Spencer Ackerman points out that President Bush claimed with a straight face that “The minute we found out [Iraq] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so” during his recent 60 Minutes interview — unbelievable:
PELLEY: You know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has not been straight with the country, has not been honest. To those people you say what?
BUSH: On what issue?
PELLEY: Well, sir . . .
BUSH: Like the weapons of mass destruction?
PELLEY: No weapons of mass destruction.
BUSH: Yeah.
PELLEY: No credible connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
BUSH: Yeah.
PELLEY: The Office of Management and Budget said this war would cost somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion and now we’re over 400.
BUSH: I gotcha. I gotcha. I gotcha.
PELLEY: The perception, sir, more than any one of those points, is that the administration has not been straight with . . .
BUSH: Well, I strongly disagree with that, of course. There were a lot of people, both Republicans and Democrats, who felt there were weapons of mass destruction. Many of the leaders in the Congress spoke strongly about the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons prior to my arrival in Washington, DC. And we’re all looking at the same intelligence. So I strongly reject that this administration hasn’t been straight with the American people. The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so. Scott, all I can do is just tell the truth, tell people exactly what’s on my mind, which is what I do.
Sadly, Scott Pelley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, didn’t follow up. But if he had read the newspaper back in 2003, he would know that Bush’s claim isn’t true. As Ackerman notes (and as we documented in All the President’s Spin), Bush actually claimed that we did find WMD in an interview with Polish TV on May 29, 2003:
Q But, still, those countries who didn’t support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven’t been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?
THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’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.
It was flatly untrue that the US found WMD — Bush’s claim was false then, and his claim to have been honest about not finding WMD is false now. (It is even highly questionable whether the trailers had served as weapons labs. As we wrote in ATPS, “When fifteen experts from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and [State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research] gathered in June [2003] to analyze the evidence, only one agreed with the conclusion that they were most likely biological weapons labs.”)
And even though the President made a false claim about an extremely important issue on the highest rated news program on television, no critical coverage of it appears in Google News. None. Have we reached the point where presidential deception is no longer news?