George W. Bush tries to revise history with more lies

[marmar]

by David Corn, from Politics Daily



Once again, George W. Bush is not telling the truth about Iraq.

He has, as you may have heard, a book coming out this week. It's not a full-fledged memoir. It's an examination of various decisions he has faced during his life. (Andover or Exeter?) But he ducks much. He avoids the deregulation and free-market policies of the Bush-Cheney years that helped cause the economic meltdown at the end of his presidency. He doesn't confront his decision to divert resources from the war in Afghanistan to Iraq. Nor does he cover the administration's cherry-picking of the intelligence regarding Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. He spends more time on his trouble with booze. ("Was alcohol becoming my god?")

But Bush is mounting a defense, as selective as it might be, of the Iraq war. He acknowledges that he experiences "a sickening feeling every time" he recalls the absence of WMDs in Iraq, but he contends that invading Iraq was the right move because "America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD."

Yet that statement is flat-out wrong. Not the "safer" part, but the description of Saddam Hussein and WMDs. Bush is still trying to mislead the American public, for at the time of the invasion, Saddam, brutal dictator that he was, was not pursuing the development or production of WMDs. The Bush administration's own investigation found this. Following the invasion, there was a probe of Iraq's WMD activity conducted by Charles Duelfer, a hawkish fellow who had been handpicked by the administration to handle this sensitive job. In 2004, his Iraq Survey Group submitted its final report. The report noted that Saddam "aspired to develop a nuclear capability." But it was quite clear on the key point: Iraq had not been actively working on WMD projects. The Duelfer report concluded that Iraq's ability to produce nuclear weapons -- the most troubling W in the WMD category -- had "progressively decayed" since 1991 and that inspectors had found no signs of any "concerted efforts to restart the program." In plain talk: nada on nuclear. The same was true, the report said, for biological and chemical weapons. It found that by 1995, under U.N. pressure, Iraq had abandoned its biological weapons efforts and that there was no evidence Iraq had made any chemical weapons in the preceding 12 years. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/08/george-w-bush-still-not-telling-the-truth-about-iraq/

[liberalmuse]

1. I hope his book is filed in 'Fantasy/Horror'.

Unfortunately, we're going to have excerpts shoved down our throat and apparently he's crawled out of his drunken stupor so he can give interviews. Truly - he should be sitting in prison awaiting trials for war crimes along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Wolfowitz.

[Botany]

2. I wonder if W will mention "the pentagon's office of special plans" and

.... "the white house Iraq group," whose job it was to cherry pick data and stories
in order to make a case for going to war in Iraq.

Bush efforts at rewriting history would be laughable except for the boost he is getting
by a complicate media.

BTW a short google search will show that W spoke of how he would conduct his war in Iraq
in a 1999 interview w/ the Houston Chronicle.

[HopeHoops]

3. The shrub can't remember how many drinks he's had in the last hour and you're talking HISTORY?

:rofl:

[Rob H.]

4. "..."a sickening feeling every time" he recalls the absence of WMDs in Iraq..."

Except for the White House correspondents' dinner in 2004, when he showed slides of himself looking under a table for WMDs and joked, "Nope, no weapons under here." By that time, almost 600 soldiers had been killed and more than 3,300 had been wounded--apparently he thinks a lot of people don't remember that.

[Enthusiast]

5. He is trying to improve

the Bush brand for Jeb in 2012.