Fun With Selective Amnesia

March 17, 2004

At the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), the Minority staff for the House Committee on Government Reform prepared a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq. These officials are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The full report is On the Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq.

The Iraq on the Record database contains 237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies. Most of the statements in the database were misleading because they expressed certainty where none existed or failed to acknowledge the doubts of intelligence officials. Ten of the statements were simply false.

The panel describes their methodology for classifying statements as false or misleading: "The database does not include statements that appear mistaken only in hindsight. If a statement was an accurate reflection of U.S. intelligence at the time it was made, the statement is excluded from the database even if it now appears erroneous."

Appearing on CBS News' Face the Nation on Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently forgot making 52 statements exaggerating the Iraqi threat.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s-- suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Of Secretary Rumsfeld's other misleading statements concerning the imminent Iraqi threat, "5 claimed that Iraq posed an urgent threat; 18 exaggerated Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons; 21 overstated Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons capacity; and 8 misrepresented Iraq’s links to al Qaeda"

More about the imminent threat at the Center for American Progress, including a video clip (Windows Media) of the Rumsfeld appearance on Face the Nation.

MoveOn.org finds Rumsfeld caught on video.

Posted by Andrew Raff at March 17, 2004 1:26 PM