Breaking F@#kin’ News: Bush And Co. Lied
Seriously, apparently Bush and top administration officials have made false statements as the fabricated evidence and a pretense for invading Iraq.
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.
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.
What amazes me is that the vast majority of those journalists and journalism nonprofits knew before the war that Bush & co. were lying, they either did not have enough balls to oppose and criticize them, or they held off the anti-war stories simply because they had a pro-war agenda. Their motivations may have ranged from political loyalties to the neo-cons and Israel to their desire for busy news season. The price of a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives seemed reasonable to them.
Anti-war activists and a handful of academics spoke out against the fabrications Bush & co. pushed through the news pipeline. However, they were vilified, accused of treason and supporting terrorism, silenced and intimidated by the Bush administration with the help of the media, similar attacks were carried out on charities and institutions that criticized Bush’s McCarthyism and march to war.
The facts did not change; what we knew to be a lie prior to 2003 is what’s being documented and chronicled in those new studies. Yet the media outlets and individuals complicit in fabricating the war pretense relied on a dumb and ignorant public that is incapable of drawing parallels when those tactics are being used to invade a nation, shut down a charity, or sensor and academic, a public that seems to suffer collective amnesia when the same fabrications and tactics are employed only a few years later, and goes in a state of severe denial when the government of its “greatest country in the world” turns out to be no better than the most corrupt dictatorships whom they grown accustomed to uncritically condemning.
At this rate, it appears that it will be a few years before some media watchdogs or the academia come out to critique the immorality and lack of ethics inherent to the war pretense, even had the claimed made by Bush et al been vindicated.
