Did the United States go to war under false pretenses?
A new multimedia investigation by the Fund for Independence in Journalism and the Center for Public Integrity shows President Bush and seven of his top officials made at least 935 false statements in the two years following 9/11 about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The project, “Iraq: The War Card,” shows this orchestrated campaign was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for going to war with Iraq.
The project, housed on CPI’s site, is an exhaustive and searchable database containing every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding (1) Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and (2) Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda.
A chart of the frequency of false statements by month shows:
The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion. It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation.
