[news.yahoo.com]Bush admin made 935 false statements on Iraq

Pgab: The better argument is that you'd have to be beyond naive to think that the admin did not put immense pressure on the CIA to make this data fit the plans they had been drawing up since Bush took office.

People are dumb.

 

Oh look. Mr. George i-tried-to-buy-the-2004-election-and-failed-miserably Soros paid some "journalists" with nothing better to do to sit down and count the total number of statements Bush made that have turned out to be false. "Look everyone, we worked hard on this project and ended up counting 935 statements in total!" Ooooh, I'm so excited.

Everyone already knows the Bush administration gave us false information leading up to the war. This sort of meaningless, self-congratulatory bullcrap does not serve any purpose whatsoever.

 

well put. But it's been a while since the most vigorous opponents had had a chance to get together and vent lately.

 

This is only news if you can prove they didn't believe the statements. Otherwise it's just a retread that isn't really newsworthy at this point.

Conspiracy theories are dumb. Any pressure is more likely from groupthink than from nefarious planning and O'Neill's statements are a joke - there is no indication Bush had plans to intervene in Iraq previous to 9/11. He was, in fact, a non-interventionist prior to that occasion.

 

At a minimum, it was quite apparent that the data was very, very shaky.

Starting a war over shaky data is no better than starting a war over an outright lie. You should have a damn good reason before you go asking people to die for your cause.

 

Hayes, that would require believing Bush when he said that.



Impeach Bush.

 

Oh no?

Then care to explain why the American people to this day aren't allowed to know the men Cheney met with to form our energy policy. And why to this day we can't get an explination why they were looking at maps of Iraq and the middle east while they were forming that policy?

 

The thing that bugs me is that people seem to forget all the people who died as a result of these lies.

Some people here seem to just not care because it are not Americans (and I'm not even talking about the American soldiers). The people that lived in Iraq are people too, and they deserve a normal life.

So just keep on saying that he president did nothing wrong. and he is not responsible for all those death, and terror he caused.

Lying to people and making people believe they should be afraid of something (WMD in Iraq) in order to get something you want (like a war, and oil) is called terrorism (sound familiar??)

 

Republicans 1998- If the President lies, he should be impeached, especially if there is enough evidence out there that proves him wrong.

Republicans 2008- It's okay if the President lies if enough people believe him, even though there is enough evidence out there that proves him wrong.

 

At a minimum, the administration saw what they wanted to see instead of what the data supported, agreed.

Yes, I think he did believe it. But his isolationist tendencies were rocked by 9/11 and his thinking changed - IMO. I believe this is a much more plausible explanation.

That's the same sort of speculation that might lead one to say: 'Why is Saddam continuing to hinder inspections? He must be hiding WMDs.' The simple fact is that you cannot reasonably draw the inference that Bush et al were lying about Iraq and had always planned on invading Iraq from your statement. This is even worse than people saying 'read the New American Century document because it lays out the invasion of Iraq,' even though it does no such thing.

Living under a brutal dictatorship is not 'a normal life.' Some people here seem to think things are bad in Iraq now but they were great beforehand. That's unfortunate and revisionism at its worst.

lie1 /laɪ/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[lahy] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun, verb, lied, ly·ing.
–noun 1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.

You can't prove it was a lie, first off. Beyond that, no - it isn't terrorism.

 

Call me when it hits 1000!

 

President Bush, November 2002:
"Not only does he have them -- remember, this is a guy who was a short while away from having a nuclear weapon. Then they dismantled it. Then he started deceiving the world again and no telling how close he is to having one now. We know he's got chemical weapons, probably has biological weapons.

But, more significantly, we know he uses them. He uses them not only on his neighbors, he uses them on his own people. That's the nature of this man. We know he's got ties with al Qaeda." (emphasis added)

If you say you think something is true, and it turns out to be false, then that's a mistake. If you say you know something to be true, and it turns out to be false, you've told a lie. You shouldn't say you know something if you aren't willing to stake your credibility on it.

