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

Ugh. Every credible intelligence state in the world at the time said there were WMD's in Iraq. Put every leader on trial.

This has been an increasingly stupid argument.

 

Disappointing. A late night drunk fatty response that is merely irrelevant and nonresponsive, rather than incoherent. 4/10.

 

im really not sure where to start - we were lied to and fear mongered at every step of the way by this criminal administration. we know that intel was cherry picked to support their desire to attack iraq, which prominent members of the administration had been advocating since the 90's through the project for a new american century.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14056-2002Oct24.html
"They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it," said Vincent M. Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. "And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can't get him to say what they want on Iraq."

bush gave us many reasons for invading, all of which turned out to be false. if you want to argue the incompetence route, more power to you. but evidence is pretty strong that we were lied to. bush is a puppet, but these are not dumb people running the country - they knew exactly what they were doing and saying.

iraq had chemical weapons and munitions to deliver them - saddam supported al-qaeda - saddam was involved w/ 9/11 - mushroom clouds - aluminum tubes - yellow cake - rebuilding nuclear facilities - saddams remote controlled airplanes will spray us all w/ chemical weapons - iraq will be a cakewalk...

these all turned out to be wrong - if you want to say it was just incompetence and stupidity on the part of the bush administration, thats fine...i disagree w/ you, but either way these people should not be running the country - its can only be either total incompetence or total criminality.

what about the memo that came out which revealed bush and tony blair talked about painting some american recon planes w/ un colors to get the iraqis to fire on them? i suppose technically that isnt lying, but i would say provocateuring is a more serious offense.

was bush lying when he said that nobody could have imagined the levies failing?

was bush lying when he said nobody could have imagined planes being flown into buildings?

was bush lying when he said that he was not illegally wiretapping american citizens?

 

Good luck convicting Bush of 'willful blindness.' Strange that an ex-lawyer would use the 'technicalities' cop out. I already made an argument as to why the distinction is both accurate and important.

I guess you can keep ignoring that you can't reasonably show we were lied to, but it doesn't make it fact.

This is a false statement.

Groupthink is a more likely explanation for this than conspiracy.

This is false. For example, Saddam was a brutal dictator. I doubt you can dispute that - hence your statement is incorrect.

There is zero evidence we were 'lied' to rather than misled by people who believed what they were saying.

Iraq did have unaccounted for chemical weapons and they also had missles they were not supposed to have, btw. Iraq will be a cakewalk was a future prediction so it is silly to claim that was a 'lie' since one can never be 'certain' of a future prediction. Yes, they said other things that turned out to be false, but that is not a lie and it does not prove conspiracy. Incompetance, sure. Again though, the debate should center around the dangers of groupthink and the inability of Congress to check an administration under its own delusions.

Not relevant to this debate, but if you want to rehash it then pull up an old thread since there are already answers there.

No. Hence the need to make a distinction between saying something that is untrue and lying. Again, were people lying when they said the world was flat? No, but they were wrong. Was Bush lying when he said cutting taxes would help the economy? No, he believes that to be true.

 

This is so stupid.

The reality is that we are in a war that has cost of hundreds of lives and billions of dollars.

Why? Because Bush could not bother to make sure his argument for war was 100% justified.

One would think that, if you're going to elect to go to war preemptively, it would be wise to make sure you're right. Lest you waste lives, dollars, and the little bit of international respect you have left.

Impeach that mother****er.

 

I didn't say anybody was going to be convicted - I am saying that being deliberately ignorant of something in order to obtain a desired result is recognized as a form of lying in the circumstances that matter most - accordingly a culpable mental state is inferred. Good luck arguing this "accurate and important" distinction to a jury in a real life situation.

 

Each president paid deeply for those lies. Bush must be the slickest of them all, or he has the most loyal minions.

 

fft! Impeach?

He should be tried for treason.

 

Fixed it.

It's a subtle distinction, but an important one. The people who thought the world was flat not only strongly believed that claim, but they also truly believed that there could be no doubt about it. They thought that they had learned that fact through divine revelation. So, when they said they knew it to be true, they were mistaken but not lying.

So, the question is, did Bush honestly believe that there could be no doubt about his Iraq claims? I think this is where we differ. If he honestly felt that there was no room for doubt, then he could claim to "know" that his claims were true without lying, as you say. Of course, this begs the question of how Bush could have arrived at such certainty. There may have been evidence to suggest that Iraq had WMDs or connections to al-Qaeda, but there can't possibly have been sufficient evidence to prove those claims, as they turned out to be false.

It's important to make the distinction that if Bush merely believed Iraq to have WMDs, he was sadly mistaken (and lied when he said that he knew they did). If he honestly believed that there could be no doubt about it, then he's by far the most shockingly stupid President in our nation's history. Since your argument depends on the assumption that Bush felt there could be no such doubts, I suppose that your estimation of his intelligence is even lower than mine.

I've been proceeding under the assumption that Bush, who seems to at least possess a functioning brain, recongnized that there was at least some possibility that his claims were untrue. However, those doubts in his mind were small enough that he decided to gamble with his credibility and persuade the country to go to war by stretching the truth (lying) and saying that he "knew" the WMDs and al-Qaeda connections existed. His certainty was a lie, and would have been whether or not the claims themselves turned out to be true. He just figured that the odds of being caught in it were so small that it was worth the risk.

