When I read and hear of such non-partisan organizations with names like Center for Public Integrity & Fund for Independence in Journalism I just know that the opposite is true.
Posted on 01/22/2008 9:17:48 PM PST by Tut
WASHINGTON — A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded 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."
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said he could not comment on the study because he had not seen it.
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to Al Qaeda or both.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I guess a “lie” is in the ear of the beholder.
Yeah. Sounds like a Bill Moyers project. ROFL
Need a Freeper to post that picture of the actor agonizing about “Not This $..t Again, cause that is what it is.
They never give up do they.
A non-profit research group (my wife and I) here in the Northwest determined that no lies were told about Iraq. We are currently awaiting a call from the AP to set up an interview.
How many times did they count the same statements between 1992 and 2000? Hmmmmm?
Oh please... and Fox News, the “conservative” channel publishes this tripe.
“non profit organization”?
Is that the NEW liberal brand, like pro-choice’, or “climate change”?
The disassociated press never gives up...
Related........http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1958002/posts
“Center for Public Integrity” my butt. Why go back just to 2001 and not through out the 1990s and include statements from the Clinton Administration and even the press?
I thought I would report one more time about these people’s so called “Integrity”
Oh, “journalism organizations” that makes it credable!
“The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to Al Qaeda or both.”
Erm, lessseee here...
Chemical weapons... check! Had them before, can’t just assume ‘they evaporated’.
Trying to produce (ie, having a nuclear program)... check!
If they didn’t have a program, the hell was El Baradei doing for 10 years ? Just because their program ‘sucked’ doesn’t mean they didn’t have it.
Connections to shady characters... check!
Hatred of the US... check!
Firing on Coalition Aircraft... check!
Just becuase no weapons were found doesn’t mean anyone lied. Believing something and being wrong (maybe - we don’t actually know what happened with the chemical weapons everyone knew they had) does not make one a liar.
Perhaps they should check out the CIA reports and figure out why they screwed the pooch on post-invasion insurgency intelligence...
Check out the boards of these organizations. A coalition of lefty journalists and lawyers.
When I read and hear of such non-partisan organizations with names like Center for Public Integrity & Fund for Independence in Journalism I just know that the opposite is true.
FOX is “Conservative” by the new definition of “Conservative”, which is spelled M-O-D-E-R-A-T-E, and is slightly left of center.
One cannot even begin to count FOX as Conservative per historical definition of Conservative anymore. It simply isn’t.
Perhaps “Faux Conservative”, and change of name to FAUX instead of FOX.
Ahhhhhh ... weren’t the Bush people saying the same thing the Clinton people had been saying ..?? Don’t we have transcripts and videos of the Clinton people talking about the “threat” that was Iraq ..??
If Bush lied - CLINTON LIED .. and we all know Clinton never lies [/s].
But .. just let a repub say Clinton lied and the sky practically falls in. I’m so sick of this whole mess.
Saddam Hussein signed an armistice with the Allies. I think the number of Allies was around 50+ nations.
Within 24-hours of signing that document, he violated it, and then went on to violate again and again and again, to a totla number of violations 1000+ times.
We had International Law on our side when we went in and cleaned his clock.
This just sounds like a bunch of cry-baby liberals.
I wonder how many times they discovered the media lied—must be in the thousands or millions. OH, nevermind that doesn’t count.
‘Perhaps “Faux Conservative”, and change of name to FAUX instead of FOX.’
Can’t tell DU from FR sometimes these days. At least the lefty loons were original with that 10 years ago.
So Fox pissed you off by having an AP article on its site? How dare they?
Oh yeah, Fox is not a conservative news outlet. You take everything liberals say as gold, huh?
Yup, it’s an election year. What a bunch of crap.
I think we should withdraw 1st ammendment speech rights from the press during time of war.
Failing that we should publicly pillory every one of them found to be lying in fact, for 3 days with no bathroom privileges, so they can smell the same stink we read or hear from them.
“I guess a “lie” is in the ear of the beholder.”
Or in the case of “non-profit journalism”, the donors. A who’s-who of lefty organizations in this case.
Check their sites. “non-profit journalism” is beholden to donors. The LEAST way to remain fair and objective.
That's almost as much as a journalist lies in a day. Shocking.
My point ‘zactly. Every other driveby is so far left that Fox, left of center, appears conservative by comparison.
This is just more “Bush lied” propaganda from left wing journalists: and the now hopelessly agenda-driven AP treats it as “news. No wonder our media are dying before our eyes. Do they think we have no memory? No access to search engines? It’s not just that they are so dishonest: they think we are stupid!
“Lie” being defined as whatever liberals don’t want to hear.
