Bush and Blair Lied About Mass Graves in Iraq

I have been thoroughly amused by some recent discussion on ATS about whether George Bush has told lies. The deluded Republican partisans reject all examples of Bush lies, because the sources that document the lies are left-wing. LMFAO! What difference does that make if the source provides valid links which document the lie? But the Bush lovers refuse to even consider any source with a left-wing bias.

How about the official White House website? Would you consider that a reliable source? From a November 12, 2003 interview with David Frost of the BBC.

Nobody could say that Saddam Hussein wasn't a danger. Not only was he a danger to the free world -- and that's what the world said. The world said it consistently -- he was a danger to his own people, as well. Remember we discovered mass graves with hundreds of thousands of men and women and children clutching their little toys, as a result of this person's brutality.

www.whitehouse.gov...

Well, it turns out that that is a flat out lie, and Tony Blair, who made the same claims, has admitted it is a lie.

PM Admits Graves Claim 'Untrue'

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

Tony Blair has admitted that he lied about the mass graves. When will George Bush do the same?

And they also lied about Iraqi citizens being used as chains to protect the major cities like Baghdad from the US invasion. Obviously nothing of that sort ever happened. Damned propaganda!!!

The Iraqis themselves keep giving bad information and the US and UK just take them at their word because there was no one on the ground to verify their claims. It happened with the weapons and it happened with the mass graves.

Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.'

A further difficulty, according to Inforce, a group of British forensic experts in mass grave sites based at Bournemouth University who visited Iraq last year, was in the constant over-estimation of site sizes by Iraqis they met. 'Witnesses were often likely to have unrealistic ideas of the numbers of people in grave areas that they knew about,' said Jonathan Forrest.

'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'

You would have a hard time getting this past the families in Iraq that went to the mass graves and matched bundles of ID cards and personel documents with the graves. This was covered on the ground by NPR and PBS.

Originally posted by IntelRetard
You would have a hard time getting this past the families in Iraq that went to the mass graves and matched bundles of ID cards and personel documents with the graves. This was covered on the ground by NPR and PBS.

No ones doubting that there were mass graves.
There are just doubts as to the numbers of bodies in those graves.
We were told it was hundreds of thousands but we now find it was only around 5,000

Originally posted by IntelRetard
You would have a hard time getting this past the families in Iraq that went to the mass graves and matched bundles of ID cards and personel documents with the graves. This was covered on the ground by NPR and PBS.

No one denies that there are mass graves. The point is, both Bush and Blair stated as fact that hundreds of thousands of bodies had been found. In Blair's case, he specifically used the number 400,000.

Now, it turns out that only 5,000 bodies have actually been found in these mass graves. Whether more are found later is irrelevant. The statements by Bush and Blair were about how many bodies had already been found.

Bush and Blair lied.

But we need to ask ourselves, are we susprised that we were lied to about the # of graves? Or was it to be expected?

All you have to do is look at my avitar to see that I cant say anything bad about the regieme in power here in the U.S. unless I want to risk jail time, but I can say "good post", hadn't heard about Mr. Blair setting things strait on this.

5,000 is a good round number for genocide, ethnic cleansing, or political supression

Originally posted by IntelRetard
5,000 is a good round number for genocide, ethnic cleansing, or political supression

Well then, if that's your idea of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or political supression then the US is also guilty of those same things.

There have been over 10,000 Iraqi deaths in this war and I would consider that a conservative estimate.

Originally posted by AceOfBase

Originally posted by IntelRetard
5,000 is a good round number for genocide, ethnic cleansing, or political supression

Well then, if that's your idea of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or political supression then the US is also guilty of those same things.

There have been over 10,000 Iraqi deaths in this war and I would consider that a conservative estimate.

Every week, "The McLaughlin Group" on PBS gives an estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths due to U.S. military action since the Iraq War started. The current estimate is 17,000+.

I agree that the "collateral damage" is no better or even worse. Hopefully our killing of the innocent Iraq citizens will not go on for 30 yrs.

So far every thing about this war has been either a lie or an exaggeration of events and finds, the point is more of this lies and misconceptions are going to keep on coming to the surface and to the public as time goes by.

The more it comes out the more the people in this country and in UK are going to feel more and more deceived by their leaders. What a shame.


That mass grave were found? is not doubt about that, but about how many people die actually and are burry in this places well thats another story.

Good catch Don! So far, this is the best evidence of a Bush lie I have seen.

Your point is a good one: unless "hundreds of thousands" of bodies have already been discovered, then Bush lied.

However, in fairness, we should bear in mind that the source for the figure of 5,000 is not an official source, but rather "the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain". There is a difference. Blair's statements, however, add weight to the claim.

Also, it is important to distinguish between "discovered" and "recovered" (Bush said "discovered"), which is a huge difference. Per the Observer: "Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined[...]", leaving the overwhelming number of grave sites filled with bodies that have not been recovered.