 

It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not someone can be determined to be lying, only whether they are responsible. The whole concept is only important when someone says they weren't responsible for something, which the administration is not doing. For instance, when Ken Lay said he was not aware of what was going on at Enron, the courts said he should have been, not that he was. That has nothing to do with any determination of whether or not he was lying. Nice stretch.

If the issue is whether or not Bush was lying, this would be a slam dunk for me in front of a jury. Look at the definition of lying, look at what evidence we have, my verdict. I know I would win that argument (hmmm maybe I am lying?). I'm not saying he wasn't responsible, I'm saying there is no evidence he was purposely saying something he recognized was false.

How did he commit treason?

Whether or not they turned out to be false begs the question, since as we agree above claims about knowing the earth is flat also turned out to be false, yet those people were not lying.

Well, he is widely heralded as the most shockingly stupid President in our nation's history, even aside from Iraq, so I'll conceed. I can't even stand to watch the guy speak because he's so stupid it's too irritating.

When someone says they know something to be true, that does not mean they have testing and vetted all other possibilities to 100% certainty. That is an unrealistic and improbable threshold that really doesn't accurately account for people saying they 'know' something. Someone can be presented with evidence counter to their conclusion, evaluate it, decide that their previous conclusion is still correct, and then say they know their conclusion is the correct one. That is not lying anymore than saying those in the flat world scenario were lying. You seem to be saying that merely recognizing that there is other evidence out there means that someone can't say they know something to be true. If I said "I know we went to the moon" would that be lying? I wasn't there, I can't prove it, there is evidence countering that statement. But you'd have a hard time making a case that I am lying, even IF you could make the case that I was mistaken.

 

I'm glad you brought that up, because Ken Lay's jury was in fact given a willful blindness instruction. It was enough to convict him, apparently.

Myself - I don't care too much to make the distinction if I'm culpable regardless. Whether you open the suitcase of cocaine you are carrying across the border, or whether you decide to believe it contains something else, and don't open it up - this distinction that you are bloviating on has proven inconsequential on hundreds (or thousands) of prior occasions.

Maybe if you post a lot more you can paint yourself out of this corner, and you can prove that the Bush Administration was merely incompetent rather than duplicitous.

If you are able to do so this will represent a substantial victory for your point of view, and ultimately afford you a lot of vindication!

 

and you can keep ignoring all the evidence, manipulations, exaggerations and misstatements, but it doesnt make it false. its been well documented that intel was cherry picked and manipulated and that intel agencies were strong-armed into providing info that backed up the administrations desire to attack iraq.

no - it is true. prominent members of the administration were calling for saddams removal in the late 90's. we already had this discussion a few months back. if i remember correctly, you were so uninformed on the pnac letter that you were trying to argue that most of the signatories did not end up in the bush administration and i broke it down to show that the majority of them indeed were. ill be happy to dig up that thread if you like.

the cia counterterrorism chief disagrees with you.

hayesian sematics fun! ok - one of the myriad of reasons given for invading was that saddam was a brutal dictator (we wont talk about how we supported him while he was brutally dictating) - so i misspoke when i said ALL the reasons given were false. if you throw enough crap against the wall some of it is bound to stick. however, the the main reasons given for invading were false - ties to al-qaeda, 9/11, nukes, mushroom clouds, imminent threat. but it is true that he was a brutal dictator - but im pretty sure if bush would not have had the support to invade if that was the best reason he could come up with.

there is ample evidence to show that we were lied to and fear mongered into iraq. what exactly is the difference b/t lying and misleading?

not the ones we were told they had and they certainly had no nukes.

the people who told us it would be a cakewalk seemed pretty certain of their prediction. it was used as a way to get people to more willingly go along with the war. if we had been told that we would be there for at least 10 years and iraqi oil would not be paying for it than i imagine it would have been more difficult to get the country on board. they knew exactly what they were getting us into b/c they stated such in the 90's - that iraq would be a quagmire and we would be fighting an insurgency - that is exactly what has happened. bush I and cheney circa 1994 called it right.

the fact that our president talked about painting some of our planes with un colors to get the iraqis to fire on them is not relevant in a debate about whether or not bush lied about iraq?

wait a minute...bush wasnt lying when he said nobody could have imagined the levies failing, even though he had been told specifically that there was a good chance the levies could fail? can you clear that up for me please?

and bush wasnt lying when he said that nobody could have imagined planes being flown into buildings, when our government had wargamed just that?

and bush wasnt lying when he said the government was not wiretapping american citizens w/out a warrant when they were?

 

I've posted this over and over again. Cherry picking intelligence, and going to war over it, unfortunately is not against the law. (Invading a country without declaring war might be, but I digress.) Warrantless phone tapping is. Don't impeach for a stupid war. Impeach for violation of civil liberties.

 

i agree - there are crimes this administration has committed that go beyond any shadow of a doubt.

the 3 most obvious...

authorization of illegal torture
wiretapping of american citizens
illegal funding of fake news stories, propaganda and buying off reporters - to the tune of $2.6 billion dollars. the gao reported that this was illegal.

 

Now you're talking.



Impeach Bush.