Didn’t he do the whole “If they don’t find them by x(date) I’ll agree it was a lie” thing years ago?
I have said many times that I do not find any compelling evidence for Bush actually knowing the truth and then saying something else. I’m sure there will be more additions to the historical record that could change my mind, but what I see now is that Bush has “merely” been proven wrong.
While I wouldn’t agree with the phrase “reckless disregard for the truth,” since that implies that he knew that he was saying something wrong, I think that a reckless and haphazard process of misjudgment and extreme prejudice against evidence that didn’t confirm one’s bias is an equally damnable offense.
In other words, why does the bad guy always have to be a liar? Isn’t being a fool condemnation enough?
Isn’t there a point when a belief based on the reckless disregard for the lack of evidence becomes willful lying?
George Bush did not plan the 9/11 attacks. But suppose I said that George Bush personally planned the 9/11 attacks and when I was pressed on the point I said that I had read a website that said Bush was guilty and I choose to believe this website is correct. Does that mean I’m not lying because I’m just repeating somebody else’s lie? Wouldn’t that mean that there is no such thing as objective truth?
Not hard to find…
“No doubt”? Err…I’d say there was a helluva lot of doubt. “No doubt” is a flat out lie. If there was no doubt then we would have found them right? Because they “knew” Iraq had WMDs.
It certainly should be. But I’ve seen calls, even on this board, about how Bush should be tried in the Hague. “Bush Lied, They Died” “Clinton lied about a blow job, but Bush’s lies got people killed” etc. etc.
I was just wondering what the evidence was of him actually lying. It seems as if most people in this thread would say that he did not lie, but was incompetent.
If this were true then why:
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Did the rest of the world think he had WMDs? Even Germany and France who didn’t help us in the war believed that he had these weapons, just that a diplomatic solution would be preferable.
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What were those pictures that Powell was showing the U.N.? I remember one picture that showed weapons manufacturing tools and the next day before the inspectors arrived, they were all dismantled. A hide and seek game; I thought Powell had the smoking gun on them? What did he really have?
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What did happen to all of the chemical weapons that Saddam had? We know he had them. Even if he destroyed them, there has to be a massive amount of spent canisters somewhere.
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Was Saddam that foolish? Why didn’t he come clean before the war? Surely he knew that we could take him out; we’d done it once before.
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Finally why hasn’t there been a massive, massive investigation as to what in the hell happened that caused us to go to war over incorrect information? (Lies or otherwise) More Americans have died in Iraq than on 9/11 for a mistake. That seriously needs to be corrected.
That’s the Costanza Defense: “Remember, Jerry, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
The calls you’ve seen, and heard, are about war crimes other than starting a war of aggression too, remember. One doesn’t even have to get into that to discuss torture.
There’s a lot of cherished, repeated misinformation among the defend-the-Republican crowd too, for instance:
They, like the rest of the reality-based community, properly thought it was possible, and that’s what the inspectors were for. But they were just about to report that there weren’t, showing Bush’s claims to be false, when he coincidentally “couldn’t wait any longer”, and *had *to start the war.
Cite for the “weapons manufacturing tools”, or anything else WMD-related? Even the Bush people themselves dropped that stuff long ago; why do you still think there’s a factual basis for it?
Either outdated or destroyed. What, do you believe the truck convoy to Syria story?
Not foolish, just grandiose and power lustful. He needed to keep up the pretense to keep people fearing him. Same kinda shit any dictator pulls. As to coming clean, remember those inspectors? The ones he let in, who went everywhere and found jack shit? Is that coming clean enough for you?
You won’t find many people on this board who disagree with that, at least. The best answer may be that the people who’d do it would be shown to have been fooled by the falsehoods themselves.
Technically he didn’t lie, he hid behind the intelligence which he said showed Saddam was a threat. But they made the intel up or exaggerated it or whatever. The CIA kept sending the White House assesments saying they had no evidence of anything, the White House kept telling them to look harder. Cheney personally visited CIA HQ a number of times. Eventually the CIA gave them what they wanted, a load of bs intel. So let’s not call it lies, let’s call it bs. George W Bush bullshitted the country into an illegal war.
What is your evidence that anyone believed there were WMDs in Iraq?
Here’s Robin Cook addressing the UK Parliament on the eve of the war:
“Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.
Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?
Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?”
