Crossposted from Flopping Aces
Naw, these “studies” weren’t biased.
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the 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.”
~~~ The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. “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.”
Insane!
Everyone believed Saddam had WMD’s. The Democrats, the Republicans, the French, the Italians, the UN….everyone.
But these “unbiased” organizations now want to pass this off as some kind of conspiracy. That Bush KNEW there was no WMD. Think about it, if he knew we wouldn’t find any WMD, why in the hell would he use it as one (amongst many) of the reasons to go in?
Common sense people.
Oh, and on the links to AQ, there are plenty. Check out the 48 posts I have written on them here. No need to rehash them, just go read them and find out for yourself all the connections Saddam had with AQ.
Hindsight being 20/20, now that we know the WMD’s had been removed and/or destroyed during the yearlong build up to the war, I’m sure Bush and the Democrats wished they had not believed the intelligence given to them. But that is all they had to go on at the time.
But hey, according to these “non-partisan” groups all statements by the President prior to January of 2001 on Saddam were made with good intentions. After? Evil conspiracy.
Sigh….
UPDATE
Center for Public Integrity funding = George Soros and Bill Moyers.
Fund for Independence in Journalism… same founder as Center for Public Integrity.
Non-Partisan my ass!
UPDATE II
Putting up our resident Intel expert, Scott Malensek, comment on this report:
What a piece of crap. It freely declares a conclusion in its title-that the case for war in Iraq was Bush Administration deception; a deliberate lie. Yet, when reading the report (particularly its Key Statements section) we see that the report itself never forms or supports the allegation of deception in lieu of “bad intelligence” which almost a dozen other investigations have already determined, AND which the faux independent journalists themselves even cite!
I’m not sure what part of this psuedo journalism is my favorite example of deceit and hypocrisy. Is it the title which is unsupported by the article itself, and which the article even admits is not supported by any real investigation?
Perhaps the “report’s” best moment comes in a caveat:
“Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.” I particularly like this one because it just touches on the reality and importance of what’s being discussed. It just barely starts to suggest that 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee and Sen Intel Com member, Sen John Kerry “routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.” Additionally, 2008 Presidential candidate Sen John Edwards sat on the same intelligence committee and saw as much or more intelligence reporting than the Bush Administration while he “routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.” And who could possibly ignore the outstanding, personal, and uniquely qualified intelligence assessment given to 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen Hillary Clinton by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, while she also “routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.” If we’re to take this report seriously then the entire premise that the Bush Administration actively, deliberately, knowingly deceived and misled the world regarding pre-war intelligence on Iraq, then these three potential Presidents are fools, ignorant, naive, and incompetent for they were duped by a man and an administration that is so often described as incompetent itself. When an intelligent person is fooled by a fool, there are no intelligent people involved.
No. No, my favorite part of the “report” is this:
“Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. “…”Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.”
I like this part the best for three reasons.
1) it completely ignores that the Sen Intel Com has investigated this for years now. In fact, back in Nov06, on the eve of the midterm elections, Senator Harry Reid pulled a political stunt by invoking a rarely used procedure rule to order the doors of the Senate closed so that he and other Democrats could DEMAND that the report be released. They claimed the White House was blocking the so-called Phase II report to cover up their pre-war statements about Iraq intelligence. Low and behold a few days later, Democrats take control of the Senate, and almost a year and a half later…the Democrats still haven’t released their report; a report which is exactly what this allegedly independent investigation says has never been investigated
2) the allegedly independent investigation we have here is claiming that no investigation has been done into Administration statements before the war re Iraq intel, but on the very same PAGE that they make this false statement, they cite numerous other investigations which did in fact compare pre-war statements with post-war intelligence assessments
3) the “report” assumes guilt and assumes deception on the part of the Bush Administration while assuming innocents and naivety on the part of members of Congress (of particular importance as many of these people seek to be President themselves). This opposing assumption is based on party or political orientation and not on fact or the presumption of innocence, and that dichotomy extinguishes and vestigial premise of unbiased investigation.
Lastly, the “report” includes a chart showing a trend of Bush Administration false statements, and seems to show that these statements peaked in August 2002 as some sort of political move. What the report ignores-in keeping with its tendency to ignore any and all mitigating factors that do not support its preformed conclusion presented in its title-is the simple fact that the case for war didn’t really start until August/September 2002, and at that time there had been almost no intelligence gathered on Iraq for four years thus any statements made would be more (or at least equally) reflective of the absence of intelligence gathering than of intelligence gathered. The chart is also a near on perfect copy of charts presented in other investigations into pre-war statements; investigations that somehow the writers list, then ignore, then magically created a chart that’s almost identical.
