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Obama Has Always Had His Priorities Screwed Up
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Jun 28, 2014 12:22:23   #
carolyn
 
Sgt, Andrew Tahmooressi is a decorated, combat-wounded veteran of two tours in Afghanistan. He is being held in a Mexican jail against his will. Sgt. Tahmooressi was meritoriously promoted to Sergeant, but evidently this means nothing to an anti-American such as Saddam Hussein Obama, who so sneakily and illegally went to so much trouble to trade a cowardly deserter who ran out on his fellow soldiers, putting them in untold dangers while searching for the enemy to be palsy-walsy with. And this illegal act turned 5 of the most dangerous Taliban Commanders loose to k**l more Americans in the future.

Now this is a cowardly and impeachable act that so many Americans are willing to turn a blind eye toward, As they evidently are with the incarceration of Sgt. Tahmooressi, who is a bona-fide hero. What manner of screwed up reasoning is this insane POS president using in this display of evident loss of mind?

We should round up and deport 1/2 million i******s for each day that Sgt. Tahmooressi has been held captive. This way we could k**l two birds with one stone because the president of Mexico does not want his dregs back home to have to support, and he does not want to lose the American dollars that they send back to their families. So we could get rid of all the i******s here while forcing this POS peppergut to release Sgt. Tahmooressi.

Sgt. Tahmooressi has already been held long enough to make a tremendous difference in the amount of welfare we could save and all the other costs such as the other freebies that come with being on welfare.

Think about it and demand that our officials start the ball rolling.

Reply
Jun 28, 2014 12:34:37   #
America Only Loc: From the right hand of God
 
You have some real facts here...but as some of us already know...Obama is obsessed with perfecting his technique in sucking s**t through a straw...and remains stead fast in not allowing anything to interrupt that agenda.....

Reply
Jun 30, 2014 16:54:25   #
Chameleon
 
Your mommy must be a turd howelse could she give birth to a piece of s**t like you.

Reply
 
 
Jun 30, 2014 23:42:37   #
carolyn
 
Chameleon wrote:
Your mommy must be a turd howelse could she give birth to a piece of s**t like you.


Now you have picked a "handle" for yourself that certainly fits you to a "T". A chameleon is a reptile that can change it's coloration to that of it's surroundings. Chameleon also defines as "a fickle person." Fickle defines as "inconstant and changeable." So to define you we would have to say you are a true Democrat who changes his ideas as often as he is around someone who is his same color.

What color are you, Mr. Chameleon?

Reply
Jul 1, 2014 10:51:00   #
Chameleon
 
Your name just says you're Stupid.

Reply
Jul 1, 2014 10:53:45   #
Chameleon
 
Just shut up and stop spreading ignorance.

Reply
Jul 1, 2014 12:55:00   #
carolyn
 
Chameleon wrote:
Your name just says you're Stupid.


Would you care to define my name?

I defined your name and came up with what I posted. But I do believe we will be seeing different name but with the same juvenile cast that would mean you changed yours.

Reply
 
 
Jul 1, 2014 13:00:38   #
carolyn
 
Chameleon wrote:
Just shut up and stop spreading ignorance.


Ignorance? Almost all of that which I post comes from sources that have spent time and money in researching what I have posted. Most of these people do not have a direct link to any political party. The reason they are accused of being affiliated is that the Democrat party is so blatantly crooked and dishonest that they can't help but post their crooked dealings. If they did not, they would not have anything to post at all.

Reply
Jul 1, 2014 13:54:15   #
Chameleon
 
There you go spreading ignorance again.

Reply
Jul 1, 2014 13:57:33   #
Chameleon
 
Your sources are stupid, ignorant, and r****t just like you, so who cares about your dam sources.

Reply
Jul 2, 2014 00:25:05   #
carolyn
 
Chameleon wrote:
There you go spreading ignorance again.


A two year old child's response if I ever saw one. Does your mommy know you are playing on her computer? You had better watch yourself or she will beat your little black ass with a board.

Reply
 
 
Jul 2, 2014 00:29:45   #
carolyn
 
Chameleon wrote:
Your sources are stupid, ignorant, and r****t just like you, so who cares about your dam sources.


HAHAHA! Evidently you care quite a bit about my sources because they sure do make you pee in your diaper, don't they? Let me find another good one and we can all watch as you poop in it as well.

