I don’t think that that information established a lie. All it established was that there was disagreement in the intelligence community about the tubes. Thus, if Bush had gone the other way, opining that the tubes were no threat, but then that turned out to be wrong, you could make the exact same argument that he lied. It’s not lying when you make a decision after different people have given you different advice.
The specific lie I’m talking about was from this bit:
His claiming that this report existed was a falsehood told in the service of an intent to deceive.
Daniel
[url=http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020907-2.html]Search this interview for “remind you” for the specific text of the lie, straight from the House’s mouth.
Daniel
Oy. Try this again, and if someone wants to report my previous post to a mod for cleanup, that’d be swell.
Search this interview for “remind you” for the specific text of the lie, straight from the House’s mouth.
Daniel
When you present a case with two sides in a one-sided manner, I think that can be deemed lying. I never heard any response from the administration about the problems with their interpretation of the aluminum tubes story, for example. Whenever they said something that was later discredited, they ignored the response and kept saying it. They continued making a number of claims, perhaps most notably the Iraqi-Al Qaeda meeting in Prague, after they had been discredited and sometimes entirely disavowed by the people who’d originally made them. I have trouble believing that’s an honest difference of opinion.
They’re called “car stickers” over there. The anti-war anti-Blair slogan of choice seems to be the misspelling of his name as B-Liar, which is pretty much the same as “Blair lied”.
Well, since you ask, no. “Other than” acts as a preposition and must take an object in the objective case. Just as you’d say “Nobody but him believed it”, “Nobody except him believed it”, you have to say “Nobody other than him believed it”.
This was my position as well. I was opposed to the war in Iraq on other grounds – I figured it would lead to a long occupation and would stir up Arab opinion against us, making our battle against Al Qaeda harder. But I assumed that the administration would find some WMDs – enough to provide a fig leaf for their pre-war claims.
But I never thought Iraq was a serious threat to us. It just didn’t make any sense based on my pre-war understanding of Iraq’s security situation. (I was working on terrorism-related videogames at the time and had done a lot of research into real-world terrorist threats. Iraq was very low on the threat list.)
It never occurred to me that there weren’t **any ** WMDs in Iraq! I thought there might be a moth-balled nerve gas factor or a forgotten freezer with some old anthrax samples in it. It seemed pointless to argue the “there aren’t enough WMDs to be a threat” position before the war because even a small amount could be spun by the administration.
Bush lied. He took fragmentary evidence that at most pointed to a small, moribund weapons program and spun it into a massive threat to American security. He thought we would find just enough of something after the invasion to make his pre-war claims credible. And in the warm glow of victory afterwards, who would have the stomach for quibbling?
“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out”. – George W. Bush, March 2002.
That was my initial position, too. It wasn’t until I’d argued with people who really supported the thing elsewhere on the Web that I started to think “these people can’t be serious - they have nothing,” and came to think probably weren’t any weapons at all.
I apologise, those quotation marks can be tricky things. Of course it is not a direct quotation, but a paraphrase I rendered in direct speech. Hence the quotation marks. I assumed it was obvious from the hyperbole.
Nonetheless it is an accurate paraphrase of the certainty, size of the supposed threat and the imperative to disregard the evidence being produced by Dr Blix.
Lastly, as anticipated all the faithful have posted their bushlove posts and fled. It was never about debate.
Good story.
Yeah, I must say that evidence of intentional lying is compelling at least to the degree of preponderance. Okay, you’ve all convinced me.
Is the OP going to come back to defend his thesis or are we to assume we have pretty much of a consensus here?
The WMD are all but a red herring. At issue is the quality of threat presented to the US by Iraq.
The position of the US Intel Community at the time was that Hussein was “drawing a line short” of and unlikely to be in the “foreseeable future” attacking the US directly or by proxy with WMD or conventional weapons.
He wasn’t going to risk what Dr, Rice called “national obliteration” to score would may have eneded up being posthumous points.
Further, despite the US Intelligence Community’s purposely aggressive, exhaustive and repetitive searches for a operational or collaborative relationship between aQ and Saddam, the Community’s assessment was and still is that no such relationship existed. That’s what Team Bush was hearing on the issue while they were out pimping the Atta/Prague connection, Salman Pak etc, etc, etc.
Surely there’s no one here brazen enough to try and make the case that Team Bush did not sell the invasion on the basis of preventing Saddam from attacking the US quite possibly through his ties to aQ.
All of Team Bush’s cacophonous din to the contrary was made in spite of theBest Information Available at the Time.
This is where the Office of Special Plans (OSP) and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group comes in.
They were the folks who, (among other things), ‘found’ the evidence for the connections where the US Intel Community said there were none.
Here’s my previous post summarizing the lie put forth within a 2-3 day period in 2002 by three Bush administration officials, Ari Fleisher, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5982775&postcount=116
The timing and wording of their statements can only be interpreted as a concerted administration effort to push the lie that al Quada was working with Iraq.
Of course, we appear to have a brand new lie to talk about, since it was reported today that Bush knew of Rove’s involvement in the Plame leak from roughly the beginning, but made public statements to the contrary, and reportedly gave testimony to Fitzgerald to the contrary after that time. Oopsie.
By the strictest definition of a lie, I’m not convinced that these qualify: a lie requires a falsehood told in service of a deceitful end, and while the deceitful end is certainly there, I’m having trouble finding the outright falsehoods. I think this is deliberate on the administration’s part: it’s the equivalent of the kid who thinks he can promise whatever he wants as long as his fingers are crossed. As long as the Administration never actually said something factually incorrect, they could mislead and distort and out-of-contextify everything as much as they wanted.
But the Administration’s statements in that post are all technically true, as near as I can tell. They talked about numerous contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and acted as though this showed collaboration. Obviously it doesn’t, or else you’d have to say that the US was collaborating with Iraq immediately before and after the 1991 Gulf War.
Daniel