Come on now, we all know that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, right? I mean Bush told us over and over again that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction leading up to the war, but did they ever find any? No!!! Even Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC (see video below) have confirmed that Bush lied, so it must be true, right? Well, what would you think if I told you there is no direct evidence supporting the charge that Bush purposely told a single lie leading up to the War in Iraq?
While it is certainly true that most of the information given by the Bush Administration leading to the war may have ended up not being true, that is not evidence of a conspiracy to lie and deceive. Most that support the lie conspiracy rely heavily on a database of “false statements” put together by The Center for Public Integrity that claims the Bush Administration deceived the American people and Congress a whopping 935 times.
You see, when people hear that something is a “false statement” they instantly assume that the statement is a lie. In reality, a false statement can be false while still not being a lie so it would be more appropriate to call these “inaccurate statements.” Let me explain: When Bill Clinton told the country that he didn’t have any sexual relations with Monica Lewinski, we all know now that he was lying, but when his staff went before the major news outlet and repeated this lie, they were not lying because they believed that what President Clinton had told them was the truth. For the Center for Public Integrity, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann or anyone else to claim that Bush lied directly about WMDs prior to the war they must first have evidence that he knew what he was saying was false. No such evidence has yet been found to date.
Even when Olbermann and Maddow discuss this very point on MSNBC Maddow claims that the proof lies in the fact that there were critical spikes in the release of information at crucial times leading to the war saying, “at certain times they were lying a lot faster.” So are we to believe that the increase effort to convince Congress that Iraq posed a threat based on long standing evidence not just from our intelligence communities but from our allies is somehow evidence of purposeful deceit? This kind of thinking defies all logic. Simply because the Bush administration was able to coordinate a campaign to inform both Congress and the American People about something they believed to be true at crucial moments in the political process is not and never will be evidence of lying. It is only evidence of a skillful politician who knows how to make his points for the greatest effect. If this way of thinking were true, anytime any president of either political party used the Bully Pulpit when pushing an agenda it would be considered a lie.
The Challenge:
After searching long and hard through news articles and various web sites for direct evidence that the Bush administration knowingly lied or manufactured evidence, I have yet to find a single thread of concrete evidence to support this claim. In frustration I began turning to true believers of the Bush lied conspiracy theory on left wing blogs asking for that single definable piece of evidence against Bush. I felt that surely if anyone would have a solid example to support the lie theory a true believer would know where to look.
To this end I challenged Becky Stauffer, one of the contributors at the left wing website OneUtah.org. Becky recently wrote in one of her essays, “Bush proves Lincoln’s words that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Sooner or later the lies catch up with you. Future presidents be warned.” I challenged her to give me the one single “lie” from The Center for Public Integrity’s 935 false statements that she felt was an irrefutable example of Bush telling a lie. She selected the following:
“In an interview with Polish television on May 29, 2003, President Bush stated: “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Bush was referencing two trailers or “mobile labs” discovered in Iraq.
Just days earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that the trailers “could not be used as a transportable biological production system as the system is presently configured.” It was ultimately acknowledged that the trailers had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and were probably used to manufacture hydrogen employed in weather balloons.” – The Center for Public Integrity
I expected Becky Stauffer to give me a quote from prior to the war to support the idea that Bush lied to get us into Iraq in the first place. Therefore, I will also address the claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had Mobile Biological Weapons labs prior to the war as well since it is also widely considered a lie by the Bush administration. Please consider that Becky Stauffer a True Believer of the Bush Lied Conspiracy and as someone who claims to have, “read considerably on the subject,” believes that this is the best example of a bold faced lie on the part of Bush.
Facts, Logic & Reality
First, we must go back to where the U.S. intelligence community first learned of the mobile biological weapons labs. It was not some made up piece of intelligence on the part of Bush or his staff. In fact the information about these weapons labs came from several sources. The primary source was known to the CIA as Curveball or Rafid Ahmed Alwan. He was an Iraq defector who claimed that he worked as a chemical engineer at a plant where these supposed weapons labs were manufactured. While the German FIS warned about Curveball’s reliability, the CIA felt that because they had several other sources collaborating the information that it was likely accurate.
