Knight-Ridder offers four more Bush-Cheney assertions

Knight-Ridder offers four new assertions that are currently being made by Cheney and Bush about the War in Iraq. Each assertion is provided with context that indicates why it is misleading and in one case flat false. The assertions are listed below. Go read K-R's responses here.

ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war "critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

ASSERTION: In his speech, Bush noted that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate - who had access to the same intelligence - voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

ASSERTION: In his Veterans Day address, Bush said that "intelligence agencies around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

ASSERTION: Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told reporters last Thursday that the Clinton administration and Congress perceived Saddam as a threat based on some of the same intelligence used by the Bush administration.

"Congress, in 1998 authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," Hadley said.

And Rumsfeld, in briefing reporters Tuesday, seemed to link President Clinton's signing of the act to his decision to order four days of U.S. bombing of suspected weapons sites and military facilities in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.

In one case the assertion is simply untrue. In every other, Bush/Cheney provides a sliver of truth in a highly misleading interpretation. The effort is to provide their core supporters with something to say, even if (as is true of all of these assertions) the statement is clearly false to anyone who has followed the issues.

Bush-Cheney are simply trying to keep a vocal minority supporting them. This is not a debate. This is an effort to frustrate any search for the truth and demand accountability. Go read my earlier comment here for an explanation of what they are attemmpting to achieve.

This article is a beautiful example of the same techniques used to mislead the nation into war. It worked for them in 2002, so they are continuing to use the same techniques to avoid the blame for what they did.