"The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq"

A BuzzFlash Interview with Robert Scheer And Christopher Scheer

Al Qaeda's Ties to Iraq
Iraq's Chemical and Biological Weapons
Iraq's Nuclear Weapons
The War Will be a "Cakewalk"
Iraq As a Democratic Model

As Christopher assured us in the interview, these five lead to many other lies, which lead to additional deceptions.

BUZZFLASH: These are not just deceptions that you document; they are something more than that. They are deliberate lies. You're very insistent on drawing a distinction between something that might have been the result of a careless assertion and lies.

ROBERT SCHEER: The five specific ones that the book singles out are cases where just too much information was known that what they were saying was not believable. For example -- and remember, this is not a question of "Are there old weapons in Iraq which may be found 15 years from now?" -- the president said there’s an imminent threat of deployed weapons that can be used within 45 minutes. They had to know that was a lie. There is enough intelligence data. And we knew there was no evidence. The claim on the nuclear [weapons] reconstitution had to be known as a lie. There was not a scintilla of evidence [to prove the threat].

The biggest lie of all was the connection between Hussein and al-Qaeda and 9/11. That’s just the most vicious lie, and one of the most vicious lies maybe in American history. Here you have this horrible traumatic event that not only killed people in this country, but threatens our civil liberties and threatens our whole system of government because of the over-reaction to it. And you know without any evidence whatsoever -- this they knew right in that first week or two -- they kept trying to link Hussein to it.

CHRISTOPHER SCHEER: Powell is completely implicated in this whole pattern of lying. His presentation to the UN about the threat of Iraq just before the war, in which he famously refused some of the data he was fed as "bullshit" -- as it was quoted in "U.S. World News and World Report" -- was received with rave reviews. But he went out and presented a whole bunch of new stuff that day which, in the book, we very carefully describe and pick apart: He went out and made a case for biochemical weapons labs in areas that Iraq didn’t even control. He talked about different individuals that were supposedly links between al-Qaeda and Hussein. And all this stuff was just as shaky and un-backed-up by the intelligence as the stuff that had come out in the previous six months, since the marketing campaign for the war in Iraq had begun.

And what’s astonishing in reviewing the book was to find out just how little they really had. They really took a few little pieces and milked them to the extent that it was clear they didn’t have much evidence at all. I mean, with a $27 billion intelligence budget, you think we could have come up with some more convincing evidence, even if it was manufactured.