Reply
Jul 2, 2014 00:54:54   #
Jack2014
 
carolyn wrote:
Sgt, Andrew Tahmooressi is a decorated, combat-wounded veteran of two tours in Afghanistan. He is being held in a Mexican jail against his will. Sgt. Tahmooressi was meritoriously promoted to Sergeant, but evidently this means nothing to an anti-American such as Saddam Hussein Obama, who so sneakily and illegally went to so much trouble to trade a cowardly deserter who ran out on his fellow soldiers, putting them in untold dangers while searching for the enemy to be palsy-walsy with. And this illegal act turned 5 of the most dangerous Taliban Commanders loose to k**l more Americans in the future.

Now this is a cowardly and impeachable act that so many Americans are willing to turn a blind eye toward, As they evidently are with the incarceration of Sgt. Tahmooressi, who is a bona-fide hero. What manner of screwed up reasoning is this insane POS president using in this display of evident loss of mind?

We should round up and deport 1/2 million i******s for each day that Sgt. Tahmooressi has been held captive. This way we could k**l two birds with one stone because the president of Mexico does not want his dregs back home to have to support, and he does not want to lose the American dollars that they send back to their families. So we could get rid of all the i******s here while forcing this POS peppergut to release Sgt. Tahmooressi.

Sgt. Tahmooressi has already been held long enough to make a tremendous difference in the amount of welfare we could save and all the other costs such as the other freebies that come with being on welfare.

Think about it and demand that our officials start the ball rolling.
Sgt, Andrew Tahmooressi is a decorated, combat-wou... (show quote)


It's undoubtedly due to dumb pukes like you that have lost all credability due to the buchendy i***t pukes.

The Lies We Believed (And Still Believe) About Iraq
June 27, 2014
by Charles Lewis

651

US President George W. Bush speaks to US troops at the Baghdad International Airport on Thursday, November 27, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The following is an excerpt from Charles Lewis’s book, 935 Lies. Lewis joins Bill this week to talk about why facts, logic and reason are often missing in the rush to war.

At the end of 2004, a series of public opinion polls offered disturbing news. More than half of all Americans, we learned, believed that there had been weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq — the principal raison d’être for George W. Bush’s war of choice there — despite the fact that numerous widely publicized bipartisan and international reports had definitively shown that no such weapons existed. This stubborn refusal to face the facts about Iraq continues today for millions of Americans. [1]


Publisher: PublicAffairs Books, 392 pages

Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy, for government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words, requires an informed citizenry. [2] But in regard to the Iraq War, it seems, facts are now irrelevant or at least debatable, a mere matter of opinion, for a majority of Americans. And if facts no longer matter to millions of our fellow citizens, then what becomes of the traditional role of the journalist as the independent watchdog digging through obfuscation, secrecy and deception by the powerful in search of what Carl Bernstein once called “the best obtainable version of the t***h”?

This is a question that touches me personally — not just as a concerned citizen, but as someone who has dedicated his life and work to the pursuit of t***h. In more than three decades as an investigative reporter in Washington, DC, my approach toward those in power, regardless of party or ideology, has followed the principle “Watch what they do, not what they say.”

Politicians, captains of industry, and their zealous aides too often resemble circus barkers, shilling for attention and advantage, with little regard for accuracy or veracity, using the press and the news media not to enlighten but to bamboozle the public in pursuit of v**es, profits and power. When necessary, they even employ the wiles of deception to conceal, disguise, or justify unseemly and sometimes outright criminal behavior. As George Orwell wrote, in words that still ring true more than half a century after they were written, “Political speech and writing are largely the defence [sic] of the indefensible . . . Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound t***hful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”[3]

Precisely what had US government officials said to cause most Americans and their elected representatives to completely ignore facts, logic and reason in the rush to war? Exactly who was involved and to what extent?
So as a professional t***h-seeker, I have always been skeptical of statements by those in power, preferring to ignore the official versions of events in my quest for the (sometimes ugly) underlying realities. That quest continues. But when I learned the extent to which the public had swallowed and accepted the official lies about WMDs in Iraq, I realized that I actually could no longer ignore what those in power had said. Their shameless manipulations and mis-representations, I now saw, were a crucial element in the tragedy of that dubious war of choice, and therefore deserving of investigation and analysis in their own right. Precisely what had US government officials said to cause most Americans and their elected representatives to completely ignore facts, logic, and reason in the rush to war? Exactly who was involved and to what extent?

