Bush Administration Makes 935 False Statement About Iraq, According to the Center for Public Integrity

Is it possible that high level members of the Bush Administration, including the President and Vice President, made 935 false statements regarding Iraq before the war began 5 years ago? That is what is being alleged by the The Center for Public Integrity and their site lists them all.

There can be two types of false statement, those made on purpose and those that are the result of wrong and misleading information, which should have been checked out before anyone stated them as fact. Looking at the list, we can find false statements of both types.

For instance, back in 2003, on May 29th to be exact, the President did an interview for Polish TV. In that interview he stated as a fact that we had found not only weapons of mass destruction, but lab for making biological weapons as well. This was just days after a team of experts had reported that the labs were not used to make biological weapons. Now, if this was the only time that the President had mentioned that there were weapons of mass destruction, you could attribute it to mis information. But it was not. And this was one of the main reasons given for going to war.

Now in July of the same year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed by George Stephanopoulous. In the interview, he stated that Iraq could have weapons of mass destruction and then went on to say that they could have been moved, but that they did not know.

Months later, on September 7th, Condoleezza Rice, who was then National Security Adviser, in an interview with Tony Snow of Fox News, again made a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between Al Qaeda and chemical weapons, there by linking the chemical weapons to Iraq, without directly saying so. And there was never any evidence of any connection to begin with.

Now, lets fast forward to an appearance the President made on Meet the Press in 2004 where he said that there had been no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Then in Dec of 2005, in his regular Sunday night radio address, he stated that Saddam had a history of using weapons of mass destruction and went on to say that he hid the weapons and did not cooperate with the UN inspectors. Those two statement are contradictory enough, but he than said that other countries believed in the weapons, that the intelligence was wrong, but it was ok to go after Saddam anyway.

As you browse through the data base, you come across contradictions and going from knowing that the weapons exist to saying they could exist shows that someone was not saying the right thing in the first place.

Source: The Center for Public Integrity