Summary:
More political crap showing a full on bias from journalists pushing a political agenda rather than doing substantive research and reporting. They should be ashamed of themselves, but instead will no doubt take pride in their opposing political assumptions that the Bush Administration brilliantly orchestrated a case for war while Democrats running for President were duped by those they so often call fools (making themselves even more inept and ignorant).
UPDATE III
This might confound the lefties, but did you know there were in fact WMD’s found in Iraq?
Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein. The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000 word research paper with citations to each captured document has been posted online at LoftusReport.com, along with translations of the captured Iraqi documents, courtesy of Mr. Ryan Mauro and his friends.
This Iraqi document research has been supplemented with satellite photographs and dozens of interviews, among them David Gaubatz who risked radiation exposure to locate Saddam’s underwater WMD warehouses , and John Shaw, whose brilliant detective work solved the puzzle of where the WMD went. Both have contributed substantially to solving one of the most difficult mysteries of our decade.
The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at these disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The “Bush lied, people died” chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq. Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam’s WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.
The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam’s WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990’s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990’s. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam’s nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses. The theft of the unguarded Iraqi nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggesting a level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that makes the Hurricane Katrina debacle look like a model of efficiency.
Woops!
Reactions Across The Blogoshphere:
You would think by now that the MSM would try to spare itself some embarrassment and at least do a cursory Google search before casting the researchers as neutral, reliable, disinterested parties. But noooo. They dutifully published these transparent moonbat briefs for impeachment without disclosing the “nonprofit journalism organizations’” ties to BDS sugar daddy George Soros.
Let’s boil this down. An organization funded by known political activists puts up a website with shopworn quotes taken mostly out of context and misrepresented — and this somehow qualifies as news?
Hey, AP. I’ll be posting a couple of essays today. I’ll be sure to look for your breathless report on the wires later this afternoon.
I’m not shocked that George Soros backed groups still push the nonsense that Bush lied, or that the AP ran the study press release as though it was hard news.
It’s the only thing that keeps them warm at night.
Two things here. First, few people now think Saddam had WMDs, of course. But nearly everyone thought he had them before we went into Iraq — including the leadership of every nation on the planet as well as Saddam’s own generals. So, it was not a “lie” if it was commonly thought to be true by nearly every head of state in the world. That Saddam had WMDs may have been a mistaken notion, but it was not a lie before it was known for sure!
Secondly, it is interesting that this “study” claims that Bush “lied” about links with al-Qaeda. Yet even they have to massage that claim of a lie into “meaningful ties to al-Qaida.” This means that even they are admitting that there are ties with al-Qaeda but that they aren’t “meaningful.”
Does that mean the “lie” is not that the ties exist but how “meaningful” they are? Instead of a lie we are squabbling over semantics. In essence, Bush DIDN’T lie about ties to al-Qaida, the is just a debate on how “meaningful” those ties are.
Conclusions of reports issued after the invasion of Iraq can prove that the Bush administration was wrong about aspects of its case for war, but they can’t prove that the Bush administration lied. But this is the problem we’ve had with the anti-war left since the invasion was over. They claim that Bush “lied us into war,” but the truth was that some of the intelligence Bush used to make his decision for war was flawed. It was inaccurate.
A George Soros-funded journalism organization slammed the Bush Administration today for “lies” on Iraq!
(But, for some reason the group curiously omitted the Clinton Administration’s lies?)A left wing group that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros slammed the Bush regime today for lies on Iraq.
The fact that these groups are funded by George Soros was omitted from today’s report- a fine example of media corruption.
Even though Douglas and Cushman put forth the press release talking points claiming that President Bush and other administration officials made hundreds of “false statements” leading us to war in Iraq, they both fails to do any fact checking. Oh they note that journalists and news organizations have issued mea culpas, saying their pre-war coverage was “too deferential and uncritical.” But they fail to mention that no less than three exhaustive studies have concluded that there is no justification for the false allegation that the administration lied about the WMDs.
In any case, by stopping the research at 2001, the story is set-up to misreport the facts. The Clinton administration spent years warning the public of the threat of Saddam and his WMD. They even bombed a pharma factory in Sudan on the suspicion that it was making WMD for both al Qaeda and Iraq. So the story either unintentionally or by design left out years of context.
Whatever the motivation, it’s clear that the reporter, Douglas K. Daniel, paid no attention to the man behind the curtain. The Center for Public Integrity is one of many George Soros fronts. Soros pays the bills and his minions, whether they happen to work at the CPI or the Center for American Progress or Media Matters or wherever, dance to his tune. And Soros has made it his life’s work to bring down the Bush administration. He says it’s the “central focus of my life.” Do you think people paid to to “research” by a man with that stated mission are likely to deliver unbiased findings?
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