MAYBE NOT QUITE APPALLING

10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq (Christopher Scheer, June 27, 2003, AlterNet)

LIE #1: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment need for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." - President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

FACT: [...] Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. [...]

LIE #2: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." - President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

FACT: [...] based on a document [...]

LIE #4: "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." - CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.

FACT: Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s [...]

LIE #6: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." - President Bush, Oct. 7.

FACT: Said drones can't fly more than 300 miles [...]

LIE #7: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons [...]

FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.

LIE #8: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." - Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

FACT: [...] these stocks...were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder. [...]

LIE #10: "Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." - President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.

FACT: This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers [...]

So if you take a monkeywrench to context (also called Dowdification these days), here's what you come away with:

(1) Iraq tried purchasing these tubes.

(2) There was a document saying they tried to purchase uranium.

(3) Saddam had contacts with al-Qaeda.

(4) Iraq was developing drone aircraft.

(5) Iraq had chemical and biological weapons but may not have deployed them.

(6) AlterNet's own investigations prove Iraq had WMD.

(7) Iraq had those two modifed trucks.

You could obviously choose to give Saddam the beneft of the doubt on all those points, but it doesn't seem like an administration that did so would be doing its utmost to protect our national security or that of friends in the region. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 27, 2003 9:36 PM