once invaded, to the decisions to ignore the actual reports by the UN investigating teams that the WMDs were long gone. Referring to engineered propaganda and the deliberate dismissal of actual facts as “momentum” as if it was some sort of event of nature that operated on its own and carefully not mentioning that that “momentum” was manufactured by a bunch of guys who had expressed a desire for that explicit invasion in the 1990s is just odd.
Claiming that Bush did not lie is like claiming that Henry II never ordered the death of Thomas Becket when he merely wondered aloud, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”. Perhaps Bush was able to frame his beliefs according to his desperate desires–he certainly has the talent to do that–but a claim that no one lied with all the claims of yellow-cake, mobile biological warfare manufacturing labs, al Qaeda agents meeting in Bagdad with Iraqi agents, and a host of similar nonsense, either someone was lying or Bush assembled his team from people rejected by the Three Stooges for the role of Curly Joe.
And, as the crowning point, the invading forces were given no instructions to secure suspected sites of WMD creation or storage. We KNEW there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, so anyone who claimed, subsequent to the UN inspection team reports in the Autumn of 2002, that there were WMDs was lying.
Hell, they apparently weren’t even ordered to secure sites of CONVENTIONAL weapon creation or storage. Didn’t insurgents clean out at least one of Saddam’s stockpiles without even an American military presence within reach in the early days?
No, there was not. The only “intelligence” that claimed there were WMDs was the bullshit sent to the White House by the Office on Special Plans. That group of advertising writers were called together based on their ability to spin anything into a commercial. They were placed in the DoD so that Rumsfeld could have direct control over their organization, preventing the CIA, FBI, or Army Intelligence from being allowed to review or criticize their work. Claiming that there was “contradicting intelligence” does not even makes sense. It puts a group of 18 propaganda producers on an equal footing with every professional intelligence organization in the country, as well as the UN inspection teams that were actually in the country.
Claiming that Woodward reports from the right is like saying the facts have a right-wing bias.
That doesn’t mean that everything he reports is factual, and I don’t really know that he’s an “investigative journalist” since Watergate. What Woodward does is use an incredible amount of access and skill at getting people to talk to him that he gives us inside accounts of government decisionmaking that will probably never be equalled once he’s gone. I see no difference in tone or objectivity between his books on the Bush administration and the Obama administration. His opinions are almost entirely left out. He just reports what was done and what was said. If you think that makes Democratic administrations look less flattering, tough.
As for Bush and WMDs, we didn’t need Woodward to tell us that the facts paint a complicated picture. There’s no doubt that they cherry picked intelligence. There’s also no doubt that there was nearly unanimous agreement that Saddam still possessed large stocks of chemical weapons. And now we know that chemical weapons were indeed found, although they were not very useful on a battlefield due to their lack of maintenance.