In fact, after Colin Powell demanded multiple sources on this subject he was told by CIA director George Tenant and deputy director John McLaughlin that they had multiple eye witnesses and stated, “This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can’t doubt this one.” While we know now that the weapons labs never materialized, it is completely understandable how the Bush administration would trust such information coming from their top intelligence chiefs. Incidentally, Curveball was never actually interviewed by U.S. Intelligence agents a failure of the CIA not Bush himself.
If there was any deception here it certainly began with Curveball and was passed onto the President as reliable information. We have no direct evidence that Bush knew that the case for the biolabs was shaky since the CIA ultimately provided 4 separate sources. There is no expectation that Bush knew this information was false and therefore it would have been impossible for him or is administration to have lied about these alleged mobile weapons labs prior to the war.
Now on to what appears to be a more damning example of Bush lying about WMDs in Iraq. The stated example above by Becky Stauffer is listed as a key Overview Point by the Center for Public Integrity in their report, “The War Card, Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War.” Please notice again that because the following statement by Bush was made well after the war had begun that it could not be considered an Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War as the title of the article suggests. It seems that maybe the Center for Public Integrity should be first concerned with their own integrity and what appear to be its own deceptive practices.
First, President Bush did say on May 29th, 2003
“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.” – George W. Bush
After the discovery of the suspected mobile weapons labs, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) dispatched a team of scientists to determine whether these trailers were truly the alleged biolabs as initially reported by the Iraqi Survey Group who was in charge of searching for WMDs in Iraq. Two days before Bush made his public statement about the biolabs these scientists release an “initial action report” stating that it was believed that the trailers were not the suspected labs. It should be noted that an Initial Action Report is not a conclusive finding but an initial first hand impression.
While this may sound damning at first we must also understand that the undisclosed high ranking DIA official that broke this story in the Washington Post denied knowing if the information ever reach the President when he said, “Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say,” The final, more conclusive report titled Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers, wasn’t finished until September of 2004, well after Bush had made his initial declaration.
The fact is that there is no evidence that the President ever saw the initial action report prior to making his statement concerning these labs because the report was said to have been “shelved” or “incorporated” into the overall work of the Iraqi Survey Group. Now for those of you that are convinced without evidence that Bush did see the action report, let’s apply a little logic for a moment.
If Bush had seen the report and truly believed that these trailers were not the suspected biolabs, why would he ever even consider telling the world that they were? Are critics and supporters of the orchestrated deception conspiracy trying to say that a man who is brilliant enough to orchestrate a huge deception campaign filled with unfounded and contrived evidence is simultaneously not smart enough to recognize the terrible political damage that would be done by stating publically a lie that he knew would be discovered in short order? This way of thinking just makes no sense.
It is far more likely that President Bush believed completely the initial reports that they had found the suspected bio-weapons labs and merely jumped the gun on the announcement in his eagerness to be vindicated. Once the statement was made Bush was put into a position of continually supporting the initial findings until the final report had been concluded. You see politicians and especially presidents don’t like to admit they were possibly wrong until they absolutely have to. Also, can anyone imagine how difficult it would have been for the Bush to have had to come out with another reversal if the suspected trailers had later been found to be authentic? The opposition party would have had a field day with such a fiasco. Even then many in out Intelligence services believed that the trailers may have been scrubbed or re-converted during the build-up to the war in an attempt to hide their true intent. Regardless, as I have stated before if Bush believed that these were the alleged biolabs it certainly can not be said by any measure of the word that he lied.
Again, I would like to re-assert that there is no evidence that Bush ever did see the initial briefing making all of this pure conjecture, not fact. This makes any discussion about Bush possibly lying about the biolabs pure conjecture.
