Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:03:35
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A new study from the Center for Public Integrity has revealed President Bush and top administration officials made a total of 935 false public statements about Iraq's alleged national security threat in the two years following the 9/11 attacks.
President Bush made the most false statements-260. Colin Powell, his then-secretary of state, made 254 false statements. We speak with the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, Charles Lewis.
Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity. He created and directed the “Iraq War Card” project. He is the president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, a distinguished journalist in residence at American University, and the coauthor of five books.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a new study from the Center for Public Integrity that's revealed President Bush and top administration officials made a total of 935 false statements about Iraq's alleged national security threat in the two years following the 9/11 attacks. President Bush made the most false statements-260. Colin Powell, his then-Secretary of State, made 254 false statements.
The authors of the study conclude, “The cumulative effect of these false statements-amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts-was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war.” On October 7, 2002, for example, Bush repeatedly lied about the threat posed by Iraq in a primetime speech in Cincinnati Ohio.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today-and we do-does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons? We know that Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy: the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al-Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, speaking October 7, 2002. Well, Charles Lewis joins us now from Washington, founder of the Center for Public Integrity. He created and directed the study called “Iraq: The War Card.” He is the president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Chuck Lewis.
CHARLES LEWIS: Thanks. Nice to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about these findings.
CHARLES LEWIS: Well, we wanted to just look, now that we know-really since at least 2005, there have been a number of government reports, obviously, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that were no meaningful links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now that that's been firmly established, we wanted to see how often this was-this message was put out there and who said it the most and also when was it said and where was it said, how many venues. In other words, how did we get from this not being true to it being a war and what happened there?
So we systematically-and I do mean systematically-we took a two-year period, from September 11th forward, and we tracked eight officials, the folks you mentioned. And altogether, including two White House press secretaries, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and the President and the Vice President and Colin Powell, we looked at all their statements, and we wanted to-we also interlaced various fine and wonderful journalistic accounts, like Bob Drogin's and others. We looked at government reports, Senate Intelligence Committee reports, the Duelfer Report, the-you name it, we have all those reports in there. We have whistleblower accounts, the most credible ones, Richard Clarke, of course, and many others. And we wove that into the chronology, so you know what they're saying at the time, and you know what privately they are actually discussing and hearing and thinking behind the scenes. And it's very useful, because then you get to put it all in context.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain that.
CHARLES LEWIS: This is basically a historic record.
AMY GOODMAN: Chuck, explain that-
CHARLES LEWIS: Well, basically-
AMY GOODMAN: -what they knew behind-the-scenes and what they were saying publicly, because in that case, aren't you talking about lies?
CHARLES LEWIS: I am talking about them choosing certain information over other information. We know that within twenty-four hours of 9/11, of course, from Richard Clarke's account, that the President wanted to go into Iraq. And then, within a few days, the government begins the war-planning process for Iraq, and they also acknowledge they don't have the evidence, and so they decide to focus attention on Afghanistan. I know all this is known to many of your listeners and viewers, but the public has never really seen all this woven together. Most people don't read this. We felt it was useful for the public to know.
What is unclear is the process inside the White House, where this campaign-how this campaign was orchestrated. As you know, millions of emails from the White House may now apparently have been destroyed. And there's not been any hearings so far about the process in the White House, about what they knew and when they knew it and what they thought and what they were saying. I mean, this is not-this is a beginning step, in my view at least, to creating a historic record for posterity that will be a working document, and every new thing that comes out like, Scott McClellan's book in a couple months, where he apparently says he was lied to by the President and the Vice President on the Valerie Plame matter, as these things start to tumble out, we're going to start to understand better what occurred in the White House. Maybe the Senate Intelligence Committee can shed light on that in a few months, when they have hearings about their long-awaited report.
But, you know, we just laid out what we called false information. It was simply not-there was no basis in fact; it was erroneous. We did not interview any of these people, and we don't have access to internal communications that they had. And as you know, Karl Rove-they also had a separate email system through the Republican Party, which is not accessible. So until those things emerge…
You know, I'm a records guy, and right now the record, to make a blunt, you know, assertion, it certainly does-when you make 935 false statements, obviously that's strange credulity, to put it charitably. Yes, it does. But did some people actually believe this? In other words, ethicists, who are experts on lying, do make a distinction between-it doesn't mean it's any less morally offensive or tragic. What it means is, did they consciously say today, “I'm going to go out and lie some more today,” or do they believe it down to their toes, and if you gave them a polygraph they would pass? What we don't know is, which of the eight-where did this come from exactly? I mean, I think we all have some ideas what that might be, but we actually don't know.
AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Lewis, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked about your study on Wednesday.
REPORTER: Any reaction to that study out from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, where they did what they called a count of hundreds of false statements made by the President and top administration officials regarding the threat posed by Iraq-and they counted during the two years after 9/11?
DANA PERINO: I hardly think that the study is worth spending any time on. It is so flawed in terms of taking anything into context or including-they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world, because, as you'll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.
AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Lewis, your response?
CHARLES LEWIS: Well, you know, just to make an observation, this is the press secretary who didn't know about the Cuban Missile Crisis until a few months ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain.
CHARLES LEWIS: Well, she made a reference that she had-actually didn't know about the Cuban Missile Crisis back in the '60s. For a White House press secretary to say that is astonishing to me.
So, anyway, her comment is, of course, predictable. At least she didn't call this a third-rate burglary. If my administration, that I'm the flack for, made 935 false statements, I would want to say, “Go do another study and take ten years and look at the world and Congress.” The fact is, the world was rallied, as was the compliant Congress, into doing exactly what the administration wanted. And the bottom line is, she didn't say that they were not false statements. Basically, they acknowledged they were false statements without her saying it. They have essentially said, “Gosh, I guess there weren't any WMDs in Iraq,” in other statements they've made, “it's all bad intelligence.”
Well, the fact is, we did provide context, 400,000 words of context, weaving in all of this material, not just what they said at the time, but what has transpired and what has tumbled out factually in the subsequent six years. So we actually have as much context so far as anyone has provided in one place. It's searchable for all citizens in the world and for Congress and others that want to deal with this from here on.
But her comment is slightly laughable. I mean that she didn't really address it, of course, and she's going to really have an interesting time in a couple months.
AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Lewis, I want to keep you with us-
CHARLES LEWIS: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: -as we continue to talk about the lies that led up to the Iraq war. We're joined by Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin, who's author of the new book Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War. The book examines how a former Iraqi taxi driver helped build the Bush administration's case for war by making false claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged biological and chemical weapons programs.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bob Drogin.
BOB DROGIN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you back. You make this case, how the CIA leveraged and the Bush administration used this guy Curveball's false allegations to provide a pretext for war. Explain who he was and how the administration used him.
BOB DROGIN: Sure. Yeah, I think this is sort of the defining case of how we got led down the rabbit hole in Iraq. Curveball is the codename of an Iraqi-Rafiq Alwan is his name-who was a chemical engineer who defected to Germany, fled to Germany in 1999 and told the German intelligence authorities that Saddam-that he had helped mastermind a scheme to build biological weapons for Saddam Hussein. That information was never confirmed. It was never vetted. It was just sort of put out there and handed over to the Americans.
And after 9/11, the CIA literally just pulled it out of a safe, and within three weeks, the classified documents showed that all of the caveats that had existed before that period, where the questions of Saddam's WMD was viewed as possible, probable, could be, may be, someday, suddenly were viewed in a totally different light. And his information-that is, the information from this one individual-rose higher and higher until the fall of 2002, when President Bush is citing it.
It appears in a document known as the National Intelligence Estimate, which is the gold standard of US Intelligence, it forms the strongest part of that. The President cites his information in the State of the Union speech in 2003. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, makes it the absolute highlight of his speech, when he goes up to the UN Security Council in February before the war. He shows pictures or drawings of trucks.
What they don't say at that point is that US authorities had never interviewed this man, had never confirmed his information, had never vetted his background, didn't even know his name before the war. They had ignored warnings from the German intelligence authorities, who repeatedly had sent warnings over saying he was a single source, they couldn't confirm his information, he was-he had had a nervous breakdown, they didn't know what to make of him, he might be a fabricator. There had been a bitter fight inside of the CIA between the clandestine service-that is, the operatives who go out and steal secrets but who deal with informants and defectors like this-and the analysts. The analysts were utterly championing-sorry, they were pushing his story.
And three days after Powell went to the United Nations, the UN weapons inspectors went to all of the sites, every single one of the sites that Curveball had told them about, where these weapons supposedly were being produced. And they not only didn't find the evidence, they proved that it couldn't be true. They found a variety of things that showed his story was wrong. All of that was ignored, was overruled, was pushed aside. And obviously we went to war on false pretenses.
