2008-01-22 study of Bush Iraq lies

Overview
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations – the Center for Public Integrity, funded by the Fund for Independence in Journalism – shows that President Bush and top Administration officials issued 935 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."

Neocon Response
The neocon reality inversion immediately started trying to spin the report as totally biased, without actually addressing any of the facts:

Now, would any disinterested party read the above -- and not think the study authors were accusing President Bush and his administration of deliberately lying us into war? Surely this subtextual implication must have crept in because of bad writing; I can't imagine that the elite media would be so intentionally partisan.


 * 1) Yes, they were accusing him of that, because he did. This is common knowledge everywhere except within the neocon reality inversion.
 * 2) How is it partisan to accuse someone of something they did? Ok, mea culpa, I realize the author isn't being genuinely obtuse, just deliberately misleading. "Partisan" is not the same thing as always presenting both sides as equally valid, but the neoconservatives want us to think that it is so that we will fall for the fallacy of moderation and assume that a "reasonable" position is halfway to (their) madness. Which it isn't.

...somehow the AP forgot to mention that the organization that released this study was funded by extreme leftist George Soros, who has spent billions funding the Democrat Party and many far left think tank and advocacy organizations. Yeah, THAT study is going to be legitimate!

This is an ad hominem attack, and doesn't actually address any of the facts raised in the report. It's also unclear whether it is even true, as the article specifically mentions that the report was posted by the Center for Public Integrity as funded by the Fund for Independence in Journalism. If there's a Soros connection there, it isn't so obvious that not mentioning it should be considered poor reporting.

More importantly, if funding from Soros automatically makes such a report illegitimate, who do they think should have funded it? The government? (Conservatives are supposedly against government funding for anything except war.) A right-wing organization? Possibly; that would ensure that all such studies were "fair and balanced" in the Fox Newspeak sense.

Would it not have been more honest for the newspaper of record to recall that however â€œsketchyâ€ the intelligence, it was not presented by the CIA to the administration as sketchy at all? Rather, it was presented as an iron-clad case, most memorably by CIA director George Tenet as a â€œa slam-dunk.â€ And would it not have been more honest to point out that the post-war studies of Iraqâ€™s WMD program, like the Duelfer Report, had the benefit not merely of hindsight but the ability of investigators to roam freely through Iraqi archives and facilities? Back in 2002 and early 2003, when the U.S. was gearing up for war, things looked very differently than they did afterward.

My understanding is that the "slam dunk" was but one of many reports presented to Bush, and that any reports not supporting the existence of WMDs were carefully suppressed or ignored. One such report even led to harsh retribution by the Bush administration, so the author must think his readers are all idiots with long-term memory loss. Bush knew very well there were no WMDs, but his administration has carefully engineered the impression that he couldn't have known.

However, even if he truly didn't know, and made an honest mistake based on sketchy data -- where is the contrition for having made this huge mistake? Where is the realization that well, perhaps it wasn't necessary after all? How is this justification for our continued presence in Iraq, now that we know for sure there is no WMD threat there?

Reference

 * Iraq - The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War: the report itself
 * 2008-01-23 official press release