House of a thousand lies

CheeseDigestsAll — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:32:09 -0800

While it may be old news the US was drawn into the Iraq War under false pretenses, a new report by the Center for Public Integrity documents 935 specific falsehoods in public statements by eight white house officials: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Fleischer and McClellan. At the center of the report is a database of 380000 words of testimony on Iraq. A search for the phrase "aluminum tubes," for example, shows that there was an immediate negative reaction inside the government to Rice's claim (Sept. 2002) that these tubes were "only suited" for making nuclear weapons. Within a week, objections from the International Atomic Energy Agency, DOE, and the Oak Ridge labs, were raised both privately and publicly. Despite the expert rebuttal, in the summer of 2003, Rice was still claiming "a consensus" of scientists supported the claim.
Sadly, this report also serves to document why lying works and why Bush and others continue to use it. The press acts as an "echo chamber" for anything that high administration officials say. Anyone who disagrees is cast as a "critic" and an outsider. The fact that it took nearly five years after the start of the war to compile this database shows how much time the propaganda machine has to operate without an effective counter.

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House of a thousand lies