{"id":65686,"date":"2003-07-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-07-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2003\/07\/21\/mensonges-et-compagnie-letat-des-lieux\/"},"modified":"2003-07-21T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-07-21T00:00:00","slug":"mensonges-et-compagnie-letat-des-lieux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2003\/07\/21\/mensonges-et-compagnie-letat-des-lieux\/","title":{"rendered":"Mensonges et compagnie : l’\u00e9tat des lieux<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mensonges et compagnie : l’\u00e9tat des lieux<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

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\t21 juillet 2002 A l’heure o\u00f9 les machines virtualistes anglaise et am\u00e9ricaine connaissent de tr\u00e8s graves avatars et o\u00f9 la question des divers mensonges ayant servi pour justifier l’attaque de l’Irak est d\u00e9battue en abondance, il est bon de rappeler les diff\u00e9rentes cat\u00e9gories d’arguments expos\u00e9es \u00e0 cette occasion, arguments qui peuvent tous autant, les uns que les autres, \u00eatre soup\u00e7onn\u00e9s d’\u00eatre purs mensonges.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tNous empruntons un texte publi\u00e9 par FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), qui fixe la situation \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard. Il a en plus le m\u00e9rite de nous renvoyer \u00e0 diverses interpr\u00e9tations et informations des m\u00e9dias \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, puisque c’est \u00e0 partir de leurs observations que FAIR fait son travail.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

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\tBy FAIR, July 18, 2003<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tFive months later, the truthfulness of one claim in George W. Bush’s State of the Union address has become the focus of growing media scrutiny. The attention media are paying to this single assertion should be part of a larger journalistic inquiry into other misstatements and exaggerations that have been made by the Bush administration about Iraq. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIn the January 28 speech, Bush claimed that \u00a0\u00bbthe British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.\u00a0\u00bb That assertion was similar to claims made previously by administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell (CBS Evening News, 12\/19\/02), that Iraq had sought to import yellowcake uranium from Niger, a strong indication that Saddam Hussein’s regime was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIn fact, the Niger story, as documented by journalist Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, 3\/31\/03) and others, was based on crudely forged documents. In addition, the administration’s own investigation in March 2002 concluded that the story was bogus. As one former State Department official put it, \u00a0\u00bbThis wasn’t highly contested. There weren’t strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down\u00a0\u00bb (Time, 7\/21\/03). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tBush’s use of the Niger forgeries has received considerable media attention in recent days. Much of this reporting has been valuable, and some outlets have broadened the inquiry beyond one passage in a speech. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, for example, suggests (7\/16\/03) that the uranium claim remained in the State of the Union address because \u00a0\u00bbalmost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.\u00a0\u00bb <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tMuch media coverage, however, has focused narrowly on the Niger incident, putting the press is in danger of ignoring the most important question the story raises: Does the uranium claim indicate a larger pattern of deceptive claims made about Iraq? At minimum, the following assertions made by the Bush administration also deserve media scrutiny: <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• Aluminum tubes: In the State of the Union address and elsewhere, the White House has claimed that Iraq was seeking to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in processing uranium, tubes Bush said would be \u00a0\u00bbsuitable for nuclear weapons production.\u00a0\u00bb But a report in the Washington Post (9\/19\/02) months before Bush’s address noted that leading scientists and former weapons inspectors seriously questioned the administration’s explanation– pointing out that the tubes, which would be difficult to use for uranium production, were more plausibly intended for artillery rockets. The Post also noted charges that the \u00a0\u00bbBush administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence.\u00a0\u00bb Commendably, some reporters, like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell (7\/14\/03), have questioned the aluminum tubes claim in recent reporting about Bush’s State of the Union address. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• Iraq\/Al Qaeda links: When Bush announced the end of hostilities in Iraq in a May 1 speech aboard the USS Lincoln, he said of the defeated Iraqi regime: \u00a0\u00bbWe have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.