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   Study: Bushies Lied 935 Times to Sell Iraq Invasion

		By 
		Charles Lewis  and 		Mark Reading-Smith, 		The Center for Public Integrity. Posted January 24, 2008.

			Bush and his top officials waged a campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top
officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made
at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11,
2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's
Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive
examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an
orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and,
in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On
at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews,
testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along
with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott
McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al
Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush
administration's case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not
possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al
Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government
investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the
multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established
that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and
made little effort to restart it.
In short, the Bush
administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous
information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in
military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the
officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media
interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most
false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire
body of prewar rhetoric.
President Bush, for example, made 232
false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another
28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State
Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244
false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about
Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false
statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney
(with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the
heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven
top officials were saying for public consumption against what was
known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully
searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both
primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources
(chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on
September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more
than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.
Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:
On
August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the
Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there
is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director
George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his
agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to
the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where
is he getting this stuff from?' "
In the closing days of
September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on
authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in
his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and
chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and,
according to the British government, could launch a biological or
chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. .
. . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material
could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were
also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- an analysis that hadn't been done
in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and
the White House hadn't requested it.
In July 2002, Rumsfeld
had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had
relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment
issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and
confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of
"compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the
government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA
assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al
Qaeda is unclear."
On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish
TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction.
We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward
reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian
experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had
concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological
weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month,
concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen
for weather balloons.
On January 28, 2003, in his annual State
of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has
attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear
weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to
colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the
uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax." 
On February
5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell
said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid
intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human
sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to
which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi
con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence
officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The
other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had
reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later
recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January
2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information
interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being
handed over to [a foreign government]."