The Bush administration, despite knowing that the intelligence suggesting that Saddam had WMDs and connections to al-Qaeda was shaky and by no means certain, was nonetheless insistent on using such language to claim that there was no doubt about those things. Since they knew that there were doubts, they were lying.

By the way, Hayes, what's happened since Bush told all these lies that makes this "not really newsworthy at this point"? Has he paid any real price for all of this, other than the obvious blow to his public image? It seems to me that deception on this scale, with such awful results, is at the very least an impeachable offense. I think this will be "newsworthy" until there is a real debate about impeachment in Congress.

 

Sorry, link for the above post:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021101-5.html

 

Nope. Telling a lie is about intention (see definition above). The 'doubts' were not their own.

Being wrong isn't an impeachable offense. Unless you can prove he purposely propogated something he knew was false, this isn't really newsworthy. We are fairly certain now that Iraq had no WMDs, although they were in violation of the sanctions and did possess weapons they weren't supposed to have, and that Saddam didn't have AQ ties. So repeating that the administration was wrong really isn't newsworthy at this point as it is already widely acknowledged that they were wrong.

Besides, the results really are still up for debate as far as I can see. We've removed a brutal dictator, we've removed an inevitable WMD threat, we've removed a state sponsor of terror, we've seen AQ's credibility evaporate after they've openly turned on their own people, we've removed sanctions that were apparently killing millions of Iraqis, we've removed the need for US troops in Saudi Arabia, and we've removed the artificial impediment to Iraqi self determination. On the downside we've seen a lot of death and violence in Iraq, we've lost a lot of credibility on the world stage, and we've stretched our military and treasury. At this point I'm more inclined to call it a push, although I still lean toward it being worth it. That's not 'awful' IMO.

 

I wonder how many statements were reviewed that made no sense at all? As in, you can't tell if the statement is false, or true, or even if it is in English as we know it.

As in, GWB bumbles through some non-sentence, and the nerds rewind, replay, rewind, replay, rewind, replay... then throw their headsets down and open a beer.

 

I thought it was hilarious last night on Letterman when Obama's #1 campaign promise was to say he would pronounce "nuclear," "nuclear."

 

Maybe he very strongly believed it to be true, in which case he's an idiot and shouldn't have been elected in the first place. But that still doesn't change the fact that he asserted that there was absolutely no doubt about his claims. Of course there were doubts. Those doubts were based in evidence which the president had access to and were voiced at the time by knowledgeable people.

Anyway, this is a moot point. When you say you know something something to be true, that does not mean that you have not come across any evidence to the contrary. It means that, in studying the issue, you have entirely eliminated the possibility that you are wrong. If you have not done this, you are lying when you say that you "know" it, whether or not the claim in question turns out to be true. If Bush had said that he strongly believed Iraq had WMDs, that would be mistaken but truthful, and his remarks would have been much less harmful if he had worded it so. When he said that he knew Iraq had WMDs (and meaningful connections to al-Qaeda), he was mistaken and he was also lying, because he obviously did not do what was necessary to prove his claims.

I've got to go; maybe I'll get to the rest of your post later.

 

Sorry, but that's just not the case - see the definition of 'lie' I posted earlier. It's really fairly simple. When people said 'we know the world is flat' they were not lying. They were wrong, but they believed they were right. There is a difference and some expectation that you've eliminated any possible chance you are wrong is unreasonable and more than likely impossible. Lying is purposeful deception, and nothing in this report comes close to proving Bush was intentionally saying something he knew to be untrue.

One might think this is a small point but it really isn't. Bush can be accused of a lot of things, including being stupid, with good reason. However, claims like these that contend he intentionally told untruths blur the real lesson from this intervention, which is how dangerous groupthink can be. Instead of learning that lesson and being vigilant against it in the future, accusing him of lying distorts the picture and distracts us with conspiracy theories that make little sense in a cold analysis of what actually happened.

 

willlful blindness is enough to convict somebody of a felony in American criminal law.

However if you want to make an argument based on technicalities, you can pretend that being wilfully blind is not a " lie" , of course this requires a degree of willful blindness.