You Don't Know, Dick
Fact Checking Big Time!

Vice President Dick Cheney's recent reemergence from his secret bunker/cave and his spewing of patriotic venom on anyone who dares to question the administration's actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War has been getting a lot of play in the media. But is it factual? Luckily, as Dan Froomkin points out in his White House Briefing from today, not all modern journalists are stenographers:

William Douglas of Knight Ridder Newspapers today maintains his bureau's tradition of consistently pushing back on mischaracterizations in White House speeches, rather than just repeating them.

"Cheney laid out the administration's defense of the war again -- and again conflated the war with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even though investigative commissions have concluded that there was no connection between them and Saddam Hussein," Douglas writes.

He quotes Cheney:

"(T)hey attacked us on 9/11 here in the homeland, killing 3,000 people. Now they are making a stand in Iraq. . . . '

"Would the United States . . . be better off, or worse off, with Zarqawi, bin Laden and Zawahiri in control of Iraq?'

" . . . A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists."

Then Douglas writes: "But the war in Iraq isn't primarily with terrorists. Cheney didn't note that Iraq's insurgency rises primarily from ethnic and sectarian tensions among Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds, rejection of U.S.-led occupation forces, and loyalists to Saddam and his once-dominant Baath Party."

[Michael] Fletcher and [Jim] VandeHei also note at the end of their article: "Some observers called into question Cheney's repeated description of the enemy in Iraq as 'terrorists' who are seeking to control that country to establish a base from which they can 'launch attacks and to wage war against governments that do not meet their demands.'

"U.S. intelligence agencies say foreign terrorists represent a minority of the insurgent forces; the vast majority are Iraqis."

WaPo columnist Richard Cohen also adds some fuel to the fire:

Along with such creations as American POWs still being held in Vietnam and the Bill Clinton drug-smuggling operation at a remote Arkansas air strip, the unhinged right wing has now invented the myth that Democratic members of Congress have called President Bush "a liar" about Iraq. An extensive computer search by myself and a Post researcher can come up with no such accusation. That's prudent. After all, it's not clear if Bush lied about Iraq or was merely the "useful idiot" of those who did.

The term "useful idiot" is not a reflection of IQ. I resurrect it from the Cold War days when anticommunists used it to contemptuously describe certain communist sympathizers. I think sometimes the phrase probably went through the dark mind of Vice President Cheney and certain other Bush administration officials who must have known that their dear president was exaggerating the case for war. Cheney, for one, is too smart and too calculating not to have known that the envelope was being pushed past the point of verifiable truth.
[...]
In just one month -- August 2002 -- Cheney repeatedly warned of its imminent danger. The first time, he said that if Hussein was "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons." Later that month he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country," adding that he constituted a "mortal threat" to the United States. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," the vice president also said that month. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."

But as a Post story by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus from August 2003 makes clear, Cheney could not have known what he said he knew. In the first place, Hussein's son-in-law was dead, killed in 1996 when he made the dubious career move of returning to Iraq. What's more, when Hussein Kamel was still a defector and being debriefed in Jordan, he said he had no knowledge of a current nuclear weapons program.
[...]
This was typical Cheney -- and, to a lesser extent, Condi Rice and other members of the Bush administration. Their incessant references to "mushroom clouds" or "nuclear blackmail" might have at one time been understandable -- although still a huge, irresponsible reach. But well before the war began, it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein had not a nuclear weapon to his name. The program that United Nations and other inspectors had stumbled on after the Gulf War -- the program that surprised U.S. officials and encouraged them to believe that Hussein could hide anything -- had by then been proved to no longer exist.
[...]
The restraint of responsible war critics has been remarkable. Despite a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- "What If People Start Believing That 'Bush Lied'?" -- the "L" word has been prudently withheld by elected Democrats. But you would think that Bush himself would wonder about how he's gotten to this place where he looks like such a fool: wrong on the biggest issue of his presidency. He went out there and told the American people things that were not true. Does that mean he lied? Maybe not. Maybe he was just repeating the lies of others.