Conclusions: What we know vs. What we believe.
While it certainly could be said that the Bush administration hand picked pieces of evidence against Iraq and even put a greater emphasis on certain pieces, such action is completely understandable considering that Bush and his administration rightfully held the belief that Iraq did have WMDs. This understanding was not something that was pulled from thin air as critics would suggest but was handed to the Bush Administration by the CIA and the former Clinton Administration who in 1998 used the same sorts of evidence to launch his own attack on Iraq.
“Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.
Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.
Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons…
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…The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world.
The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government — a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people. Bringing change in Baghdad will take time and effort. We will strengthen our engagement with the full range of Iraqi opposition forces and work with them effectively and prudently.” – Bill Clinton, National Address December 16th, 1998
As you can see if Bush lied to get us into a war we must also accept that first Clinton lied for the exact same reasons and passed that lie onto the Bush administration. Not so strangely, the assessment of false statements about WMDs in Iraq from The Center for Public Integrity doesn’t include the bucketfuls of similar statements made by members of the Clinton Administration.
While many critics like to point out that certain extra emphasis was added to some intelligence, expecting the President to make a case contrary to what he believes would be like asking a criminal prosecutor to make a case for the defense. If the run up to the war were a courtroom drama, the burden of defense would not fall on the President, but to Congress whose leaders had equal access to every piece of intelligence held by our intelligence community. If there was a failure to scrutinize for contrary information the responsibility for that failure falls square in the laps of Democrats that refuse to do their job by establishing a legitimate opposition.
Finally, consider that it has become known that not only did Saddam’s own generals believe that Iraq possessed WMDs but one, General Georges Sada claims that the weapons were loaded into civilian aircraft and flown to Syria. While I am not going to get caught up in debating whether WMDs actually did exist, it is impossible to fathom how we should expect that Bush actually knew there were no WMDs when Saddam’s own generals believed that they existed.
You see, the evidence and basic logic supports the idea that Bush truly did believe as everyone else did that Iraq had WMDs. In fact it has been widely reported that the entire administration was completely surprised when the weapons were not immediately found. Why would they have searched so feverishly if they knew they did not exist? As such, any statement Bush made to that effect could not have been a lie because to be a lie he would have had to know there where no WMDs.
To this critics respond with accusations that Bush lied about or manufactured specific information, gathered from intelligence agencies. Still, there is no evidence to suggest that Bush actually did manufacture information, only that he chose to believe as did most on both sides of the isles information from our long trusted intelligence agencies. Combine this information with the undeniable fact that Saddam for over a decade had refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to do their job and you have a recipe for war. While this may not have been the case if Bush had simply been willing to defy all logic and brush aside the mounds of evidence placed before him against Iraq in a post 9/11 era; truly if Saddam Hussein had simply allowed weapons inspections to go forward there would have been no war.
During police standoffs, negotiators are quick to explain that in a standoff situation the only person who is ever truly in charge of the outcome is the perpetrator. This is the case with Iraq. In a post 9/11 era the prospect that WMDs might eventually make their way into the hands or terrorists from Iraq who was already funding terrorism against Israel and training terrorists in bomb making was simply to great for our president to ignore.
While many things may ultimately be said of President Bush, he did keep his country safe in a post 9/11 world. Let’s hope his successor has the same fortitude and willingness to do the same.
I would like to close with a few final quotes:
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it…
…By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” – Adolf Hitler
Unfortunately, the lies now are not about Weapons of Mass Destruction but about lying itself! It is important that each of use are able separate between what we believe may be true and what we know can be proved. If we fail to do so, civilized society breaks down and the mob takes over.
Please Note: For those that would like to see the clearest picture of the events leading to the Iraq War, I invite you to watch the PBS, Frontline Special: Bush’s War. Whether you are Republican or Democrat you may not like what you see in this documentary but it is likely the closest thing to the Truth that we have to date.
National | Richard Okelberry January 28, 2009 | 
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