Lies, Damn Lies, and Misspeaking
Matt Yglesias has a cogent takedown of Fred Hiatt's much remarked-upon piece attacking the notion that "Bush lied" in the runup to the Iraq war. I sort-of agree with Hiatt that the whole "Bush lied" idea is simplistic. But it's all about how you frame the argument. If we take a narrow definition of "lying" as knowingly uttering an untruth, then it's hard to nail Bush, given the predominant opinion of the intelligence community was that Saddam did have various WMD stockpiles somewhere. You might be able to nail Cheney, who said on Meet the Press that "we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Six months later, Tim Russert got Cheney to walk it back:
MR. RUSSERT: Reconstituted nuclear weapons. You misspoke.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. I did misspeak. I said repeatedly during the show weapons capability. We never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.
Set aside, for the moment, why Russert effectively let this pass the first time, or why he was so accommodating the second. You can see how using the strict definition of lying reduces this question to a set of circular arguments about the degree of dissembling in individual statements, or legalistic shadings of the meaning of "lying." Which, as Yglesias points out, is to ignore what actually happened. What Bush & Co. did was what presidential administrations do all the time in political campaigns and on domestic policy -- take a set of at-best muddled and contradictory information about a problem, then exaggerate and misrepresent it to create the appearance of great urgency. The innovation, such as it was, was to apply these ham-fisted techniques to matters of war and statecraft, with lives and America's strategic interests on the line. That it didn't work out so well is one of the great cautionary tales of our era: there are some lines presidents shouldn't cross in communicating with the masses. To deny this now, as Hiatt does, and instead maintain the Iraq invasion was a reasonable response to the facts as known at the time doesn't make much sense.
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should we impeach all the democrats that made the same statements as the Bush Administration, at the same time as the Bush Administration, from the same information as the Bush Administration?
Should we include in this witchhunt: Senator Clinton, Senator Rockefeller, Senator Kerry, Senator Gore-ical, Senator Durbin, Senator Dodd, Senator Schumer
Perhaps we can retro-actively impeach president clinton who made removal of Saddam U.S. Policy. (and fired 400 rockets into Baghdad at potential WMD sites).
Its very convenient that the same Democratic Senators who supported the war, now claim to have been mislead (even though they were privy to, and relied on the same National Intelligence Estimate as the Administration), and want to hang President Bush for saying the same things they said.
Shameful political posturing, which is why Pelosi and Reid, despite leading a Congress with an 18% approval rating, have actually demonstrated rational leadership in calling for an end to all the cries for impeachment.
"[S]hould we impeach all the democrats that made the same statements as the Bush Administration, at the same time as the Bush Administration, from the same information as the Bush Administration?"
You'll note that Senator Clinton has recently taken a bullet for exactly this offense.
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However, there remains a substantial difference between *believing* false intelligence, and *manufacturing* it.
How does this square with the fact that this admin set up a shadow Intel group to supply BS that was more in line with their beliefs?
You can disassemble, spin, and contort what happened but you cannot escape the fact that bush and co “catapulted the propaganda” to sell their bloody product. They succeeded, and they used lies and propaganda to do it. Everything else is just more republiCON spin and BS.
Bush lied. People died.
True then. True yesterday. Still true today. Reality does NOT change because the MSM isn’t comfortable with the fact that they helped king george jr pull off the greatest, most damaging lie in our history. And they are still trying to cover up their complicity in that war crime by shading the facts and continuing to spew their lies. But people are just not buying their BS anymore.
Other administrations have done them same. Of course, the difference is they were held accountable for their actions. Richard Nixon-impeachment, disgrace, public shame, massive media coverage of each infraction. Bill Clinton-in
Thank you for pointing out Matt Yglesias' analysis. http://mat
His best point is summarized in his own words: "it's perfectly clear that the whole pitch was made in bad faith."
You're right maybe we should all just start conflating and confusing facts and lie until they're Impeached and under arrest...t
I'll go first ...
I saw Karl Rove with Jimmy Hoffa the day he disappeare
I did...I swear..!
See it's easy...
You Americans were lied to about a lot of things. Election results , Bushs' service record, 911 , Cheney meeting with his private energy group, Gonzales and the entire justice system and so many other fibs that I don't have time to recount. Two terms! It comes to a point where the lies can be expected, but the idea that they are believed by a large segment of the population is what shocks this Canadian.
Johntal, the truth hurts. It's so embarrassing that a large segment of the U.S. population fell for the administration lies hook, line and sinker. Even now, there's a die hard 28% or so of the population who treat whatever the administration says as gospel.
Your canadian kangaroo courts now trying to draw and quarter Mark Steyn and Macleans magazaine are what shocks this american.
When you do it once, it's misspeaking; when you do it 435 times, it's lying.
Go Dennis the Impeacher!
After reading this post and the links to Matt Yglesias blog and Fred Hiatt's column, I read Newsweek's take on the senate report. Here is the link below. Reading Mr. Hiatt's post and comparing it to the Newsweek article, I came to the conclusion that what Mr. Hiatt did was this. He cherry picked pieces of the report to make it sound as if the report didn't have anything to criticize the Bush administration's run up to the war in Iraq. Ironic huh? Mr Hiatt using the same technique as the Bush administration to make similarly misleading points.
http://www
Treason and war crimes are *not* "what presidential administrations do all the time".
Exactly. To make that claim is to trivialize the unprecedented degree of mendacity and malfeasance that this administration has demonstrated from day one. The baffling thing, to me at least, is how on earth they get away with it. This administration makes Nixon look like a saint and Reagan look like a gentleman scholar. Maddening.
