Iraq War: Bush still lying, says USA Today

It doesn't really seem like "9/11 changed everything," no matter how many times politicians keep repeating it.

But the Iraq War has made some lasting changes in perceptions.

And it's wasn't probably not directly related to the war.  But for whatever reason, USA Today no longer looks like the Wonder Bread of newspapers.  Look at what we seen recently for two of the chief villains in the world of those who believe in the fairy tale of the Liberal Media.  The New York Times let Judith Miller plaster Ahmed Chalabi's lying propaganda about WMDs all over the news cycles and gave a big boost in credibility to Bush's case for war in Iraq.  The Times is still considered "the paper of record," the Gray Lady, etc.

And CBS News, after their sad little stumble over the "Killian papers," decided they wouldn't run a news story about the WMD deceptions because someone might think about it in deciding how to vote for President.  As the Daily Howler says, if we didn't have a press corps like this, you couldn't invent them.

But USA Today has been doing some surprisingly solid reporting lately.  In fact, they've had some good reporting on the Bush National Guard story.  This week, John Diamond illustrates for his more timid cohorts that it is possible to report the news professionally while still pointing out, carefully but clearly, when the president is lying in our faces:  Report Creates firestorm at Senate hearing USA Today 10/06/04 (10/07/04 print edition).

The article is about Charles Duelfer reporting to the Senate his final conclusions that - big surprise! - Iraq didn't have any WMDs.  The article doesn't mention it, but one of the conditions in the Congressional "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002" was that President Bush had to demonstrate to Congress that diplomatic means of dealing with Iraq's WMD threat had been exhausted.  (See Iraq War: What did Congress really authorize? 08/16/04) Since the UN inspectors were working in Iraq and asking for more time, and since we now know that the WMDs didn't exist anyway, it's hard to see how Bush can claim to have even pretended to comply with that. 

But Diamond's article does note that Bush is not, to put it mildly, fully explaining the implications of this to the public in his speeches:

As Duelfer methodically went through his findings in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Bush was on the stump recasting his explanation for the war in light of the emerging information.

“There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks,” Bush told an audience in Wilkes Barre, Pa., “In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.”

The main risk at the time of the invasion, it seems, was that Bush might fail to get the war against Iraq he and his senior advisers wanted despite the fact that Iraq had no WMDs and no operational connections to Al Qaeda and was not sponsoring anti-US terrorism.

But, unlike the presently-degraded standard for his profession, Diamond points out a flaw in the president's comment (my emphasis):

The decision to go to war has brought with it new risks that have become the central issue of the presidential campaign. Responding to the report two days before the second of three presidential debates, the White House emphasized the portions on Iraqi plans to restart chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs once U.N.-imposed economic sanctions were lifted.

But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, scoffed at what he called “speculative discussion about Saddam's possible intentions.”

Say what?  War involves risks?  This is obvious to most sentient beings.  But the White House even today talks about the alleged risks of not going to war, as though war weren't the riskiest of all human enterprises.

And it's a sad commentary on the state of today's mainstream media that when a reporter bothers to point something like that out, it seems to leap off the page for being so unusual.  But Diamond isn't editorializing here.  That comment was a bridge to give the reader useful information to put Bush's claims into some kind of realistic context.  And he continues (my emphasis):

Bush's unapologetic tone contrasts with that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who faces his own political troubles for his strong backing of the Iraq invasion.

“Just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is there were no stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed,” Blair said Wednesday, “I hope others have the honesty to accept that the (Duelfer) report also shows that sanctions weren't working.”

The 1,000-page Duelfer report does not entirely support Blair's characterization. In the years immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam destroyed his arsenal in hopes of having economic sanctions lifted. However, U.N. inspections uncovered illegal Iraqi arms activity that sanctions were supposed to have prevented.

“Rebuilding the military, including any WMD capability, required an end to the sanctions,” the report states.

In other words, according to Diamond's reading, Blair was just lying about what was in the report.  And he takes the time to pull out a passage illustrating his observation.  If we had the kind of press in the US that a democracy needs, this would be standard practice to fact-check very checkable claims by officials like this instead of meekly reporting their mischaracterizations like partisan press offices.

Not that this required a lot of work.  Duelfer's Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] on Iraq's WMD (30 September 2004) is available on the CIA's Web site.  But for today's Potemkin press corps, the idea of actually looking to see if the leaders talking about the report might be, oh, bald-faced lying about it seems to be way too much effort.

Now, obviously, Diamond didn't use the word "lying," and it's right that he didn't in a news story.  Bush's supporters could rightly claim that a weakened Iraq with no WMDs and no ties to Al Qaeda "a risk we could not afford to take” is at least in part a situational and value judgment.  But he did bother point out legitimate problems with Bush's continued characterization of the invasion, without relying completely on the "this side says/the other side says" convention.

And he pointed out that Blair's sanctimonious statement is difficult to reconcile with the Duelfer report, though again his supporters could claim that in some long-term sense of not providing absolute certainly for all time, the sanctions weren't working.  But Diamond flags for the reader that this is something most people would consider a bogus interpretation of the report.

Also, I would think after Tony Blair's pathetic record on the Iraq War, he would be ashamed to say something like, "I hope others have the honesty..."

But, then, anyone who would pump out false claims about WMDs using cooked intelligence to start a war like the one in Iraq, is hardly likely to blush at making additional phony claims.