False Positive: Bush's Deadly Odor of Mendacity

Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 08 August 2007
President Bush's many media sycophants tell us over and over that he is not the dribbling idiot of popular imagination. As Hugh Hewitt and other genuflectors who are ushered routinely into the great man's presence insist, George W. Bush is an intelligent, focused, purposeful leader, with a firm grasp on the complexities of modern statecraft.
Let us grant the truth of this assertion. (Indeed, I have already granted it, in two previous pieces: here and here.) What this means, of course, is that when Bush makes a statement in public, he is very much aware of what he is saying, and fully cognizant of the implications of his words. Therefore, when the intelligent, focused and purposeful Mr. Bush declared Monday -- at a highly publicized meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- that the Iranian government "has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon," we must assume that he knew full well that he was telling a barefaced lie, and that he told this lie for some specific purpose. That purpose is obvious: to further prepare the PR ground for inducing the public to go along with a future military strike against Iran.
This is precisely the same kind of focused and purposeful lie that Bush told when he declared, on national television, that there was "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," and that Saddam Hussein had "aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operative of al Qaeda." In fact, the new lie is even more brazen, for it involves only the public statements of Iranian leaders, not cherry-picked and falsified nuggets of murky intelligence data buried from all public view. Anyone with a computer -- or a memory -- can readily determine that Iran's government leaders have insistently proclaimed their adamant opposition to building a nuclear weapon; the nation's theocratic leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, has even declared such a weapons program to be against the will of God.
The veracity of such statements might be controversial, of course. After all, there is no particular reason to believe that the government leaders in Iran are any more honest than, say, American presidents (or American clerics) have proven to be down through the years. But it is simply, literally, indisputably an outright lie to declare that the Iranian government has "proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon." The very opposite is true.
Bush knew he was lying -- and he was lying with a purpose. He was trying to inject this poisonous falsehood into the public debate, and he succeeded. The remark went largely unnoticed by the corporate media, which focused on other themes in the joint press conference. The US media's flagship, the New York Times, did not even mention Bush's falsehood, much less point out the inaccuracy of the remark. As it does so often, the Times smoothed over Bush's actual words with a bland paraphrase, saying only that Bush "is deeply suspicious of [Iran's] nuclear ambitions, a view he reiterated Monday." (That is a further lie in aid of the original lie. Bush did not say he was "deeply suspicious" of Iran's nuclear ambitions; he said outright that Iran has declared its desire for nuclear weapons. There was no "suspicion" about the statement at all; Bush retailed it as an established fact.)
Some outlets, such as the Washington Post, did report Bush's remark -- and even went on to note, at the very bottom of the story, that "Iran actually has not proclaimed a desire to build a nuclear weapon." But instead of asking why Bush would tell such a glaring, provocative lie, the Post merely, and meekly, allowed an Administration spokesman to explain away the remark with a non sequitor: Iran had once kept its nuclear energy program a secret and was now resisting some of the extra inspections demanded of them outside the the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that they have signed and followed for years. The spokesman did not explain how any of this constituted a "proclamation" of the desire to build nuclear weapons. And the Post obviously did not press him on it. Still, in this degraded age of journalism, I suppose we must give a gold star to the Post for even mentioning the discrepancy between Bush's statement and the truth.
(However, full marks must go to AFP for writing a whole story on the lie: Bush levels dubious Iran nuclear arms charge. But they're just a bunch of foreigners anyway, so they don't count. Only the echo chamber of the Homeland media is important in the new warmongering campaign.) CONTINUED