I began systematically to investigate the answers to those and other related questions, enlisting the help of a team of reporters, researchers and other contributors that ultimately included 25 people. Nearly three years later, the Center for Public Integrity published Iraq: The War Card, a 380,000-word report with an online searchable database. [4] It was released on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was covered extensively by the national and international news media.

Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq. The carefully orchestrated campaign of unt***hs about Iraq’s alleged threat to US national security from its WMDs or links to al Qaeda (also specious) galvanized public opinion and led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. Perhaps most revealing: the number of false statements made by top Bush administration officials dramatically increased from August 2002 to the time of the critical October 2002 congressional approval of the war resolution and spiked even higher between January and March 2003, between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address before the United Nations General Assembly and the fateful March 19, 2003, invasion. [5]

Within hours of the release of our report, White House press secretary Dana Perino responded with scorn: “I hardly think that the study is worth spending any time on. It is so flawed in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.” [6] This sophistry was at least consistent with the administration’s track record of distorting reality. In fact, neither Congress nor America’s international allies was demanding an invasion of Iraq before the administration started beating the war drums.

Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq.
The so-called Coalition of the Willing was a face-saving artifice cobbled together after the UN Security Council failed to approve the US-instigated invasion, rendering it a violation of the UN Charter and thus “illegal.” Furthermore, “the intelligence” referred to by Perino proved to be anything but intelligent; indeed, it had been mostly manufactured by the administration in accordance with its political agenda. [7]

Three months after the Center for Public Integrity Iraq report, David Barstow of The New York Times reported more details about how the Iraq deception had been orchestrated. Barstow revealed that the Pentagon had quietly recruited and coached 75 retired military officers to be “independent” paid consultants and radio and television analysts whose true role was to make the case for war in Iraq. Many had significant, undisclosed financial ties to defense companies and were thus benefiting hugely from the very policies they were “analyzing.” [8]

Earlier, Barstow had reported (with colleague Robin Stein) that “at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments between 2001 and 2005 . . . Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.” David Walker, the then comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, who happened to be a Republican, declared that such taxpayer-paid propaganda by the government is unethical and violates federal law. However, the Bush administration publicly disagreed, and Congress meekly declined to pursue the matter any further. [9]

The broadcast and cable news media, which had overwhelmingly failed to investigate or challenge the administration’s flawed case for war, shamelessly ignored Barstow’s revelations, neither reporting on their own dubious use of such c*********d news sources nor apologizing to the public for the resulting gross misrepresentations of fact.

The full extent of deference to power and self-censorship by our obsequious major news media during the run-up to war is still not fully known; it will gradually seep out — or not — over the coming years.
And a month after the stunning Times stories, one of the White House officials who had actually made several false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, former press secretary Scott McClellan, wrote a “surprisingly scathing” memoir admitting that his own public comments at White House briefings about Iraq had been “badly misguided,” that President Bush had not been “open and forthright on Iraq,” and that instead he had relied on “propaganda.” [10]

There were a few honorable exceptions in Washington to the general failure of the news media to challenge the pro-war deceptions. They included the fine independent coverage by then Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington bureau reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay; the prescient articles by Walter Pincus, buried in the back pages by his nervous Washington Post editors; and, in early 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal stories by CBS News 60 Minutes II and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Later, in 2005, beyond the Iraq deceptions, there were Dana Priest’s exposés in The Washington Post about the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret “black site” prisons and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s stories in The New York Times revealing how the Bush administration had quietly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to secretly eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States, without warrants usually required for domestic surveillance. [11]

Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us
But in the context of the overall performance of the media, these valiant efforts to get beyond the official version to uncover the t***h about our involvement in Iraq were too little, too late. The full extent of deference to power and self-censorship by our obsequious major news media during the run-up to war is still not fully known; it will gradually seep out — or not — over the coming years. Some major news organizations later grudgingly acknowledged that their coverage was insufficiently critical of government pronouncements. But that did nothing to ameliorate the tragic consequences of an unnecessary war, including a financial toll of more than $2 trillion, a sum that is likely to increase substantially with benefits to war veterans over time and other expenses, as well as — far more important — the deaths of thousands upon thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians, including women and children. [12]
Could the Iraq War have been prevented if the public had been better informed before the invasion about the specious official statements, faulty logic, and breathtaking manipulations of public opinion and governmental decision-making processes? I believe the answer to that grim question is very possibly yes, and it will haunt me and others in my profession for years to come. [13]

