Study documents nearly 1,000 lies from Iraq war propaganda campaign

By the CPI’s count, the 380,000-word searchable database (available to the public at http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/) contains at least 935 demonstrably false statements made on 532 separate occasions by the following officials: President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

On these 935 separate occasions, the database’s authors write in their introduction, officials “stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.”

These claims of Iraqi WMDs and links to Al Qaeda were all completely false, as US officials have acknowledged. Perhaps the most famous admission came on January 26, 2004, when, in Senate testimony, former US weapons inspections leader David Kay conceded that “we were all wrong”—a conclusion that followed from the October 2003 Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report, which Kay explained by telling Congress that, after months of searching US-occupied Iraq, “We have not found at this point actual weapons.”

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