Too many refried beans has partially led to the smog problem in LA. Ruminants have led to global warming as well. This is a different kind of gas that needs to be harnessed. I had enough in me the other day to have heated a home for several minutes. You could say that I am full of it!
Al buys carbon “credits” from exactly who? Several “Carbon Credit” companies have been found to be a total fraud as they did NOTHING to reduce any carbon and just took Al Gore’s money and laughed their way to the Bank.
Wake up Jasper, buying credits is a scam with many of those companies. If Al truly cared, he would actually reduce the amount of pollution he spews by opening his mouth. Nobel Peace Prize my a ss.
LARS, you think the Element’s ugly; everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I just find it ironic that you justify that opinion by driving a car that looks like a bloated pimple.
Whatever floats your boat.
Maud, you really want to know what causes the majority of the smog in the L.A. basin?
It’s not the cars as it was 20-30 years ago. The majority of the smog is caused by industry. Then that smog gets trapped by the mountains to the east.
Do some research; my fear-mongering little kumquat.
PS: Insurance is higher on a Prius because most people that drive them do so like crap.
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
“The first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction.” This familiar Democratic claim is itself
probably the biggest lie of the Iraq war, rather than anything the
president or his administration has said.
In fact, the first — and last — rationale presented for the war by the
Bush administration in every formal government statement about the war
was not the destruction of WMD but the removal of Saddam Hussein, or
regime change.
This regime change was necessary because Saddam was an international
outlaw. He had violated the 1991 Gulf War truce and all the arms control
agreements it embodied, including U.N. resolutions 687 and 689, and the
15 subsequent U.N. resolutions designed to enforce them. The last of
these, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, was itself a war ultimatum
to Saddam giving him “one final opportunity” to disarm — or else. The
ultimatum expired on Dec. 7, 2002, and America went to war three months
later.
Contrary to everything that Al Gore and other Democrats have said for
the last four years, Saddam’s violation of the arms control agreements
that made up the Gulf War truce — and not the alleged existence of Iraqi
WMDs — was the legal, moral and actual basis for sending American troops
to Iraq.
Al Gore and Bill Clinton had themselves called for the removal of Saddam
by force when he expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998, a clear
violation of the Gulf truce.
This was the reason Clinton and Gore sent an “Iraqi Liberation Act” to
Congress that year; it is why the congressional Democrats voted in
October 2002 to authorize the president to use force to remove him; and
it is the reason the entire Clinton-Gore national security team,
including the secretary of state, the secretary of Defense and the
director of Central Intelligence, supported Bush when he sent American
troops into Iraq in March 2003.
The Authorization for the Use of Force bill — passed by majorities of
both parties in both Houses — is the legal basis for the president’s
war, which Democrats have since betrayed along with the troops they sent
to the battlefield. The Authorization bill begins with 23 “whereas”
clauses justifying the war. Contrary to Gore and the Democratic critics
of the Bush administration, only two of these clauses refer to
stockpiles of WMD. On the other hand, 12 of the reasons for going to war
refer to U.N. resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein.
Even if these indisputable facts were not staring Gore in the face, the
destruction of WMDs could not have been the “first rationale” for the
war in Iraq for this simple reason. On the very eve of the war, the
president gave Iraq an option to avoid a conflict with American forces.
On March 17, two days before the invasion, Bush issued an eleventh-hour
ultimatum to Saddam: leave the country or face war. In other words, if
Saddam had agreed to leave Iraq, there would have been no American
invasion. It is one of the most revealing features of the Democrats’
crusade against George Bush that they blame the war on him instead of
Saddam.
If its offer had been accepted, the Bush administration would have left
in place a regime run by the Ba’athist Party and headed by Foreign
Minister Tariq Aziz or some comparable figure from the old regime. The
idea was, that without Saddam, even such a bad regime would honor the
truce accords of 1991 and U.N. Resolution 1441. This would have led to
Iraq’s cooperation with the UN inspectors and the destruction of any WMD
or WMD programs that Saddam may have had — without necessitating a war.
Ignoring — and distorting — the facts about how and why his country went
to war, … repeats the slanders of the president — and therefore his
country — that have become a familiar aspect of our political life.
The charges are transparently designed to destroy the authority of
America’s commander in chief, while his troops are in harm’s way — an
unprecedented sabotage of a war in progress.
Even so, the argument that Bush manipulated the facts about Iraqi WMD to
pursue a war policy that was aggressive and unfounded is demonstrably
false.
