Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People
Posted on 10/11/2003 12:46:46 PM PDT by dirtboy
For weeks now, to the point of annoyance, we’ve witnessed Democratic politicians and liberal media talking heads stating that the threat from Saddam wasn’t imminent, as President Bush had claimed. Nancy Pelosi said it, as did Senators Levin and Rockefeller. The AP and Reuters have claimed it. Bob Edwards on NPR stated it as fact in a softball question to Terry McAuliffe during an NPR interview. By the time the Kay Report was made public, the NY Times felt the lie well-positioned enough to incorporate it into their opening front-page salvo against the evidence Kay presented:
“Analysis: preliminary report delivered by David Kay, chief arms inspector in Iraq, forces Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Saddam Hussein posed imminent threat to world”
However, anyone who gets their news from non-PIPA approved media outlets is well aware that Bush said nothing of the sort. As a refresher, here are Bush’s actual comments from the 2003 State of the Union Address:
"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."
So why would the Dems so transparently alter Bush’s clear meaning here? I initially chalked it up to their pathological tendency to play games with the truth, whether they need to or not. However, upon reflecting upon Charles Krauthammer’s brilliant analysis in his column WMDs in a Haystack, the purpose and timing of this lie and the need for the Dems to distort what Bush said becomes clear. From Krauthammer:
“Ekeus theorizes that Hussein decided years ago that it was unwise to store mustard gas and other unstable and corrosive poisons in barrels, and also difficult to conceal them. Therefore, rather than store large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, he would adapt the program to retain an infrastructure (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could "break out" and ramp up production when needed. The model is Japanese "just in time" manufacturing, where you save on inventory by making and delivering stuff in immediate response to orders. Except that Hussein's business was toxins, not Toyotas.” (emphasis mine)
The Kay Report found the framework of an extensive chemical and biological weapons program, but no weapons themselves. Above and beyond the possibility that the finished weapons themselves are either still hidden or were shipped to another country such as Syria, the existence of this kind of program was both a vindication of the decision to invade and of Bush’s postulation that we should not wait until the threat is imminent.
Hence the need to alter the debate and Bush’s very words.
By shifting the debate to a position where the threat from Saddam was stated by Bush as imminent, the Dems basically are attempting to make the just-in-time manufacturing approach from Saddam irrelevant to the case against him, and the Kay Report, instead of being a justification for the war, instead becomes damnation of Bush and more “evidence” that Bush lied to get us into war.
But the timing is rather interesting – the Dems started lying about this well before the Kay Report went public. How could they have been aware of the need to engage in damage control over the Kay Report and lay the groundwork of widespread lying before the report came out?
I believe that the answer lies in Kay’s initial Senate briefing on his findings that happened in late July. Kay made it clear that Saddam had engaged in an extensive deception campaign to hide his WMD programs. I would also speculate that Kay confided to the Senators present that he had found programs but no weapons. It is my belief that at least one Dem Senator, seeing the problems that Kay’s findings would present to their attacks on Bush, saw the need to change Bush’s position regarding the threat from Saddam, hence the sudden barrage of claims from the Dems that Bush stated the threat from Saddam was imminent.
If this is the case, a Dem Senator took a classified briefing and used it for purely political purposes. It would be very interesting to track this lie back in time and see when it went into widespread Dem use.
"It is long past time for this administration to be held accountable. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history - worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-Contra."
The CBC statement, she said, makes clear the group's opposition to any military strike against Iraq "without a clearly demonstrated and imminent threat of attack on the United States." And, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said there has seen "no evidence nor intelligence that suggests that Iraq poses an imminent threat to our nation."
So we can see why Bush raised the issue in SOTU - he was saying we shouldn't wait until the threat was imminent. And if Dems want to say that the threat wasn't imminent and we shouldn't have acted, that's fine. But when did Dem politicians start bleating in unision that Bush claimed the threat was imminent? Krugman did it in June 03, when did the politicians pick it up and run with it?
I found a quote by our buddy Greg Thielemabb using it in the run up to the war.
"Does Saddam Hussein pose an imminent threat to the United States?" Byrd asked.
Recent published reports tell of unhappy CIA analysts who fear their intelligence reports on Iraq's arsenal was compromised for political reasons, that higher-ups tilted intelligence to fit the administration's need to find an excuse to attack Iraq.
The intelligence hierarchy might become the scapegoat if no weapons are found.
In a parting shot, Hans Blix, the retiring chief U.N. weapons inspector, claims the Bush administration "leaned on us" to produce certain findings in their weapons search.
In the run up to the war, Bush and his team spent months contending that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were a "direct and imminent" threat to the United States.
I guess it wasn't enough for Helen to use just "imminent", she had to falsely throw in "direct" as well. There really seemed to be a tremendous amount of this kind of stuff in the press about July 17th or so - looks like that's when the DNC fax machine fired up. Still looking for Dem politicians who claimed that Bush stated that the threat was imminent.
Agreed. Looks like they led with Krugman on June 3rd, and then there was a commentary barrage about July 17th- or a couple of weeks before Kay gave his preliminary briefing. Kinda like softeninig up the other side with an artillery barrage before attacking...
By JIM ABRAMS Associated Press writer WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Friday that the Iraq war was justified despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Congressional Democrats countered that a report from chief weapons hunter David Kay shows that administration claims Iraq posed an imminent threat were unfounded.
The president also shrugged off polls showing rising doubts about whether the war was worth the costs. "Sometimes the American people like the decisions I make, sometimes they don't," he told reporters. "But they need to know I make tough decisions, based upon what I think is right, given the intelligence I know."
Democrats, already hammering the president over his $87 billion request for military and rebuilding operations in Iraq, quickly latched onto Kay's interim report as further proof that the attack on Iraq was ill-advised.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, emerging from a briefing with Kay, said it was "clear to me that there was no imminence of a threat for weapons of mass destruction," as the White House had claimed.
Note that it isn't clear if Pelosi said "as the White House had claimed" - that very well could have been the AP adding that to the story. I think we're going to see a lot of media manipulation with only a few Dems (from safe, hard-core liberal districts) saying that Bush stated that the threat was imminent.
Jul 30, 2003 5:51 pm US/Central (WCCO-TV) National Democrats are test marketing a controversial political ad in Madison, Wisconsin...the capitol city of a battleground state.
"In his State Of The Union Address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat. 'Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,'" says the commercial.
Damn, nothing I like better than finding a smoking gun...
Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People
Yep, they were laying the ground here to shift the debate away from Kay's findings. They had to have known that he was findign weapons programs but not weapons, and had to make it seem that Bush claimed that the threat was imminent.
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