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The War Card

By Clint Hendler Thu 24 Jan 2008 05:53 PM 

Today the Center for Public Integrity released “The War Card,” a voluminous searchable database tallying false statements from the Bush Administration as they built their case to invade Iraq.

The CPI, a non-profit investigative outfit (founder Charles Lewis had smart things to say about non-profit journalism in CJR’s Sep/Oct issue), looked at the words of eight officials and found 935 false claims.

As 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton notes in a video released alongside the project, it isn’t just the administration that’s tarred 935 times over; it’s much of the press, who—with admirable, but too few, exceptions—reprinted the claims without skepticism.


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TDC [TypeKey Profile Page]
Fri 25 Jan 2008 11:20 AM

The Soros media machine strikes again. But I suppose it wouldnt be appropriate to mention that, now would it?

Jack [TypeKey Profile Page]
Sun 27 Jan 2008 03:15 PM

TDC,
Get yourself a perspective based on reality. The money behind the organization matters only if the organization's reports can be shown to be unreliable, deceitful, untrustworthy, etc. That's not the case with the Center for Public Integrity.

The report seems to leave out the other, third, culprit
in the maintenance of deception. The Congress had plenty of significant evidence available to it in order to judge the lack of veracity in the reports and statements from the White House at the times that the were issued or uttered. Powell's absurd presentation at the UN was soundly critiqued and shown to be based upon spurious "intelligence" not more than the day after in a news article in the Guardian. Ours is a tripartite form of government with one part, the Congress, being bicameral. Not one of the other parts did anything useful to interfere with the deceit of the Executive part.
There's virtually no one that smells good in this rotten phase of our history. Worse yet, we don't hear anyone complaining too loudly or combining even a low key complaint with any serious corrective action.

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About the Author
Clint Hendler is a staff writer at CJR.
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