The strategically ambiguous George W. Bush (6/12)

By Bryan Keefer

President Bush's recent claim that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq highlights two disturbing trends in rhetoric from the White House. The first, as we have pointed out, is the Bush administration's record of factual misstatements and distortions. The second is the administration's - and especially President Bush's - history of strategically ambiguous statements that, while technically or arguably true, imply connections between two things which he cannot directly demonstrate. (Read the whole column.)

6/11/2003 09:03:53 PM EST |

Salon runs Dean column with discredited Wolfowitz misquote (6/11)

By Brendan Nyhan

Today, Salon has reprinted a commentary by former Nixon administration official John Dean that includes a discredited misquotation of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. (Note: Access to the Salon article requires a subscription or viewing several advertisements.)

In a commentary originally published on the Findlaw website, Dean writes, "More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that '[t]he country swims on a sea of oil.'"

But this quotation, which comes from a June 4 article on the website of the Guardian, a British newspaper, was quickly retracted the next day amidst a storm of controversy. The correction read:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defense Web site: “The difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.” The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war.

Nonetheless, Dean's article ran with the incorrect quote on Findlaw and CNN.com on June 6, and continues to appear uncorrected in both places. Now Salon has reprinted it a full six days after the correction appeared. This is how political myths begin. Let's hope it ends here.

Update 6/11 11:12 AM EST: On June 9, TomPaine.com also reprinted Dean's column with the misquote.

Update 6/11 2:22 PM EST: Salon has deleted the offending line from the article and posted this correction:

A piece by John Dean, "Worse Than Watergate," published June 10, 2003, repeated an erroneous quote attributed to Paul Wolfowitz that originally appeared in the Guardian (click here to read that paper's correction). We have removed the offending quote from Dean's story.
[Correction made 06/11/03]

[Disclosure: Spinsanity had a distribution agreement with Salon from February to October 2002 and has published a number of articles on the site.]

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6/10/2003 11:22:30 PM EST |

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