'Five Lies' Lives On

[SHRED]

'Five Lies' Lives On

By Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet
February 22, 2004

Editor's Note: This is a modified excerpt from the new edition of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" by Robert Scheer, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry. The new edition includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue analyzing the series of important developments that have shaped the debate over post-war Iraq, and more importantly, the missing weapons of mass destruction. To buy the book, visit http://FiveLies.com.


On February 17, President Bush sought once again to extricate himself from the scandal that simply won't go away: the missing Iraqi WMD. "My administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a danger," he told thousands of U.S. soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana. "Members of Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a danger. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence and it saw a danger. We reached a reasonable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a danger."


It's no surprise that the independent commission appointed by the president has been carefully instructed to only look into lapses in intelligence-gathering, and not at the ways in which the administration may have exaggerated or misused intelligence. Now that it has become clear that Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons programs simply "did not exist," as the outgoing chief weapons inspector David Kay put it, the White House is scrambling to cast its now exposed lies as the inevitable consequence of a massive intelligence failure. In other words, the flaw lay not in the "reasonable conclusion" of the administration, but the evidence it was based on.

MORE:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17912

[ewagner]

1. So far

nobody has called Bush* on this new spin. He's repeating at almost every campaign stop and if he isn't challenged on it soon, it will become accepted as truth.

[Martin Eden]

2. The LIE that "we were all wrong"

They're saying that EVERY intelligence agency believed Iraq possessed WMD before the invasion, but there were HUGE differences between the EXTREME assertions of the Bush administration and others who only conceded that not all of Saddam's pre-1991 stockpiles had been accounted for.

Perhaps the biggest LIE in this "we were all wrong " canard involves the only true WMD -- nukes. Based on the in-country UN inspection team of Hans Blix, the IAEA determined that Iraq hod NOT resumed its nuclear program. At the same time, Dick Cheney asserted Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons".

No honest intelligence agency agreed with the rhetoric coming out of Washington.