OTOH< they tell lies repeatedly and insistently, apparently in the belief that if they repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true.
it’s getting to the point i really, really hate jackasses, libs and whatever else they want to call themselves
Which can only mean the likes of the Clintons, halfbright, gore, kerry...virtually all of them lied a thousand fold many more times than Bush.
Sheesh, they failed before so now they just magnify their failure into what????? 900+ times?
Bush derangement syndrome. No cure yet! Fight for a cure!
Take a peek in Seria. Those tractor trailers lined up at the border must have been full of food relief.
Read the post again, you might wish to do so with your brains functioning.
Be back in the AM.
whats the big deal....everybody lies
Did they count the times Bush was lied to?
You will notice that this "report" will only get so much coverage due to the blowback factor. This article is all selective inuendo in regards to the accusation that Bush and affiliated officials knowingly told falsehoods vs. the truth that they acted on the best info they had at the time.
Well.... that depends on what you call a lie. Michael Moore defines a lie is anything you say that is not true regardless of what you believe to be true or not.
I believe that it all depends on what a guy actually believes when he makes a statement. To decide what Bush lied about, you would have to decide what he actually believed unless you are using Michael Moore’s loose definition.
What Bush was saying was nothing new and was being said throughout the 90s by the Clinton Administration, the media and in most cases, by Bush’s sharpest critics.
It would be fairly safe to say, each and everyone of those so called Journalists, if you look at their past stories, going back a decade before Bush even got to the Whitehouse, I think you would find that they have wrote stories or at least eluded to those same WMDs that Bush spoke of, those same Al Qaeda stories.
Now.... if you actually spend time to go back and do some research on that, I believe that is what you will find.
With that new information, you can decide if the authors of that story... or that research is in it’s self a lie by misleading their readers.
Now THAT would be a story to write about.
I believe they were using Michael Moore’s definition. Anything someone says that turns out not to be factually correct regardless of what a guy actually believes.
And another independent research group (myself, my wife, and 2 kids - 1 is a college grad, the other graduates in May - and we are also in the Northwest!) did a study and determined that the Main Stream Media is biased and wants the US to be defeated.
We checked the definition of “Traitor” and determined that it probably applies to the Main Stream Media. While the MSM cries for Impeachment of Bush and Cheney - we figure that counter-claims of aiding and abetting the enemy by the MSM should be pursued, and appropriate penalties assessed if found guilty.
Since the MSM routinely distorts what Bush said, then airs the distorted statement, then tries to prove the distorted statement is false - this is shades of tampering with evidence. Ultimately, most of what various spokesmen in the Bush administration have said is demonstrably TRUE.
“The Center for Public Integrity Full disclosure: The Open Society Institute, which was founded by George Soros, is a funder of the Center for Public Integrity. ...
www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=196”
It's another Left wing outfit like People for the American Way.
AP reporters play with dolls!
Soros also funds the Center for Independent Journalism
Thank You.
AP - American Pravda
“Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.”
And not one Democrat who made similar statements. “A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations” my a**. A hit piece during an election year by a democratic supporting disingenious clown group. Soros study2.0.
Neat trick too, repeating the same “lie” gets to count multiple times. All the morons will repeat the 900 number like they parrott the 600,000 dead.
Study already being debunked
January 23, 2008
How to Lie About Lying
Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd
This one is simply befuddling:
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded 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.”
Now, would any disinterested party read the above — and not think the study authors were accusing President Bush and his administration of deliberately lying us into war? Surely this subtextual implication must have crept in because of bad writing; I can’t imagine that the elite media would be so intentionally partisan.
Here are the specific charges:
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. “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.”
One notes that “Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members” — isn’t that a lovely grammatical construct? — do not deny that Iraq was “trying to... obtain” WMD, even though they appear to include such claims under the category of “false statements.”
Nor do they deny the administration’s claim that Iraq had “links” with al-Qaeda. They merely dispute the meaningfulness of those links... and dub that another “false statement” by the president and his administration.
Here is that section from the report itself, from their database of “false statements;” it’s a perfect primer on the anatomy of a falsehood:
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.”
This one is instructive to deconstruct:
1. What they say: “In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: ‘Sure.’”
What they mean: Rumsfeld asserts that relationships exist between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
2. What they say: “[A]n assessment... found an absence of ‘compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.’”
What they mean: The later assessment found that there were relationships, but they did not rise to the level of military alliances.
3. What they say: “[A]n earlier DIA assessment said that ‘the nature of the regime’s relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.’”
What they mean: Before we found out the nature of the relationships, we did not know the nature of the relationships.
If you can find that Rumsfeld’s statement (1) — which evidently consisted of the single word “Sure” — is falsified by either (2) of (3), please take to the comments and explain it to the rest of us... because to me, laboring under the disadvantage of having been intensely trained only in the lesser rhetorical art of mathematical logic, they appear to be able to exist in the same ‘hood without bothering each other.