Bush acted on the consensus of every major intelligence agency,
including the British, the French, the Russian, the German and the
Jordanian — all of whom believed that Saddam had WMD. In other words, he
cannot reasonably be accused of inventing the existence of Saddam’s WMD,
although that is precisely what Gore and other demagogues on the left do
on an almost daily basis.
Since every Democratic senator who voted for the war was provided by the
administration with a copy the intelligence data on Saddam’s WMD, the
charge made by Gore and other Democratic senators that they were
deceived is both cynical and hypocritical as well as false.
American pilots were engaged in a low-intensity armed conflict with the
Iraqi military over the “no-fly zones” the truce had created. Clinton
and Gore had allowed Saddam to get away with breaking the truce he had
signed for two reasons. First because they were preoccupied with the
fallout from Clinton’s affair in the White House; but more importantly,
because ever since Vietnam the Democrats had shown no interest in
deploying American troops to protect the national interest (and thus had
opposed the first Gulf War).
In 1998, Saddam expelled the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. Why would he do
so if it was not his intention to do mischief as well?
Specifically, why would he do so if it was not his intention to develop
the weapons programs, the WMD programs, that the Gulf truce outlawed and
that the U.N. inspectors were there to stop?
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 showed that Saddam’s mischief could have
serious consequences, not because Saddam had a role in 9/11, but because
Saddam celebrated and endorsed the attacks, had attempted to assassinate
an American president and had hosted terrorist organizations and
gatherings engaged in a holy war against the West.
The only reason Saddam allowed the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq in
the fall of 2002 was because Bush placed 200,000 U.S. troops on its
border. It would have been irresponsible of Bush to put those troops on
the border of a country which was violating international law unless he
meant to enforce the law. But the troops were there to go to war only if
Saddam Hussein failed to honor the 1991 truce, not to slake the
aggressive appetites of the president of the United States, as America’s
enemies — and Al Gore — maintain.
Saddam’s offer to allow the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq coincided
with Bush’s appearance at the U.N. in September 2002. His message to the
U.N. was that it needed to enforce its resolutions or become irrelevant.
If U.N. did not enforce the resolutions that Saddam had violated, the
United States would do so in its stead. Jimmy Carter and Al Gore marked
the occasion by publicly attacking their own president for putting such
pressure on Saddam Hussein. This was the beginning of the Democratic
campaign to sabotage an American war in progress, which has continued
without letup ever since.
As a result of Bush’s appeal, the U.N. Security Council voted
unanimously to present Saddam with an ultimatum, and a 30-day deadline
to expire on Dec. 7, 2002.
By that date he was to honor the truce and destroy his illegal weapons
programs or “serious consequences would follow.” The ultimatum was U.N.
Resolution 1441 — the seventeenth attempt to enforce a truce in the Gulf
War of 1991. The deadline came and went without Saddam’s compliance.
Saddam knew that his military suppliers and political allies, Russia and
France, would never authorize its enforcement by arms. This is the
reason the United States and Britain went to war without U.N. approval,
not because George Bush preferred unilateral measures, which is simply
another Democratic deception.
Since war was not the president’s preference, first, last, or otherwise,
the United States did not immediately attack. Instead, the White House
spent three months after the Dec. 7 deadline trying by diplomatic means
to persuade the French and Russians and Chinese to back the U.N.
resolution they had voted for and to force Saddam to open his country to
full inspections. In other words, to honor the terms of the Gulf War
truce that they, as Security Council members, had ratified and promised
to enforce.
Virtually all of the claims that make up the core of the Democrats’
attacks on Bush’s decision to go to war — that he manipulated data on
aluminum tubes to present them as elements of an Iraqi nuclear program
and that he lied about an Iraqi attempt to buy yellowcake uranium — were
never part of the administration’s rationale for the use of force, and
were not mentioned in the Authorization for the Use of Force
congressional legislation.
They were political attempts to persuade the reluctant Europeans to
enforce the U.N. ultimatum and international law. Even then, by offering
Saddam an escape clause, Bush provided an alternative to war. If Saddam
would re-settle in Russia or some other friendly state, the United
States would not invade.
For Gore and the president’s Democratic critics, all these facts count
for nothing. In their place is the great American Satan, George Bush.
According to Gore and the Democrats, America went to war for reasons
that are either illegitimate or immoral or both.
