In a much–heralded move, the Center for Public Integrity has gone live with “The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War,” a searchable database of 380,000 words of “Iraq-related public pronouncements” by top officials, including 935 “false statements” made by President Bush and seven of his deputies before the war.
Mother Jones released its own searchable Iraq timeline, titled “Lie by Lie,” back in 2006. (Watch for a major online update soon.) So check out both timelines and while you do, it’s worth bearing in mind an important point made by CPI’s Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith:
Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. … And, of course, only four of the officials—Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz—have testified before Congress about Iraq.
Maybe next someone will make an accountability timeline. Course, it’d be awfully sparse.
—Justin Elliott
