Friday, March 05, 2010

Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq

By Robert Parry
March 5, 2010

George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove claims “one of the biggest mistakes” of that presidency was not aggressively challenging critics who charged that Bush “lied” to the American people about the reasons for the Iraq War, an accusation that Rove insists was false and unfair.

Read on.
Posted by at

8 comments:

Wes Gordon said...

It does not appear that Mr. Rove neglected his boss excessively, since he served two full terms, and the cabal continues to tour the world smiling and lying instead of residing in a prison at the Hague alongside other war criminals.

Fri Mar 05, 12:16:00 PM 2010
Morton Kurzweil said...

Rove and Cheney did not tell Bush about Colin Powell's trip to the U.N. with charts and pictures confirming the worst fears of future Tea Pots and anxiety freaks.
For Bush, as with Reagan, ignorance is not indictable.
Not guilty is not the same as not proven in American law.
When those to make the money are in charge of spending it, and are indebted to those who buy their elections, it's no wonder that a puppet government has run this country for the last half century or more.

Fri Mar 05, 10:24:00 PM 2010
Anonymous said...

Good stuff here, a beacon of truth during this long night. Watosh of Raleigh.

Sat Mar 06, 04:11:00 PM 2010
Bill from Saginaw said...

The big lie about Saddam Hussein supposedly kicking the UN weapons inspectors out, refusing to let the inspectors back in, defying the United Nations Security Council, and actually pretending to have weapons of mass destruction when he didn't finds a parallel in the revisionist history constructed to justify the invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan. Again, the mainstream US media remains shamefully complicit.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and others consistently spread the false claim that invading Afghanistan was brought about by the Taliban regime's refusal to stop harboring Al Qaeda, and by Mullah Omar's stubborn refusal to oust and hand over Osama bin Laden, Zwahiri, and other top Al Qaeda leaders for trial under international law. The exact opposite of this official narrative is the historical truth of the matter.

What is even worse is that both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and President Barack Obama in his now infamous West Point address specifically repeated the Bush/Cheney cover story to explain the current White House's own troop escalation decision. Obama declared at West Point with a straight face that Afghanistan was a war of necessity, not a war of choice - a war forced upon the United States by the Taliban's adamant refusal to withdraw its sanctuary from Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 attack cohorts in crime.

There is now no shortage of solid journalists like Robert Parry (outside mainstream American media circles) who are willing to call a lie a lie when it comes to the Bush White House's claims about Saddam's imaginary stockpile of WMD, and Baathist Iraq's supposed cooperative links to radical Al Qaeda jihadis. But a far deeper, thoroughly bipartisan Orwellian myopia still prevails about the real world diplomatic posturing in the immediate run up to the US bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.

Dumb wars spawn dumb, self-serving official cover stories that should not go unchallenged when the lies get repeated by high government officials, regardless of party affiliation.

Bill from Saginaw

Mon Mar 08, 05:01:00 PM 2010
Anonymous said...

A lie is not a simple mis-statement; it is an intentional mis-statement by someone who knows better and who intends to deceive.

The problem with saying that Bush lied is that there is serious reason to question his appreciation of reality. There are many reports, including from Bush himself, that he believes he has a personal connection and that he experiences intimate conversations with his god.

It is quite possible that in his personal reality, God told him that Iraq had WMD and Bush was responsible for finding and destroying those WMD. Clearly no report by the CIA or NSA could be a authoritative as that.

It is probably worse to have a president who is dilusional rather than dishonest, but this is likely what we had with Bush as president.

Tue Mar 09, 10:17:00 AM 2010
Benjamin from Louisiana said...

Mr. Parry makes bold claims as though he has some sort of inside knowledge. These 2 sentences are pretty funny to me:

"...it can’t be argued that Bush didn’t know that Iraq declared that it had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and let U.N. inspectors in to see for themselves in the months before the invasion."

"Hussein and other Iraqi officials did say they no longer possessed WMD and they did let UN arms inspectors into Iraq in the fall of 2002 to search any site of their choosing."

So Mr. Parry seems to be of the opinion that Hussein is more trustworthy than Bush. According to Mr. Parry, Hussein told us he had gotten rid of his WMDs, and he let our inspectors go wherever they wanted to prove it. In Mr. Parry's brain, that proves that Bush lied. Here are 2 points from the media to counter that conclusion:

1. Hussein had used WMDs on his own people after the time when they were supposed to be destroyed.

2. The inspectors would have to wait to enter sites they chose to inspect, and while waiting they could see caravans of vehicles leaving the facility.

Now Mr. Parry would of course choose to ignore these particular claims because they do not support his conclusion. And admittedly, they could be false. Of course, you could argue that I am simply ignoring the facts he sites. But here's the point. I choose to give my commander in chief the benefit of the doubt over a dictator. Maybe that's just my own ignorance, but I actually think we are in the right. I could pick and choose all sorts of interesting facts to make all types of negative claims, but in the end, I would just be fitting what I want to a preconceived conclusion. I do not have any true insider knowledge, and neither does Mr. Parry. Everything he gets is second hand. I doubt Mr. Parry will ever consider anything other than what he has already decided, but that of course is just my opinion.

Wed Mar 10, 10:05:00 AM 2010
Nat Parry said...

I'm sorry Benjamin, but your two "counterpoints" are both patently false.

1) The Halabja poison gas attack against the Kurds took place in 1988, long before the UN sanctions and at a time when the United States was supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons.

2) Read Hans Blix's book "Disarming Iraq" for a first-hand account of the inspections process. Hans Blix, as you may or may not know, was the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March 2000 to June 2003. In his book he describes the cooperation he received from the Iraqis and his bewilderment over the US's rush to war. At the time, all he was asking for was a bit more time to verify that Iraq had destroyed its WMDs, and if he had been given more time, he would indeed have confirmed that.

This is not "inside knowledge," this is documented historical fact.

Wed Mar 10, 10:28:00 AM 2010
Tony Bonn said...

if karl rove's lips are moving he is lying or taking a gigantic crap...bush most emphatically lied about iraq because he was in grudge match against daddy bush's former business partner saddam hussein and his former business partner tim osman aka osama bin laden.....

al qaeda was a complete cia fabrication to justify a phony war on terror whose only purpose was to get a pipeline through afghanistan to india when hussein failed to deliver....there are some rich veins in carlyle group exposing this and the bush crime syndicate's connections to enron which in turn necessitated the destruction of the wtc where the records were housed, as you do....

the war on terror was a hoax on america to destroy enron evidence, enlarge the pantagruel military industrial complex, and advance the police state with those moronic patriot act laws taken straight out of nazi germany - one of the many benefits of operation paperclip....

yes folks, all we found in iraq was salmon-pak where the cia trained its pilots to bomb the wtc....apparently hussein also thought he could use this to blackmail the bush crime syndicate whereupon he found himself looking down the wrong end of an m-16 rifle....

and those occassional videos of bin laden are a complete hoot....what cheesy hollywood lot were those cave scenes filmed?...

the lies continue with the vast right and left wing conspiracy of the cia controlled newsfaking press....

Sun Mar 14, 01:02:00 PM 2010

Post a Comment