Congressional oversight focused almost entirely on the quality of the US government’s pre-war intelligence — not the veracity of the highest-ranking US officials’ public statements or the objectivity and logic of their decision making in instigating the war.
Did President Bush and other officials from his administration lie about Iraq intentionally and deliberately? It’s hard to tell without unfettered access to the principals and their internal communications. Certainly, we should never underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion — too often, we find it easy to believe what we want to believe. But the fact is that they have avoided the glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to war. Under the Republicans in 2005 and 2006, and the Democrats in 2007 and 2008, there was no congressional investigation into this specific question. Congressional oversight focused almost entirely on the quality of the US government’s pre-war intelligence — not the veracity of the highest-ranking US officials’ public statements or the objectivity and logic of their decision making in instigating the war. Nor in 2009 did the new Democratic president Barack Obama, his administration, or the Democratic Congress evince any interest in investigating this politically sensitive subject. There may be no more telling example of what has happened to congressional oversight in Washington in recent decades.

Investigating this tale of dishonesty by those in power and acquiescence on the part of those charged with reporting the t***h has been a disheartening experience for me. Even more sobering, however, is the fact that the Iraq War deception, with its 935 public, shameless lies, is simply the latest and most egregious story of t***h betrayed that I’ve witnessed or reported on over the past five decades. My career in journalism has coincided with a tragic period in American history — one in which falsehood has increasingly come to dominate our public discourse, and in which the bedrock values of honesty, t***sparency, accountability and integrity we once took for granted have been steadily eroded.

Excerpted from 935 Lies by Charles Lewis. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Lewis. Excerpted by permission of PublicAffairs, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Charles Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1989 and served as its executive director until January 2005. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for ABC News and as a producer of the CBS News program 60 Minutes. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and many other publications.
945 lies about WMDs ,WMDs,WMDs..........

They belong in jail in the hague
They belong in jail in the hague...

Reply
Jul 2, 2014 01:53:45   #
carolyn
 
I stopped reading your post when I saw your sameoldsameold concerning the WMD in Iraq. It was then I knew you never keep up on current events because if you did, you would have seen where they did find Sarin gas in Iraq but had to leave it lie because of it's extreme volatility. Now this was just a few days ago and I posted on it, with the website of the article so all could see it.

I scanned the rest of your spiel and found it was nothing but what had been kicked around for several years now, so did not fully read it.

You must try and find new material to use. The sameoldsameold has been thrashed to death already.

Reply
Jul 2, 2014 03:34:25   #
Jack2014
 
carolyn wrote:
I stopped reading your post when I saw your sameoldsameold concerning the WMD in Iraq. It was then I knew you never keep up on current events because if you did, you would have seen where they did find Sarin gas in Iraq but had to leave it lie because of it's extreme volatility. Now this was just a few days ago and I posted on it, with the website of the article so all could see it.

I scanned the rest of your spiel and found it was nothing but what had been kicked around for several years now, so did not fully read it.

You must try and find new material to use. The sameoldsameold has been thrashed to death already.
I stopped reading your post when I saw your sameol... (show quote)


You and your same dead lies. Everybody must know by now that Reagan Cheney Rumpsfeld gave Hussein CW. He used it all against the Iranians under Rumpsfeld direction and the Kurds all gone by 1990.

How many times did bucheneys and Reagan's screw up? Let me count the ways! Innumerable!
Same goes for Carolyn puke

The Lies We Believed (And Still Believe) About Iraq
June 27, 2014
by Charles Lewis

US President George W. Bush speaks to US troops at the Baghdad International Airport on Thursday, November 27, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The following is an excerpt from Charles Lewis’s book, 935 Lies. Lewis joins Bill this week to talk about why facts, logic and reason are often missing in the rush to war.

