Lying The World to War

Some Bush sympathizers still maintain that Shrub, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and others were merely "mistaken" about the claims they made about Saddam Hussein and Iraq leading up to the invasion and afterward. Honest mistake = no war crime (supposedly). Others believe these con artists embarked on a deliberate scheme of deception and outright lies. Well, the verdit's in and guess what? They lied - and they lied and lied and lied.

Now their lies have been logged, sorted, digested, analyzed and compiled into a neat, searchable database you can find at: http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

IRAQ: The War Card presents 935 Weapons of Mass Deception spewed out for public consumption by the Bush regime in the two years following September 11, 2001. These are lies about the security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

"On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials [Cheney, Rusmfeld, Rice], 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.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews."

The War Card site features a free, 380,000-word searchable database. The following chart demonstrates how their campaign of lies peaked in the weeks prior to the invasion:

Take a look at the site. The conclusion is inescapable. There was nothing mistaken about the claims spun by the Bush gang to goad their congress and people into unprovoked, pre-emptive war on Iraq. Like other thug regimes before them, they just flat out lied to their own people and the world - and they did it with straight faces.