\u00a0\u00bb While a Saddam Hussein\/Osama bin Laden connection was one of the administration’s early justifications for going to war, it has produced no evidence to demonstrate this link exists. There is evidence, however, that the administration was deeply invested in proving such a tie, as former Gen. Wesley Clark attested recently on Meet the Press (FAIR Media Advisory, 6\/20\/03). Yet media accounts of Bush’s USS Lincoln speech hardly raised an eyebrow over this attempt to keep the Iraq\/Al Qaeda link alive. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• The trailers: Bush presented the discovery of two trailers in Iraq as proof that Iraq possessed banned weapons: \u00a0\u00bbWe found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,\u00a0\u00bb he told Polish TV (Associated Press, 5\/31\/03). \u00a0\u00bbThey’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.\u00a0\u00bb But serious questions had been raised within the administration about whether these trailers had anything to do with biological weapons– doubts that soon emerged in a New York Times article (6\/7\/03). No evidence has been put forward confirming that the trailers were designed for anything other than the production of hydrogen for artillery balloons, as captured Iraqis had said (London Observer, 6\/8\/03). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• Weapons Inspections: More recently, Bush has flagrantly misrepresented the history of the prewar conflict with Iraq over weapons inspections, telling reporters on July 14, \u00a0\u00bbWe gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.\u00a0\u00bb In fact, after a Security Council resolution was passed demanding that Iraq allow inspectors in, they were given complete access to the country. The Washington Post (7\/15\/03), describing Bush’s remarkable statement, could only say that his assertion \u00a0\u00bbappeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring.\u00a0\u00bb Joe Conason (Salon.com, 7\/15\/03) took note of \u00a0\u00bbthe press corps’ failure to report his stunning gaffe. The sentence quoted above doesn’t appear in today’s New York Times report, for example.\u00a0\u00bb <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• Powell’s U.N. address: Some of the current reporting over the Niger uranium forgery notes that Colin Powell was less confident about the story, as evinced by the fact that he did not include the claim in his February 5 address to the United Nations. But Powell’s speech had problems of its own. As pointed out by Gilbert Cranberg (Washington Post, 6\/29\/03), Powell embellished an intercepted conversation about weapons inspections between Iraqi officials to make it sound more incriminating, changing an order to \u00a0\u00bbinspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas\u00a0\u00bb to a command to \u00a0\u00bbclean out\u00a0\u00bb those areas. He also added the phrase \u00a0\u00bbmake sure there is nothing there,\u00a0\u00bb a phrase that appears nowhere in the State Department’s official translation. Further, Powell relied heavily on the disclosure of Iraq’s pre-war unconventional weapons programs by defector Hussein Kamel, without noting that Kamel had also said that all those weapons had been destroyed (FAIR Media Advisory, 2\/27\/03). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t• Other pre-war deceptions: Even when administration deceptions have been exposed by prominent mainstream outlets, the media in general tend not to recall them or draw connections. In October 2002, in a notable front-page article titled \u00a0\u00bbFor Bush, Facts Are Malleable\u00a0\u00bb (10\/22\/02), Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank noted two dubious Bush claims about Iraq: his citing of a United Nations International Atomic Energy report alleging that Iraq was \u00a0\u00bbsix months away\u00a0\u00bb from developing a nuclear weapon; and that Iraq maintained a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used, in Bush’s words, \u00a0\u00bbfor missions targeting the United States.\u00a0\u00bb While these assertions \u00a0\u00bbwere powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought,\u00a0\u00bb Milbank concluded they \u00a0\u00bbwere dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States\u00a0\u00bb and \u00a0\u00bbthere was no such report by the IAEA.\u00a0\u00bb But recent media discussions of Bush’s credibility– including in the Washington Post– have rarely mentioned these examples.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 l’esprit, Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only..]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mensonges et compagnie : l’\u00e9tat des lieux 21 juillet 2002 A l’heure o\u00f9 les machines virtualistes anglaise et am\u00e9ricaine connaissent de tr\u00e8s graves avatars et o\u00f9 la question des divers mensonges ayant servi pour justifier l’attaque de l’Irak est d\u00e9battue en abondance, il est bon de rappeler les diff\u00e9rentes cat\u00e9gories d’arguments expos\u00e9es \u00e0 cette occasion,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}