Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [37]
One of the first whoppers about the whopper (the whopper squared) came last February when Collin Powell proclaimed, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
Just days earlier, Powell apparently was not so sure. During a gathering of CIA officials reviewing the evidence against Saddam Hussein, Powell tossed the papers in the air and declared: “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.”
And he had good reason to distrust the “intelligence.” A large chunk of Powell’s background information had been lifted directly from sources easily located on the Internet, including a graduate student’s paper based on twelve-year-old documents. Some sections had been outright plagiarized, to the extent that typos hadn’t even been fixed. But Powell called all these whoppers “solid.”
Then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer gave it his spin: “The president’s statement was based on the predicate of the yellowcake [uranium] from Niger. So given the fact that the report on the yellowcake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the president’s broader statement.”
Huh?
We’ll leave the explaining to the Whoppermaster himself, George W. Bush: “I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence. And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction.”
Added Ari Fleischer: “The president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well.”
Maybe in his country, but not in mine. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly dished up some more whoppers on Meet the Press: “It turns out that it’s technically correct what the president said . . . But in the aggregate, do we believe that they had chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear program in progress? The answer is yes, I believe that.”
Rumsfeld added: “And right before it, I said, as the president said, and right after it, I said as the president said. I was simply repeating what the president had said.”
Are you following this? Before your head spins completely off your neck, let’s turn to Condoleezza Rice to clear it all up for us. She had this to say to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Wolf, let me just start by saying, it is sixteen words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue . . . Now, I think now that we’re in Iraq and we are interviewing scientists and we are looking at the documents and we are finding, for instance, that he had somebody bury centrifuge parts in their yard . . .”
That whopper had spoiled so badly that it got Blitzer’s attention, and Rice was forced to admit that her “evidence” was twelve years old: “Before the first Gulf War—well, in 1991.”
Undeterred, Rice also appeared that day on Face the Nation, where she insisted that “the president’s State of the Union said something that was accurate. . . . We use a lot of data points. We give them to writers. They go to speeches, and then we rely on a clearance process . . . And if you notice, the president’s statement says ‘in Africa.’ It’s not specific. It says he sought—it didn’t say he received or he acquired. It’s that he sought. And it cites the British document.”
It just doesn’t stop. Whoppers on top of whoppers. So many whoppers . . . it could make a person sick.
So many whoppers, that even a witness to world-class lying, former Nixon aide John Dean was moved to comment: “It’s important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about