According to Gore, the sending of American troops to Iraq was an
imperial aggression, orchestrated by the president and his advisors who
manipulated the evidence, deceived the people, and ignored the U.N. to
carry out their malign intent: “The pursuit of ‘dominance’ in foreign
policy led the Bush administration to ignore the United Nations,” writes
Gore, showing his utter contempt for the facts.
What Bush actually ignored was the French, who built Saddam’s nuclear
reactor, collaborated with Saddam’s theft of the “oil for food”
billions, and threatened to veto any attempt to enforce international
law or the U.N. ultimatum.
Bush also ignored the Russians, who supplied two-thirds of Saddam’s
weapons, helped him sabotage the U.N. sanctions, and refused to enforce
the U.N. ultimatum.
What Bush did not ignore were the 17 U.N. resolutions designed to keep
the Middle East peace and protect the world from the consequences of its
failure.
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration’s position that the world community viewed Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat.
“The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world,” Stanzel said.
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. “In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”
Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.
The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.
“The cumulative effect of these false statements – amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts – was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war,” the study concluded.
“Some journalists – indeed, even some entire news organizations – have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, ‘independent’ validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq,” it said.
When statisticians look at cold numbers, they have variously estimated the chances of the average person dying in America at the hands of international terrorists to be comparable to the risk of dying from eating peanuts, being struck by an asteroid or drowning in a toilet.
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people’s fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely than the rest to receive diagnoses of new cardiovascular ailments.
Almost all the people in the study lived outside New York or Washington and didn’t know any victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. But more than a 10th of them reported acute stress symptoms (like insomnia or nightmares) right after the attacks, and over the next three years more than 40 percent said they kept worrying about a terrorist attack affecting themselves or a family member.
Their worries were understandable, given the continual warnings from Washington. Officials repeatedly raised the color-coded level of the National Threat Advisory and sometimes explicitly warned of imminent attacks from terrorist cells supposedly operating in America. The alert level has never dropped below yellow (the third of the five levels). About a third to a half of Americans have continued to tell pollsters that they’re personally worried about being victims of a terrorist attack, and that an attack is somewhat or very likely within several months.
“It’s amazing how enduring these feelings of fear are, but look at what’s been going on,” said Alison Holman, a professor of nursing science at the University of California, Irvine, the lead author of the study. “I’d be surprised if those terrorist alerts didn’t contribute in some way to the ongoing worry about terrorism in our sample.”
Another of the authors, Roxane Cohen Silver, also at U.C. Irvine, is a psychologist who is on an advisory council to the Homeland Security Department.
“I’ve regularly pointed out to the department that there are psychological consequences to the raising of the alert,” Dr. Silver said. “Now we’re demonstrating that it may have physical consequences.”
The researchers caution that they’re not sure how serious the physical consequences are, because they’re relying on people reporting that their doctors have diagnosed new cardiovascular ailments. Also, studies like this show correlations, rather than an identifiable cause and effect. But since the researchers have taken into account reports of people’s health problems and anxiety that were collected before Sept. 11, and the levels of lifetime and continuing stress, they’re confident they’ve identified a worrisome increase in heart disease.
After controlling for various factors (age, obesity, smoking, other ailments and stressful life events), the researchers found that the people who were acutely stressed after the 9/11 attacks and continued to worry about terrorism — about 6 percent of the sample — were at least three times more likely than the others in the study to be given diagnoses of new heart problems.
If you extrapolate that percentage to the adult population of America, it works out to more than 10 million people. No one knows what fraction of them might consequently die of a stroke or heart attack — plenty of other factors affect heart disease — but if it were merely 0.0003 percent, that would be higher than the 9/11 death toll.
Of course, statistics of any sort, even when the numbers are rock solid, don’t mean much to people when they’re assessing threats. Risk researchers have found that even when people know the numbers, they’re less worried about death tolls than about how the deaths occur. They have good reasons — called “rival rationalities” — for fearing catastrophes that kill large numbers at once because these events affect the whole community and damage the social fabric.
Living in Fear and Paying a High Cost in Heart Risk The sponsors of the New York campaign were so pleased with the results that they papered the subways with congratulations to the riders: “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.” But as William Neuman reported in The Times, the ads neglected to mention the number of terrorists arrested as a result of the tips: zero.
Meanwhile, how many subway riders were given diagnoses of new heart problems after riding to work every morning looking at ads reminding them that they might be blown to bits any second? Not zero, if you believe the new study.
