Study: Bush, others made false statements on Iraq

[*d*]

1. Iraq wasn't in compliance even if they were disarmed. They had to be verifiably disarmed and "verifiably" was well defined. You know this but deliberately do what you accuse the Bush administration of doing! Nice.

2. Your own quote proves you to lie about the Bush administration.

"In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

And from this you say, "words were methodically placed to mislead." That's a lie. If you had instead said "words were methodically placed based on erroneous information", I'd have no quarrel.

And the UN weapon inspectors were as they claimed, within months of verifying disarmament. Verification is not instant and takes time and they asked for it.
And no, words were not just methodically placed based on erroneous information. They were placed to mislead. If you had read the study you would have found this:

In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, President Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

But as early as March 2002, there was uncertainty within the intelligence community regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq. That month, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research published an intelligence assessment titled, "Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq Is Unlikely." In July 2002, the Energy Department concluded that there was "no information indicating that any of the uranium shipments arrived in Iraq" and suggested that the "amount of uranium specified far exceeds what Iraq would need even for a robust nuclear weapons program." In August 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency made no mention of the Iraq-Niger connection in a paper on Iraq's WMD capabilities.

Just two weeks before the president's speech, an analyst with the Bureau of Intelligence and Research had sent an e-mail to several other analysts describing why he believed "the uranium purchase agreement probably is a hoax." And in 2006 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded: "Postwar findings do not support the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessment that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake' from Africa. Postwar findings support the assessment in the NIE of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are 'highly dubious.'"

Bush's speech states that the Britsh government learned that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. But the US's own intelligence was not backing this and the uranium purchase agreement was probably a hoax. Misleading? Of course it is.

 

[TQM]

d, honestly,

reading that passage, you still haven't shown words were placed to mislead. You know this. Give it up. You've tried the "lie" thing. You've changed your wording to "words were placed to mislead," and your trying again. It fails miserably.

As for inspectors in Iraq, we've played your backtracking game before.

First you say Iraq was compliant. I point out they weren't.
Now you say they might have been compliant eventually if we had waited.

Bottom line they weren't compliant. Inspectors complained about a lack of compliance to varying degrees once they started up again.

Immediate full compliance was a requirement.

Honestly, there is so much you could criticize the Bush administration for, I don't know why you insist on only going the ficticious route.

 

[frasier]

Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we've heard that one before. Well, the two groups--the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism--managed to secure major media attention by making the claim that the Bush administration released 935 false statements. Clearly no one was in the mood to read all 935, so the leftist groups boiled them down to 532. We hear that on 532 occasions the Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the claim is not that Bush told 532 lies, but that he told the same lie 532 times

Read on...

http://townhall.com/columnists/DineshDSouza/2008/01/28/actually_bush_didnt_lie

 

[TQM]

Here's an article

which indicates Hussein actively promoted the illusion that Iraq had WMD, as a means of preventing an attack from Iran, and fully intended, eventually, to restart his programs. (I've been pointing this out for years now.)

This is fully consistent with a man who did have weapons programs and used chemicals on civilians.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22847771/

You want to argue that Bush is a fool - fine by me. But that he deliberately lied? Don't buy it without direct evidence.

 

[WoodPeckr]

which indicates Hussein actively promoted the illusion that Iraq had WMD, as a means of preventing an attack from Iran, and fully intended, eventually, to restart his programs. (I've been pointing this out for years now.)

So Saddam just wanted to appear to be a bigger boogeyman than he really was.
Why should that not be expected?

 

[TQM]

It absolutely should be expected.

Here's the conversation:

d: Bush lied.
TQM: Evidence doesn't show this.
d: But he lied! But he lied!
TQM: Evidence doesn't show this.

TQM: Hussein himself was indicating (falsely, apparently) that he had WMD - and this is more evidence that Bush wasn't lying.

Woody: Why should it be surprising that Hussein wanted to appear scarier than he actually was?

TQM: (scratching his head) It shouldn't be surprising at all - it just adds credence to Bush that he (Bush) wasn't lying. The Bush administration was mostly wrong about their claims of WMD - but they weren't lying.

 

[*d*]

reading that passage, you still haven't shown words were placed to mislead. You know this. Give it up. You've tried the "lie" thing. You've changed your wording to "words were placed to mislead," and your trying again. It fails miserably.

As for inspectors in Iraq, we've played your backtracking game before.

First you say Iraq was compliant. I point out they weren't.
Now you say they might have been compliant eventually if we had waited.

Bottom line they weren't compliant. Inspectors complained about a lack of compliance to varying degrees once they started up again.

Immediate full compliance was a requirement.

Honestly, there is so much you could criticize the Bush administration for, I don't know why you insist on only going the ficticious route.

Wow. I go away for awhile expecting your reply to have some meat in it. But there's nothing. Is that it??
And yes, we have been through this before and your argument was as pathetic as it is now.
First off(as explained before), compliance must include verification. And as per the UN inspectors, verification is not instant. The completion of that verification would have proven full compliance. But just because the verification process was disrupted, it doesn't mean full compliance wasn't there. It was. Iraq was in full complicance as verification actually proved later. Iraq was indeed disarmed. UN resolution 1441 had given Iraq one last chance to prove that. The US had simply jumped the gun without that verification.

Secondly, Bush did purposely mislead! That's lying in my books. The US's own intelligence had cited the 'uranium from Africa' evidence against Iraq as most likely a hoax, but what did Bush say in his State of the Union address? He didn't say the intelligence was unconfirmed. He said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." And supported this knowing his own US intelligence saw it as most likely a hoax. He mislead.

 

[maxweber]

..and statistics

They can spin this 'til their blue in the face; there was nothing remotely close to a casus belli. At the time of the Iraq invasion, the Miss America Contest was a greater threat to national security than Saddam Hussein. The invasion was a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an unparalleled stain on American honour. However glibly and quickly we forgive ourselves for this disaster, we need to remember that the world will not; nor, I say, with a heavy heart, should they, unless and until we bring the perpetrators to justice.

MW