Charles Kaiser on Bush's war report card, and the media's road to Iraq

One of the joys of the presidential campaign season is that it allows the Washington press corps to ignore even more substantive stories than usual. With so many reporters detached to the campaign trail, dozens of big stories are either left to the wire services or ignored altogether. Last week the press buried two big stories about how many times the Bush administration has lied in public, and how it has covered up those lies in private. They belonged on the front page.

The first one is a study of all the public statements Bush administration officials made during the two years leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Written by Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, the report from the Center for Public Integrity details the massive lying of the Bush administration on the way to the War in Iraq in a way that no one ever has before.

The authors found a total of 935 false statements, with big spikes in August 2002, when Congress was considering a war resolution, another one during the fall elections that year, and the biggest one of all between January 2003 and the invasion itself.

Here's the war scorecard:

• George W. Bush was the big winner, with 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

• Colin Powell snared second, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

• Donald Rumsfeld and Ari Fleischer tied for third with 109 false statements, followed by ...

• Paul Wolfowitz at 85, Condoleezza Rice with 56, Dick Cheney with a surprisingly low 48, and Scott McClellan with just 14.

The report comes with a nifty, searchable 380,000-word online database with all the statements about the war by these top officials during this two-year period.

Charles Lewis, who coauthored the study, is the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism. A former producer for Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes, over the years Lewis has broken dozens of big stories, from the Clinton campaign contributors who were rewarded with nights in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, to the white supremacist who was cochairman of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign. (Tomorrow I will post an interview with Lewis about the state of the press.)

The report notes that the "cumulative effect of these false statements—amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts—was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists—indeed, even some entire news organizations—have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical," which might explain the tepid reception the story received from the Washington press corps. Not a single mention on any of the network TV news shows, 375 words buried inside the A section of the New York Times, no story whatsoever in the Washington Post, a healthy 1,238 words in Dan Froomkin's blog at washingtonpost.com, three minutes and 56 seconds on NPR's Morning Edition, and one mention on the early NBC morning show that precedes Today. Additionally, there was a lengthy blog entry from one of the right-wing wackos over at Human Events, complaining, naturally, that the report had received too much attention.

The report notes that so far "there has been no congressional investigation into exactly what was going on inside the Bush White House in that period." Of course, even if there was such an investigation, the administration has taken great care to try to make sure that we will never find out what really happened—as the second major uncovered story of last week made clear.

That one came from Congressman Henry Waxman, the veteran Los Angeles congressman and one of the last of the old-time congressional investigators, in the mold of Bill Proxmire, Frank Church, and Estes Keefauver.

Waxman said that all the e-mails from different components of the White House on 473 days were missing—partly because one of the first official acts of the Bush administration was to dismantle the Automated Records Management System (ARMS), which had kept track of all the e-mails of the Clinton administration. The Bush White House has never explained why that was done. One spokesman has admitted that as many as 5 million e-mails may be missing, while another one said, "We have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing." It was that latter statement that prompted Waxman to release his findings.

In what was surely pure coincidence, "among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney's office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity," and another "five-day span starting on January 29, 2004, when the White House was dealing with the possibility of an election-year probe by Congress into Iraq intelligence failures."

Once upon a time, long, long ago, when one 18.5-minute gap was discovered in a single crucial Watergate tape made in the Nixon White House, that was front-page news everywhere, as well as the cover of Newsweek. But times have changed. Now the White House can obliterate vast swaths of history, and the New York Times deems it worthy of only 233 words.

To its credit, the Washington Post did much better with a lengthy story by Elizabeth Williamson and Dan Eggen on page A3, detailing all of the contradictory statements the White House has made on this subject. It also includes this lovely detail: "In the presidential offices, for example, not a single e-mail was archived on December 17, 20, or 21 in 2003—the week after the capture of Saddam Hussein." The story also points out that "White House technology officials proposed two different records-management systems as ARMS replacements in 2003 and 2004, but neither was adopted, according to administration documents submitted in court filings. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel would not comment on why ARMS was eliminated."

Winners: Politico for hiring David Rogers, the legendary congressional correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, whom the new Murdoch team at the Journal wasn't smart enough to hold on to. Rogers' new boss, Jim VandeHei, wrote in an internal memo: "Simply put, David is the best congressional reporter in the country." He wasn't exaggerating.

Winners: Solomon Moore and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., for their page-one story in the New York Times detailing how "American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq's bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military's strategy to pacify the nation." Meanwhile, John McCain is attacking Mitt Romney for allegedly suggesting that we might want to leave Iraq somehow, someday. And McCain is the sane candidate in the Republican party?

No wonder Sinner Leon Wieseltier has revealed a soft spot in his heart for the Arizona senator. The rest of Wieseltier's Washington Diary is devoted to an attack on Barack Obama for an alleged addiction to elegant but "contentless" phrases—a failing that Wieseltier himself displays with wild abandon in this piece.

Winners: Tristram Korten and Kirk Nielsen for their lengthy story in Salon about how the American double standard on terrorism allows Alpha 66, the ex-Cubans who have been training to overthrow Fidel Castro since 1961, to escape prosecution or government interference despite its affiliations with known terrorists.

Winners: Scott Horton at harpers.org for a story that speculates that because of meddling by "movement conservatives," the justice department will end up blaming ex–CIA director of clandestine operations Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., for the disappearance of the CIA torture tapes, while ignoring White House complicity.

Winners: The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, for producing a manual for its diplomats that identified the United States as a country where prisoners risk torture and abuse, placing it alongside China and Iran. Several American interrogation techniques, including "blindfolding, covering heads in hoods, forced nudity, and sleep deprivation," are defined as torture in the manual, which was presented in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Unfortunately, Canadian foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier apologized and promised to sanitize the manual.

Winners: Mark Bittman, the nonvegetarian "Minimalist" food columnist for the New York Times, for a comprehensive and terrifying piece in the Times' Week in Review about all the ways our obsession with meat is destroying our environment, and ourselves. One startling fact: "If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan—a Camry, say—to the ultra-efficient Prius."

Winners: 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft and his producers, L. Franklin Devine and Jennifer MacDonald, for the single best piece anywhere on the real causes of the subprime mortgage crisis. The bottom line: "Banks lent hundreds of billions of dollars to homebuyers who can't pay them back. Wall Street took the risky debt, dressed it up as fancy securities, and sold it around the world as safe investments. It sounds like a shell game or Ponzi scheme; in some ways, it was a house of cards rife with corruption, greed, and negligence." Really bad news: Kroft thinks we are only "40 percent" into this crisis. Worse news: "Two of the fired CEOs responsible for the biggest losses rode off into the sunset with some free money of their own. Charles Prince of Citigroup collected $29 million on his way out the door; Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch left with $161 million." A brilliant piece of explanatory journalism.

Political Winners: Barack Obama for his baptism by Teddy and Caroline Kennedy. Teddy's unspoken subtext for the Clintons: "You think you're a dynasty? This is a dynasty."

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	5	3	14
White Women	1	1	3
Black Men	1	1	1
Black Women	0	0	1
Gay People	0	0	1

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com.