There’s been suggestions over here that Blair should be tried as a war criminal:
Of course Bush will escape in any War Crimes tribunal by pleading ‘diminished responsibility’. There’s plenty of evidence of that. :smack:
Of course, that’s part of the problem: he just kind of assumed we’d be able to either get out easily, or easily turn Iraq into a pacified client state where we’d leave some troops to be handy for the next episode of George and Dick’s Excellent Mideast Adventure, or whatever.
No one could have foreseen that the Sunnis and Shi’ites might not get along, or that there might be some conflict between the Arabs and the Kurds, or that rival Shi’ite groups might have some scores to settle, or that the big winner from a weakened Iraq would be Iran, or any one of a number of other things that would have been obvious from even a sketchy knowledge of the history of Iraq and its immediate neighborhood.
Goddamn, we had a stupid Preznit.
Figured I’d toss in a link to Barton Gellman’s reporting on this subject, just so there’s a good cite for this.
Let’s not forget the Dodgy Dossier. Support for the war was crumbling worldwide as America couldn’t provide any actual proof that Iraq was building WMDs. Suddenly Blair appeared at a press conference, did his steely jaw-clenching thing as he talked about the onerous responsibilities he was under protecting Britain from the threat of Iraq and terrorism in general and announced to the world new information about Saddam’s WMD programs, information that he announced as “new, comprehensive, and compelling”. The information was released to the press and zipped around the world’s news cycles. Then a couple of days later some interepid journalist googled a couple of the claims and found the whole dossier had been lifted from a 1991 American student thesis on Saddam’s early 90s possible WMD options.
It later transpired that Blair’s poitical office had googled this crap up and sent it to the British version of the CIA who somehow managed to turn it into a supposedly fact-based dossier. Now I’m sure Blair didn’t technically lie in whatever he said publicly about the dossier but I’d love to know why his office dug the crap up and how it ended up becoming an intelligence report. Luckily Britain is a democracy and in democracies we have mechanisms to require accountability from our leaders. I’m sure an inquiry will be starting anytime now.
Not stupid as such. Lazy. Incurious. Gullible. Contemptuous of those who aren’t.
But the results are the same.
Thanks … And, more to the point of our not securing a weapons site known to contain sensitive materials (high grade explosives that could at least potential be used in nuclear weapons and had been sealed off by UN weapons inspectors), here is the Wikipedia page about the Al Qa’qaa high explosives controversy.
His mouth was moving?
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I had no idea we had Rorschach on the board 
This is where the “lie” became mighty important. It wasn’t just that Saddam was a threat, he was a nutjob dictator with persecution complex and a history of using biological and chemical weapons; it was that he was an IMMINENT threat and we had to go to war RIGHT NOW or he would KILL US ALL!!! The statements he and his administration made had their intended effect, of overstating the threat Saddam posed, while ignoring all the evidence to the contrary. But in addition to that, the statements made it imperative that we ACT NOW and that rationale and in depth analysis of the intelligence and the inspections, could wait.
In retrospect, it’s suspicious how many of the analyses of Iraq’s WMD programs back in 2003 refered to their ongoing history over the last fifteen or twenty years without mentioning the major changes that occurred in Iraq in 1991. It’s like describing Germany in 1955 as an ongoing major threat to world peace based on their history over the last fifteen years.
I have little doubts that Iraq had active WMD programs in the eighties. But it is now clear that the UN sanctions had worked and his WMD capacity was shut down after 1991. Iraq was not an imminent threat in 2003.
Assuming the intel turns out to be credible (from the CIA no less, whom we all love and trust)…after you’ve invaded the nation. Doesn’t justification then turn on hindsight? My point is, these things are tricky judgment calls on evidence that might not be “evidence” at all. What if the leader of NK is intentionally deceiving you so you believe he has Nuclear Weapons. Is that evidence? It’s extremely suspicious behavior at the least.
I hope this all leads to an err of caution to not invade on nil evidence. Wait 50 years, US is attacked because we did not act on “some” intelligence. Repeat process.
Well, North Korea has actually tested a nuclear bomb the effects of which were detected by other countries.
Now, NK may not have any more but we know they can build one and blow it up. To my mind that makes the case for pre-empting NK more compelling. Crazy regime + nukes + belligerent to the West = Good case being built to get them first.
You’ve described the careful fabrication of a fraud, with willful suppression of the evidence that would have proved it false. Calling the intentional fraud of a warmonger “intellectual dishonesty” is really rather insulting and unfair to the intellectually dishonest, such as Ward Churchill.