We don't need a study to tell us that the Bush Administration lied repeatedly in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, but having the statements of top government officials reviewed and quantified is a good idea.
The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism did just such an analysis and found 935 false statements about Iraq that were made between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
The study, released this week, said that the false 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."
There's another term for "false statements" -- lies. George W. Bush and his cohorts boldly lied directly to the American public and as a result 3,931 members of our military have been killed, 307 have been killed among other coalition forces, somewhere between 50,000 and 250,000 Iraqis have died, and the overall cost of the invasion and occupation is estimated to total $2 trillion.
Now does anyone think we should not have slowed down in the late autumn of 2000 and counted those Florida votes a little more carefully?
1 comment:
I realize that there are a lot of Bush haters in Massachusetts. But the fact is Bush didn't lie.
Bush based his invasion on Iraq because it was based on a false intelligence report.
Any president that received such a report would have acted forcefully on Iraq under such circumstances.
Everyone voted for the war on Iraq in 2002 and re-elected Bush in 2004 in which we were in Iraq 18 month prior to him getting 59 million votes to get re-elected.
In other words, why did get the most votes in presidential history to get re-elected if people were so much against the invasion?
Go figure!
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