The White House has now retreated from claims made in George W. Bush’s January 28 State of the Union address that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger.

“At the time, the national intelligence estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction referred to attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from several countries in Africa. We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged,” admitted Michael Anton, spokesperson for Bush’s National Security Council.

Of course, the Americans admitted this fact only after maintaining the lie became untenable. The lie had been obvious to most observers as early as the beginning of April, when chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had assessed the uranium claim as follows: “This was a crude lie. All false.”

While the belated retraction was obviously welcomed by those who prefer their politicians to be honest at least some of the time, it only scratches the surface of the Bush administration’s many lies on this issue.

What is perhaps more depressing than the lies is the willingness of the American public — and especially the American news media — to forgive the lies or to dismiss them as an innocent oversight by a well-intentioned executive branch.

The New York Times, for example, timidly editorialized that “Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with any intent to deceive the nation” (italics mine).

While the American media are napping (or, when awake, banging the drums of war), it has been mostly left to the foreign press (primarily the British, who smell the blood of Prime Minister Tony Blair) to uncover the truth.

The lies propagated by Bush and his advisors are literally too numerous to mention. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was lying on March 30 when he told the media: “We know where they [Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

Even with such an absurdly vague statement (one of many in which Bush and his officials insisted that they knew where the weapons were hidden), the American invaders have turned up absolutely no evidence to support their principle justification for attacking and occupying Iraq.

Of course, Rumsfeld knew this, having been presented with a report in September 2002 that told him that “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has — or will — establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.”

George W. Bush was lying when he stated on May 30 that “for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.” We know he was lying because the very same day Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force was telling reporters “It was a surprise to me … that we have not uncovered weapons … in some of the forward dispersal sites. We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there. We were simply wrong.” Apparently Lieutenant General Conway hadnt got the memo regarding “the lie of the day.”

Bush was also lying last September when he called Saddam Hussein “a man who loves to link up with al-Qaida, a man who is a true threat to America.” A British Defense Intelligence report (and we know from the false report about the attempted uranium purchase that the White House reads British Intelligence reports) had already convincingly dismissed those alleged links, noting that “Bin Laden’s aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq.”

A subsequent report from the United Nations Terrorism Committee confirmed that “nothing has come to our notice that would indicate links.” Still, the Bush administration has persisted in making rhetorical links where no real links exist. Thanks to these lies, nearly half of Americans erroneously believe that Iraq caused, or was involved in the attacks of September 11.

Rumsfeld recently dismissed complaints from Congress about all of the lies that have come to light with the following whopper: “The fact that the facts change from time to time . . . does not surprise me or shock me at all.” This statement goes hand in hand with another that he made in September 2001: “This conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase when he said — don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.”

Unfortunately, the bodyguard of lies appears to have assassinated the truth.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...