Here is another “false statement” (we are meant to understand “obvious lie”) that the Center discovered, after digging deeply into the substrata of hidden rhetorical diplospeak. I must admit, this one was a marvel of original research that all by itself may justify the report — if only to bring this one hidden, obscure falsehood to the light of day:
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.”
This is such an out of the blue, never before seen accusation that I haven’t had time to formulate a response. He has me there!
Thus the massive database of dishonesty and mountain of mendacity they unearthed, dutifully reported by the Associated Press... with but a single effort to elicit a general response from the administration — and no attempt whatsoever to delve into these alleged “false statements” to see whether there is even a contradiction between what the administration said and what the Center for Pubic Integrity said. Yet there is also this unanswered (unasked) question that seems somewhat pertinent, at least to me:
How many of these “false statements” were, in fact, believed true by virtually everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, when they were made? How many were parroted by Democrats, including those on the House and Senate Permanent Select Intelligence Committees, who thereby had access to the same intelligence as la Casablanca? The Center doesn’t tell, and the incurious media elites don’t ask.
This is as close as they come in their executive summary:
Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual “ground truth” regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who’s Who of domestic agencies.
On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials [Eric Shinseki? Weasely Clark? Bill Clinton?], have publicly — and in some cases vociferously [”rabidly” would be the better word choice] — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence.
A growing number of critics! Well, who could argue with that?
Here are a couple of inconvenient truths the AP story neglects to tell us:
o “A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations...”
The Fund for Independence in Journalism says its “primary purpose is providing legal defense and endowment support for the largest nonprofit, investigative reporting institution in the world, the Center for Public Integrity, and possibly other, similar groups.” Eight of the eleven members of the Fund’s board of directors are either on the BoD of the Center for Public Integrity, or else are on the Center’s Advisory Board. Thus these “two” organizations are actually joined at the hip.
o “Fund for Independence in Journalism...”
The Center is heavily funded by George Soros. It has also received funding from Bill Moyers, though some of that money might have actually been from Soros, laundered through Moyers via the Open Society Foundation.
Other funders include the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (used to be conservative, but in 1987 they veered sharply to the left, and are now a dyed-in-the-wool “progressive” funder), the Los Angeles Times Foundation, and so forth. The Center is a far-left organization funded by far-left millionaires, billionaires, and trusts.
Even the New York Times, in their “me too” article on the data dump, admits that there is nothing new in this release... just a jumble of statements, some of which later turned out to have been erroneous, others which just constitute heresy within the liberal catechism:
There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”
By “wallowing,” the Times means those in the terminal stage of BDS can search for phrases like “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake” and be rewarded by screens and screens of shrill denunciation of the Bush administration... just as Watergate junkies used to do (without the benefit of computers) in the early 1970s. (Mediocre science-fiction author and liberal “paleotruther” Isaac Asimov called this, evidently without realizing the irony, “getting my Watergate fix.”)
The Nixon reference appears to have been suggested by the report itself; the executive summary ends:
Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?
I’m certain it’s sheer coincidence that this nonsense was spewed across the news sockets during the peak of the election primary season... and right before the primary in Florida, of all states. Had anyone at AP or the Times realized how this might affect the election, I know their independent journalistic integrity would have suggested they hold this non-time-constrained story until afterwards. Say, they could even have used the time to consider whether “Iraq and al-Qaeda had a relationship” and “the relationship didn’t amount to direct cooperation” contradict each other.
A less charitable person than I might imagine this “database” was nothing but a mechanical tool to allow good liberals easier access to a tasty “two-minutes hate.”
But realizing that the elite media has only our best interests at heart, my only possible conclusion is that, despite the multiple layers of editorial input that must occur at these venues, several important facts just slipped through the cracks:
o The fact that the Center for Public Integrity is a Left-funded, leftist, activist organization with a serious hatchet to grind with the Bush administration;
o The fact that the Fund for Independence in Journalism is neither independent, nor is it engaged in journalism (it’s a front group of mostly the same people whose purpose is to shield the Center from lawsuits);
o And the fact that the vast majority of the supposed “false statements” are in fact simply positions with which liberals disagree, or else statements widely accepted at the time that later investigation (after deposing Saddam Hussein) showed to be inaccurate.
I must assume that these self-evident facts must simply have been honestly missed by the gimlet-eyed reporters and editors at AP and the NYT. Heck, even Pinch nods.
http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2008/01/how_to_lie_abou.html
Shouldn’t be too hard, after all this is a Soros project
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1958158/posts
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kathleen-mckinley/2008/01/09/study-lies
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1951183/posts
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