‘Saddam chose to deny inspectors’

March 31, 2006

Salon’s [tag]Joe Conason[/tag] picks up on what may be the most breathtaking line in the president’s rhetorical quiver. Specifically, Conason noted that Bush, at his most recent press conference, insisted that Saddam Hussein, before the March 2003 invasion, “chose to deny inspectors [and] chose not to disclose.”

[H]ave the rest of the reporters in the press room become so accustomed to presidential prevarication that they literally cannot hear a stunning falsehood that is repeated over and over again?

For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there.

But forget about whether the weapons were there for a moment. The inspectors definitely went to Iraq. They left only because the United States warned them to get out before the bombs started to fall on March 19, 2003. But for some reason the president of the United States keeps saying — in public and on the record — that the inspectors weren’t there.

It is rather disconcerting, isn’t it? The first time Bush made this claim, in July 2003, reporters just seemed to shrug their shoulders. The WaPo’s Dana Milbank explained, “I think what people basically decided was this is just the president being the president. Occasionally he plays the wrong track and something comes out quite wrong. He is under a great deal of pressure.”

I’ve never found this reassuring. First, by virtue of his responsibilities, the president of the United States shouldn’t say nonsensical things when he’s “under pressure”; he or she should be able to deal with some modicum of stress. Second, Bush keeps repeating this line about the weapons inspectors. Shouldn’t he know by now that it’s not true?

Conason’s broader point, however, is that the president keeps making this very odd claim, despite reality, without reporters even making note of it.

Historians will wonder someday how a free press permitted the world’s most important official to say such things without contradiction.

Forget historians, some of us wonder now.

No mystery at all. The White House Press Corps, and reporters generally, have chucked the nitty-gritty of real jouranlism for what’s become the national pastime: celebrity worship. It’s not surprising that they would do this since the highest paid “journalists” aren’t newspaper people at all; they’re TV anchors, who worry more about their hairdos and Botox than they do about anything so mundane as the news … in fact, they’re celebrities themselves. Glitter, glitter; bling, bling.

  • My point (I hit “post” too quickly) was: Today’s “journalists” don’t care about the truth. They just report what they hear while in the company of the celebrity president. He can, and does, lie through his teeth, and nobody seems to give a damn because nobody cares what they say either.

    BTW, that was “journalism” not “jouranlism”. Sorry.

  • This serves to illustrate what a cunning, conniving, evil man Saddam was. The sheer unmitigated gall of refusing to acknowledge WMDs he did not have was alone sufficient reason for us to blow up the shit out of Iraq. He compounded his heinous act by letting UN Inspectors have unfettered access to any site they wished and, in a show of near demonic hostility, he even told the press, “The Americans claim I have these weapons when I do not. I invite the US to send in their CIA spies and to take us to where they claim they know these weapons are hidden.”

    What greater provocation could there have been: a mad dictator refusing to disclose weapons he didn’t have while offering the CIA the opportunity to expose the nonexistent stores of non-existent WMDs? What choice did Bush have? He couldn’t possibly leave a truth-telling, mindless killing machine like Saddam in power!

    Let this serve as a lesson to Iran – denying you don’t have weapons that don’t exist will not fool the keen-eyed, battle-wizened, crusader on a mission from god, the Good King George. He will see right through any truthful statements you make and discover the lies you so fruitlessly tell.

  • I always love to be reminded of the fact that George Bush was getting so frantic about the inspectors not finding WMD that he lost all connection to reality.

    Damn it! The man took us to war to punish Saddam for trying to kill his dad in Kuwait (1993?). Everything else he said was just excuses to get the rest of America to go along. Now his alcohol and cocaine addled brain can’t keep track of the excuses that proved out and those that didn’t.

    And how can you and Helen Thomas be so mean as to task him further about it 😉

  • This is the story I’ll tell my kids when they ask what it was like (along with the picture of the guy apologizing to Cheney for getting shot).

    It’s either a story of “it all started to go to hell when” or “can you believe how corrupt it was”. We’ll see which in a couple short years, I guess.

  • I wish a reporter would ask Bush whether he ever had a blowjob from a woman other than his wife, because if he was caught in a lie about a blowjob, that would we be big news.

  • I think we forget who we’re talking about, the guy who stated proudly that he doesn’t read newspapers. And we are continually reminded of how he is basically in a bubble from the rest of the wold. It wouldn’t suprise me if he truly does believe the inspectors were kicked out, as his reality is whatever he’s told it will be. There is no way in hell he could pull off lying about it, I really don’t think he’s that skillful.
    Just roll him out when you need to show his face to the camera, tell him what to say, then let him get back to his napping/exercising/choking.

    This unattachment from our world finally occured to me when Jon Stewart pointed out how he seemed to be recalling fond memories of Andrew Card as his chief of staff, from a script.

  • Tie this in with Cheney badmouthing the potential benefit of getting the arms inspectors back into Iraq, circa August 2002. Then, circa November or December of 2002, he threatened the inspectors, telling them that we would discredit them. Then, they stiffed the inspectors by not sharing the CIA’s complete list of sites with them.

    Bush and Cheney did everything they could to scuttle the inspection process. Little wonder that Bush conveniently forgets the details now. Bush claims that he did not want war. But he did everything that he could to insure that the one last process that could have prevented war did not work.

  • No, no, no, pResident Moron doesn’t forget and he’s not so coke/booze addled that he can’t remember straight–he’s doing the one thing he and the rest of his administration do so well–LIE with a straight face, over and over again, until most of the country thinks that what he is saying is true. It works, it works! Have you all noticed? And the media don’t call him on it. And in the rare instances when they present an opposing view (the truth) about the lies he tells, it just looks like a differing perspective. No one looks him in the face and says, when he says these things–You Are Lying and You Know You Are Lying and You Do It Over And Over Again!!! Nothing short of this will show a good chunk of the American people that this pResident and this administration, although they are also many other things, are pathological liars. They lie when it’s important and they lie when it’s not. Yes, they are also arrogant, stupid and insensitive. But they are not confused. They are relentless.

  • I guess all those dead Kurds were imaginary. IMHO, if he does it once, he’ll do it again. Sorta like the child molester who just moved into your city.

  • I’m astounded to find that Bush has made this fairytale claim a THIRD time. I’ve “harked” about the first and second times he blurted it out with no reaction from the press. A ‘confederacy of dunces.’

    By the way, if you haven’t already, buy and read “Cobra II.” It’s probably been discussed here, but I’m reading it now. I’m particularly impressed by its objectivity and detail. If you expect blatant Bush-bashing from “Cobra II,” you won’t find it. The facts do that job all by themselves. For example, while Bush repeatedly stated that he had made no decision to go to war, planning for the invasion began a year before it occurred. Either Bush lied, or he was unaware of what Rumsfeld and the entire U.S. military was doing behind his back.

    Good job, Tex.

  • IMHO, if you think that the war to free Iraq is fundamentally wrong, you need to talk to two groups of people – The Iraqi women who are now able to be educated and to vote, and to descendants of the survivors of Hitler’s “solution.”

    Oh, and now playing: Purple Rain – it’s turning into a seventies/eighties weekend… I think I’m gonna plug in the Mothership next…

    • Comments are closed.