Bush critics mucking up the truth (8/16)

By Ben Fritz

A healthy debate about President Bush's pattern of dishonesty has been growing recently, a topic that Spinsanity has expressed concern about on many occasions. However, some of the President's critics have been playing fast and loose with the facts.

An op-ed in Thursday's Washington Post by Peter D. Zimmerman, who was chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and science adviser for arms control at the State Department during the Clinton administration, deceptively implies that the President claimed Iraq would have nuclear weapons "within months." "And if Mr. Bush had not held out the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons 'within months,'" Zimmerman writes, "it is doubtful that Congress would have given him a blank check."

President Bush made no such claim, however. The closest he came was at an appearance September 7 of last year with British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he said, "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."

As we discussed later that year, the IAEA report actually referred to an estimate from before the first Gulf War in 1991, a point the President obscured. Later on, then-Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Bush actually meant to refer to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which said Iraq "could ... assemble nuclear weapons within months if fissile material from foreign sources were obtained."

President Bush never said the words "within months," however, and if Zimmerman meant to attribute IISS's words to him based on Fleischer's reference - a dishonest act in and of itself - he must also include the "if fissile material from foreign sources were obtained" qualifier. Indeed, a White House background paper to Bush's speech on Iraq to the UN on September 12 of last year does exactly that. (In the actual speech, however, Bush said "Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.")

Zimmerman also inaccurately states that "The claim that Niger was selling uranium was based on disputed intelligence, since retracted by the White House and CIA." The White House and CIA did not retract their intelligence, however. They simply said the intelligence was not strong enough to merit including a claim that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium in Africa in the State of the Union address. In fact, Vice President Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, and others have said the claim is factually correct since it was sourced to British intelligence. That's far from a retraction.

As we have detailed, many commentators have gotten the facts of this issue incorrect. Joining Zimmerman recently was former Vice President Al Gore, who in a recent speech at New York University, said the Bush administration claimed that the Iraq war was urgent because Saddam Hussein "was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa." He included this in a list of "false impressions" held by the public that was "dead wrong". Gore added that "those documents were actually forged by somebody -- though we don't know who." However, while documents that purportedly showed Iraq attempted to obtain uranium from Niger did turn out to be forged, that does not disprove the claim made in the State of the Union address. The U.K. government continues to stand behind its intelligence, which it says was not based on the forged Niger documents. (Gore also repeated the myth that the recent Congressional report on Iraq disproved alleged links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.)

Gore's speech is useful for its review of the of Bush administration's deception and dissembling on tax policy and the wars on terrorism and in Iraq. But critics of the administration's truthfulness need to be just as honest with the public as they ask the president to be.

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Related links:
-Lies, spin and truth in the controversy over Iraq's alleged pursuit of uranium (Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan, 7/29/03)
-What's at stake in the WMD debate (Ben Fritz, 6/24/03)
-More myths, misconceptions and unanswered questions about the war in Iraq (Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer, 5/28/03)
-Myths and misconceptions about the war in Iraq (Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer, 4/4/03)
-Myths and misconceptions about Iraq (Bryan Keefer, Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan, 3/20/03)
-Spinsanity on President Bush

8/16/2003 10:04:15 AM EST |

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