At the end of 2004, a series of public opinion polls offered disturbing news. More than half of all Americans, we learned, believed that there had been weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq — the principal raison d’être for George W. Bush’s war of choice there — despite the fact that numerous widely publicized bipartisan and international reports had definitively shown that no such weapons existed. This stubborn refusal to face the facts about Iraq continues today for millions of Americans. [1]


Publisher: PublicAffairs Books, 392 pages

Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy, for government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words, requires an informed citizenry. [2] But in regard to the Iraq War, it seems, facts are now irrelevant or at least debatable, a mere matter of opinion, for a majority of Americans. And if facts no longer matter to millions of our fellow citizens, then what becomes of the traditional role of the journalist as the independent watchdog digging through obfuscation, secrecy and deception by the powerful in search of what Carl Bernstein once called “the best obtainable version of the t***h”?

This is a question that touches me personally — not just as a concerned citizen, but as someone who has dedicated his life and work to the pursuit of t***h. In more than three decades as an investigative reporter in Washington, DC, my approach toward those in power, regardless of party or ideology, has followed the principle “Watch what they do, not what they say.”

Politicians, captains of industry, and their zealous aides too often resemble circus barkers, shilling for attention and advantage, with little regard for accuracy or veracity, using the press and the news media not to enlighten but to bamboozle the public in pursuit of v**es, profits and power. When necessary, they even employ the wiles of deception to conceal, disguise, or justify unseemly and sometimes outright criminal behavior. As George Orwell wrote, in words that still ring true more than half a century after they were written, “Political speech and writing are largely the defence [sic] of the indefensible . . . Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound t***hful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”[3]

Precisely what had US government officials said to cause most Americans and their elected representatives to completely ignore facts, logic and reason in the rush to war? Exactly who was involved and to what extent?
So as a professional t***h-seeker, I have always been skeptical of statements by those in power, preferring to ignore the official versions of events in my quest for the (sometimes ugly) underlying realities. That quest continues. But when I learned the extent to which the public had swallowed and accepted the official lies about WMDs in Iraq, I realized that I actually could no longer ignore what those in power had said. Their shameless manipulations and mis-representations, I now saw, were a crucial element in the tragedy of that dubious war of choice, and therefore deserving of investigation and analysis in their own right. Precisely what had US government officials said to cause most Americans and their elected representatives to completely ignore facts, logic, and reason in the rush to war? Exactly who was involved and to what extent?

I began systematically to investigate the answers to those and other related questions, enlisting the help of a team of reporters, researchers and other contributors that ultimately included 25 people. Nearly three years later, the Center for Public Integrity published Iraq: The War Card, a 380,000-word report with an online searchable database. [4] It was released on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and was covered extensively by the national and international news media.

Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq. The carefully orchestrated campaign of unt***hs about Iraq’s alleged threat to US national security from its WMDs or links to al Qaeda (also specious) galvanized public opinion and led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. Perhaps most revealing: the number of false statements made by top Bush administration officials dramatically increased from August 2002 to the time of the critical October 2002 congressional approval of the war resolution and spiked even higher between January and March 2003, between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address before the United Nations General Assembly and the fateful March 19, 2003, invasion. [5]

Within hours of the release of our report, White House press secretary Dana Perino responded with scorn: “I hardly think that the study is worth spending any time on. It is so flawed in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.” [6] This sophistry was at least consistent with the administration’s track record of distorting reality. In fact, neither Congress nor America’s international allies was demanding an invasion of Iraq before the administration started beating the war drums.

Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq.
The so-called Coalition of the Willing was a face-saving artifice cobbled together after the UN Security Council failed to approve the US-instigated invasion, rendering it a violation of the UN Charter and thus “illegal.” Furthermore, “the intelligence” referred to by Perino proved to be anything but intelligent; indeed, it had been mostly manufactured by the administration in accordance with its political agenda. [7]

Three months after the Center for Public Integrity Iraq report, David Barstow of The New York Times reported more details about how the Iraq deception had been orchestrated. Barstow revealed that the Pentagon had quietly recruited and coached 75 retired military officers to be “independent” paid consultants and radio and television analysts whose true role was to make the case for war in Iraq. Many had significant, undisclosed financial ties to defense companies and were thus benefiting hugely from the very policies they were “analyzing.” [8]

Earlier, Barstow had reported (with colleague Robin Stein) that “at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments between 2001 and 2005 . . . Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.” David Walker, the then comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, who happened to be a Republican, declared that such taxpayer-paid propaganda by the government is unethical and violates federal law. However, the Bush administration publicly disagreed, and Congress meekly declined to pursue the matter any further. [9]

The broadcast and cable news media, which had overwhelmingly failed to investigate or challenge the administration’s flawed case for war, shamelessly ignored Barstow’s revelations, neither reporting on their own dubious use of such c*********d news sources nor apologizing to the public for the resulting gross misrepresentations of fact.

