U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, through the House Committee on Goverment Reform, has a neat new web site. It’s a database of specific misleading statments made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice about Iraq. According to the web site, the database “identifies 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by these five officials in 125 public appearances in the time leading up to and after the commencement of hostilities in Iraq.”
That number seems low to me but that’s probably due to the methodology. First, there was a fairly strict standard: “a statement is considered ‘misleading’ if it conflicted with what intelligence officials knew at the time or involved the selective use of intelligence or the failure to include essential qualifiers or caveats.” Second, “hypothetical and implied statements about threats posed by Iraq” also were not included in the database of misleading statements.
Of course, we didn’t need this to know they lied. It’s just a useful tool to show how much. (Via Atrios)