"The baffling thing, to me at least, is how on earth they get away with it."
They're making a lot of money for a lot of well-connected people.
Your facts are wrong.
The predominant belief of the Intelligence community was that Saddam did NOT have weapons of mass destruction. Well before the cause de guerre was trotted out, every international and most U.S. Intelligence organizations were aware of this.
Bush knowingly lied, because he culled the vast majority of information due to it not justifying the war, and ignored the repeated and nearly ubiquitous analysts' opinions that a war would destroy anti-terrorism efforts, cripple the military, and play into the hands of some Middle East political/war figures who supplied the dissenting (saying there were WMDs) opinion through ONE agent NO Intelligence community deemed trustworthy and many had disproven.
The information available and the analyses of it were neither muddled nor contradictory; every source, nation, and Intelligence group provided evidence against Bush's chosen excuse for war, the one person who said otherwise had long been untrusted as a provider of false information, a tool of terrorist groups, and somebody who the president was warned to ignore.
Instead, the president chose to ignore all the experts, who unanimously asserted, from the start and with redundancy, that the information he used to justify his war was faulty.
There's no question of Bush having lied and been irresponsible, refused to discount information widely disproven and mistrusted, ignored the expert opinions and analysis, and framed those whose analysis was based only and unknowingly on the information he let them see
Thank you. As I read this article I started thinking that I had once again stepped into the Twilight Zone. The next question is what protection do we, as citizens, have from another President doing the exact same thing?
first - all children of politicians are sent to the front lines - no officer training..
second - make sure all vietnam/iraqi war veterans are receiving the BEST possible care - no talk of budgets or we don't have the $$$ - simply the best available.
three - HONOR and PARDON all vietnam draft dodgers for their courage to resist becoming fodder for a government scheme to support the military/industrial complex.
four - simply refuse to send your children to be used as fodder for government sponsored corporate welfare. unless we are attacked - we don't go to war - very simple.
Definition of LIE:
1: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
Or
2: to create a false or misleading impression
Bush and company knowingly created a false impression by leaving out part of the intel thereby fulfilling the meaning of definition #2 of a lie. They cut out the parts of the intel which did not fit the storyline the Administration was trying to spin such as the CIA, DOD and DOE debates with each other about the threat represented by the tubes, the yellowcake and Hussein’s ability to produce biological compounds, etc.
Therefore by creating a false and misleading impression of the nature of the danger Hussein truly represented, the Administration lied to the American public. The lie was made worse because certain parties within the Administration personally profited either politically or financially or both.
Parsing the statements from Senator Rockefeller's committee report about 5 speeches that Bush and company made during their run-up to invading Iraq is just that parsing. The scope of the committee’s investigation was purposefully limited so trying to definitively state Bush did not lie by strictly using Rockfeller's report is just yet another way to spin the story and defend the lies.
The facts remain that Bush and company wanted this war and they were going to find any means to make it happen. Lying to the American public and using heavy handed “patriotism" was their game plan all along.
Reconstituted nuclear weapons implies that Saddam once had them. This is FALSE.
Almost any country in the world has stockpiles of biological or chemical weapon capabilities, most of them sold to third world countries by the United States. Such was the case with Saddam Hussein when the U.S. tied itself to him for its proxy war against Iran. Therefore, to state that Saddam has or had WMD's without elaborating is misleading. Of course Cheney knew that Saddam once had WMD's, that was no surprise. However, those stockpiles were destroyed by Iraq under UNSCOM supervision. Why didn't the press push Cheney about the fact that those same WMD's were purchased from the U.S.? Cheney was all too quick to state that Saddam had gassed his own people, the Kurds, conveniently forgetting that the helicopters used were sold to Saddam by the U.S. and even after U.S. officials found out about it, continued to do business with.
Regardless, this so-called "administration" still misled the American people, it's sole marketing target; whether by telling untruths or half-truths, it doesn't matter. They did not present all of the facts which they had at their disposal for objective independant analysis.
Were tobacco companies held responsible for withholding internal laboratory evidence about the harmful effects of their products?
The answer is a resounding YES.
Wasn't Cheney actually involved in the sale of WMD's to Iraq? Didn't he meet with Sadam before we would agree to a sale and wasn't it Chney who ok'd the deal? Not stating this as a fact, just a question since I do not remember the source. Anyone else?
You would have to be an idiot not to understanding that Bush and Cheney cherry picked only information they wanted to hear. There has been 20 to 30 books written over the past 5 years from ex-CIA and FBI higher ups discribing what the White House did. Simply ignored the facts of what was being told to them. Bush already said that "God" told him to start the war in Irac! That he had a "gut" feeling about it!.
4,000+ dead service people Mr President!!!!
30,000+ wounded severally
150,000 mena nd women with permanant mental issues from war
100,000,'s of dead Iraci citizens
Bush and Republican Christian Nazi Party have be a collosal failure from day ONE!
Hang both of them, Cheney and Bush they should be examples to remind the rest of the corrupt politicians in Washington and throughout the USA that they are next!!!
Is there a physchiatric term for a compulsive liar? If there isn't then it is better to create one so that people will recognize these sick people in future elections and won't vote for them.
They're worse than compulsive, they're pathological liars.
A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit.
A pathological liar is usually defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others.
They lied because they cherry picked the evidence, taking only that that would back up their position. It's like having two pieces of cake on a plate. If I tell you there's one piece of cake on the plate, I'm lying.
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