The full extent of deference to power and self-censorship by our obsequious major news media during the run-up to war is still not fully known; it will gradually seep out — or not — over the coming years.
And a month after the stunning Times stories, one of the White House officials who had actually made several false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, former press secretary Scott McClellan, wrote a “surprisingly scathing” memoir admitting that his own public comments at White House briefings about Iraq had been “badly misguided,” that President Bush had not been “open and forthright on Iraq,” and that instead he had relied on “propaganda.” [10]

There were a few honorable exceptions in Washington to the general failure of the news media to challenge the pro-war deceptions. They included the fine independent coverage by then Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington bureau reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay; the prescient articles by Walter Pincus, buried in the back pages by his nervous Washington Post editors; and, in early 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal stories by CBS News 60 Minutes II and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Later, in 2005, beyond the Iraq deceptions, there were Dana Priest’s exposés in The Washington Post about the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret “black site” prisons and James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s stories in The New York Times revealing how the Bush administration had quietly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to secretly eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States, without warrants usually required for domestic surveillance. [11]

Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us
But in the context of the overall performance of the media, these valiant efforts to get beyond the official version to uncover the t***h about our involvement in Iraq were too little, too late. The full extent of deference to power and self-censorship by our obsequious major news media during the run-up to war is still not fully known; it will gradually seep out — or not — over the coming years. Some major news organizations later grudgingly acknowledged that their coverage was insufficiently critical of government pronouncements. But that did nothing to ameliorate the tragic consequences of an unnecessary war, including a financial toll of more than $2 trillion, a sum that is likely to increase substantially with benefits to war veterans over time and other expenses, as well as — far more important — the deaths of thousands upon thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians, including women and children. [12]
Could the Iraq War have been prevented if the public had been better informed before the invasion about the specious official statements, faulty logic, and breathtaking manipulations of public opinion and governmental decision-making processes? I believe the answer to that grim question is very possibly yes, and it will haunt me and others in my profession for years to come. [13]

Congressional oversight focused almost entirely on the quality of the US government’s pre-war intelligence — not the veracity of the highest-ranking US officials’ public statements or the objectivity and logic of their decision making in instigating the war.
Did President Bush and other officials from his administration lie about Iraq intentionally and deliberately? It’s hard to tell without unfettered access to the principals and their internal communications. Certainly, we should never underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion — too often, we find it easy to believe what we want to believe. But the fact is that they have avoided the glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to war. Under the Republicans in 2005 and 2006, and the Democrats in 2007 and 2008, there was no congressional investigation into this specific question. Congressional oversight focused almost entirely on the quality of the US government’s pre-war intelligence — not the veracity of the highest-ranking US officials’ public statements or the objectivity and logic of their decision making in instigating the war. Nor in 2009 did the new Democratic president Barack Obama, his administration, or the Democratic Congress evince any interest in investigating this politically sensitive subject. There may be no more telling example of what has happened to congressional oversight in Washington in recent decades.

Investigating this tale of dishonesty by those in power and acquiescence on the part of those charged with reporting the t***h has been a disheartening experience for me. Even more sobering, however, is the fact that the Iraq War deception, with its 935 public, shameless lies, is simply the latest and most egregious story of t***h betrayed that I’ve witnessed or reported on over the past five decades. My career in journalism has coincided with a tragic period in American history — one in which falsehood has increasingly come to dominate our public discourse, and in which the bedrock values of honesty, t***sparency, accountability and integrity we once took for granted have been steadily eroded.

Excerpted from 935 Lies by Charles Lewis. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Lewis. Excerpted by permission of PublicAffairs, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Charles Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity in 1989 and served as its executive director until January 2005. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for ABC News and as a producer of the CBS News program 60 Minutes. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and many other publications.

Bill knows screw up screw ups
Bill knows screw up screw ups...

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