The truth appears to be that no one really knows how many bodies lie in mass graves in Iraq, nor how many have actually been discovered. Hundreds of thousands of people who disappeared during Saddam's regime are not accounted for, and they had to have ended up somewhere.

It is not clear that Bush intended to deceive by saying this, or that he knew the numbers were wrong, but according to Merriam's:

Main Entry: 3lie
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): lied; ly�ing /'lI-i[ng]/
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English lEogan; akin to Old High German liogan to lie, Old Church Slavonic lugati
intransitive senses
1 : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2 : to create a false or misleading impression

I would say, based on what I am seeing here, that Bush has indeed lied in the second sense of the word by creating a "false or misleading impression".

While I am doubtful that this is what people are referring to when they use the well-worn memetic device "Bush Lied", I would say this example does qualify as a lie.

I remain interested in any other examples of "Bush Lied" that are this credible, and not just some ideologue's unsubstantiated fabrications, which, aside from this noteworthy example, are all I have seen so far. I would especially value any evidence of a deliberate lie by Mr. Bush, for which I continue to search.

What? Only 5,000 bodies recovered so far instead of 400,000? We owe Saddam an apology! And, quite possibly, a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize!

Your post would have more credence if you had shown the last paragraph of the article, donguillermo. The crust end of the loaf - there's very often where the interesting crumbs lie.

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq.'

You make it sound like Blair deliberately set out to inflate the numbers. The article states that the numbers he was working on were based on estimates - which were based on estimates, which were based on numbers obtained from traumatized survivors, unschooled in the preparation of accurate estimates. It's all there - read it.

As far as the standard Bush Lied! rhetoric, read the quote from the USAID website:

The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.'

Just my centrist .02.

Just my centrist .02.

You are an extreme right-wing apologist and propagandist for Bush and the Republicans, and you have the nerve to claim to be a centrist.

The statements by Bush and Blair speak for themselves. It is quite clear that they both stated that hundreds of thousands of corpses had already been discovered. Not that it was estimated that that number would eventually be found. This type of extreme parsing of words to argue that a blatant lie is not really a lie is typical of Republicans. You are no centrist. You are lying when you say that.

You make it sound like Blair deliberately set out to inflate the numbers. The article states that the numbers he was working on were based on estimates - which were based on estimates, which were based on numbers obtained from traumatized survivors, unschooled in the preparation of accurate estimates. It's all there - read it.

You are telling more lies here. Here is a direct quote from Blair.

'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

Please show me where in this quote Blair says 400,000 is an estimate based on reports. He says "We have already discovered," not "We estimate." Blair has admitted that only 5,000 corpses have been found. Blair has admitted that he lied. Why won't George Bush? Why do lying Republican apologists like you continue to try to parse words and engage in rhetorical hand-waving to obscure the fact that George Bush is a liar?

While engaging in lies and deceptions yourself, you have the impudence to try to impugn my credibility because I did not quote the last paragraph of the article!!!

Then you try to distract the reader by pointing to what the USAID website said? How is that relevant to anything??? Go back and read the quote from George Bush with which I began my article. What George Bush said is a lie, and he knew he was lying when he said it.

You can parse words and blow smoke all you want, you will not change the facts. Sure, you're a centrist. You have zero intellectual integrity, and you are as phony as they come.







[edit on 7/24/2004 by donguillermo]

For what it's worth, I usually find it most constructive to focus on the topic and posts, and avoid characterizing other posters one way or the other.

Even if you disagree with the way someone else characterizes themself, it is probably better to concentrate on the specific ways in which observations about that person differ from their claims, and avoid generalities.

Just my member .02.

Originally posted by Majic
For what it's worth, I usually find it most constructive to focus on the topic and posts, and avoid characterizing other posters one way or the other.

Even if you disagree with the way someone else characterizes themself, it is probably better to concentrate on the specific ways in which observations about that person differ from their claims, and avoid generalities.

Just my member .02.

I pointed to specific statements by jsobecky that are lies. I realize there are more polite ways to call someone a liar. I then made general statements based on the specific statements. That is how generalizations are made. You start with specifics, then generalize.

This just seems like more conformation that all the evidence that lead the coalition to war with Iraq was false and exaggerated. They tried to paint the worst picture they could of Saddam and it worked, for a while alot of people believed in and supported this war. . .

I remember when I first heard of this it was one of the things that really made me see Bush and Blair for what they truly were. When Bush made his State of the Union speech in 2003, I was 100% behind him. I mean, we had given him the weapons in the first place, so why shouldn't we know where they were. I figured, like I'm sure most everyone else did, that the Iraqis were simply hiding things from Hans Blix.

I think this was the first piece of info I found after the Nigerian documents were debunked. It really made me sick to my stomach that we could be lied to in such detail and with such little remorse.

I wonder what would happen if Bush got on tv tomorrow and just apologized for lying. I know it would never, ever happen, but I wonder if anything can be done to heal these deep divisions between Americans.