the kicker

The War Card

It isn’t just Bush who looks bad
January 24, 2008

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.

Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.