So I find his story-and those people who tried to bring that truth to power, who tried to stop this train wreck from happening, were not only pushed aside-one guy I write about is-came back and, you know, discovered that his desk, you know, had been boxed up, and this was at CIA, and he was being sent off to the visitors' center. And then someone else, you know, put at the end of a hallway filled with construction material and no access to classified computers. The CIA was very vindictive.
So I found this case fascinating as I tried to sort of drill down and peel back the layers of what had happened here, this idea of these bureaucracies made up of people who are trained to lie, cheat and steal, that at every possible juncture there was rival-bureaucratic rivalries and really tawdry ambitions get in the way and, frankly, spineless leadership that just absolutely refused to stand up.
What you had, in the end, this man was a con man. He was trying to get a visa to Germany to get political asylum. But the CIA heard what it wanted to hear. It conned itself. It saw what it wanted to see, and it gave the White House totally what it wanted to hear.
AMY GOODMAN: And Cheney's role in this?
BOB DROGIN: Dick Cheney's role is not as large. I mean, to me, you know, the idea-there were two things happening, as you know, before the war. There was the WMD question, and then there was the role of-the question of Saddam's alleged support for terrorism. And on the WMD side, the CIA was not whispering this, you know, to Dick Cheney or something; it was coming in through the front door. George Tenet and the rest of the CIA, you know, was briefing the President, was briefing the Vice President, was briefing senior members of Congress.
They were putting out these reports, all of which, you know, proved to be totally wrong.
So, to me, the great-in my view, the greater scandal is not that there were three or four guys over at the Pentagon sort of whispering in the Vice President's ear and, you know, feeding him false information about one thing or another; it's that the entire intelligence community got this so devastatingly wrong. When you go back and you look at Colin Powell's speech-we're coming up to the fifth anniversary of it next month-and you go back and you read it now, and it's entirely based on this document that the CIA put out a couple months earlier, this National Intelligence Estimate, it's wrong on almost every single level. And that's based on what the CIA gave him. So, you know, I don't think it-to me, it's not the issue of a couple of guys, it's that this system was so utterly corrupt.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to put this question to you and then to Chuck Lewis, and that's the issue of the media. Many people would have believed President Bush if he had simply said it, but not that many. It took the media repeating this over and over again. And even to this day, the concern about saying the word “lie,” do you think the President lied? I mean, this study says more than 900 times this false allegation was repeated, the quote “false statements.” What do you think, Bob Drogin?
BOB DROGIN: Well, I think, on the issue of Saddam's alleged ties to 9/11 or the claims that Saddam was tied to 9/11 and al-Qaeda, they clearly ignored warnings from the CIA and others that that evidence was sketchy at best. So there was a deliberate attempt or a political decision made that they were going to make that case. Now, if you want to-you know, however you want to describe that is-whatever. They made that their political decision.
On the WMD side, it's a lot harder to find, I think, you know, a difference between what they were saying and what the CIA was telling them.
This issue of lying, I have to say, Amy, I've never quite understood it. I mean, it's sort of like asking, to me, whether they, you know, forgot to put their turn signal on before they drove off a bridge. I mean, they took us into the midst of a-you know, a terrible, a horrific, tragic war, and they did it on the basis of ponied-up false intelligence. And sort of where they pushed the evidence here or there is sort of-to me, is sort of secondary. The fact is, they got it absolutely wrong on every single quarter.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Chuck Lewis, finally, we only have about thirty seconds, but if you could respond to that issue, the media's role in this, amplifying the charges?
CHARLES LEWIS: Well, I mean, you know, the media, particularly in Washington, listens to officialdom, and if all these officials are all saying these things across the board-and we only looked at eight. Just imagine it was twenty-five to fifty on Capitol Hill and throughout the administration. That goes into millions and millions and millions of words in the airwaves, on the web, in newspapers. And so, it was very hard-as I call it, an “impenetrable din”-to break through that.
But the other thing-and the intelligence is really interesting. It was mixed. At every level, there were people saying “Don't do this.” And at every level, the politicization of the intelligence community, they would put it in as “Bob is saying…”-and these folks were making speeches, the President and the Vice President, before they-
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
CHARLES LEWIS: -had a National Intelligence Estimate. So, anyway, this story is going to keep rolling out. It's incredibly interesting. It's horrendous, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Lewis, thanks very much for joining us, founder of Center for Public Integrity. We will link to the study
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?src=home&context=overview&id=945>. And Bob Drogin, author of Curveball.
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