Even before this study, some doctors were arguing that terrorism wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the related “epidemic of fear,” as Marc Siegel called it in a 2005 book, “False Alarm.” Dr. Siegel, of the New York University School of Medicine, pointed to studies linking fear of terrorism with increased risk of heart arrhythmias and elevated levels of an enzyme that correlates with heart disease.
“The fear response causes the heart to pump harder and faster, the nerves to fire more quickly,” Dr. Siegel said. “Excess triggering of this system of response causes the organs to wear down. For a person who is always on the alert, the result is a burned out body.”
It’s not fair to blame public officials alone for this fear epidemic. We in the news media have done our part to scare people. (More on how the “terrorism industry” distorts risks can be found at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) But since there hasn’t been an attack in America for six years, for domestic drama we’ve had to rely on dire predictions of politicians and security officials.
What if the alerts stopped? What if the security officials looked at this new medical evidence — or at their own perfect record of false alarms — and decided that the nation did not need to be in a perpetual state of yellow alert? What if they even decided that Americans could survive without any color at all?
I guess that’s a hopeless fantasy. No politician wants to be blamed for failing to anticipate a terrorist attack. No bureaucrats willingly abandon a system that keeps them employed.
But maybe these officials could be induced to take one more precaution. The next time they raise the threat level to orange or red, they could add, “Warning: Heeding this alert may be hazardous to your health.”
Uh….you don’t actually expect us to believe you typed all that; do you?
You could have just cut to the point and said that Maud is a goober or something. We all know that her comment has no bearing on the smog in L.A. or her “doo-doo” brown Prius.
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Yeah!! Roger Mount.People only see as far as the end of their nose.
Too many refried beans has partially led to the smog problem in LA. Ruminants have led to global warming as well. This is a different kind of gas that needs to be harnessed. I had enough in me the other day to have heated a home for several minutes. You could say that I am full of it!
Al buys carbon “credits” from exactly who? Several “Carbon Credit” companies have been found to be a total fraud as they did NOTHING to reduce any carbon and just took Al Gore’s money and laughed their way to the Bank.
Wake up Jasper, buying credits is a scam with many of those companies. If Al truly cared, he would actually reduce the amount of pollution he spews by opening his mouth. Nobel Peace Prize my a ss.
LARS, you think the Element’s ugly; everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I just find it ironic that you justify that opinion by driving a car that looks like a bloated pimple.
Whatever floats your boat.
Maud, you really want to know what causes the majority of the smog in the L.A. basin?
It’s not the cars as it was 20-30 years ago. The majority of the smog is caused by industry. Then that smog gets trapped by the mountains to the east.
Do some research; my fear-mongering little kumquat.
PS: Insurance is higher on a Prius because most people that drive them do so like crap.
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
I wondered why the insurance was higher on the Prius. It is Bush’s fault!
Maud, you’re a very angry liberal.
A bit chopped up, but makes my point.
“The first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction.” This familiar Democratic claim is itself
probably the biggest lie of the Iraq war, rather than anything the
president or his administration has said.
In fact, the first — and last — rationale presented for the war by the
Bush administration in every formal government statement about the war
was not the destruction of WMD but the removal of Saddam Hussein, or
regime change.
This regime change was necessary because Saddam was an international
outlaw. He had violated the 1991 Gulf War truce and all the arms control
agreements it embodied, including U.N. resolutions 687 and 689, and the
15 subsequent U.N. resolutions designed to enforce them. The last of
these, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, was itself a war ultimatum
to Saddam giving him “one final opportunity” to disarm — or else. The
ultimatum expired on Dec. 7, 2002, and America went to war three months
later.
Contrary to everything that Al Gore and other Democrats have said for
the last four years, Saddam’s violation of the arms control agreements
that made up the Gulf War truce — and not the alleged existence of Iraqi
WMDs — was the legal, moral and actual basis for sending American troops
to Iraq.
Al Gore and Bill Clinton had themselves called for the removal of Saddam
by force when he expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998, a clear
violation of the Gulf truce.
This was the reason Clinton and Gore sent an “Iraqi Liberation Act” to
Congress that year; it is why the congressional Democrats voted in
October 2002 to authorize the president to use force to remove him; and
it is the reason the entire Clinton-Gore national security team,
including the secretary of state, the secretary of Defense and the
director of Central Intelligence, supported Bush when he sent American
troops into Iraq in March 2003.
The Authorization for the Use of Force bill — passed by majorities of
both parties in both Houses — is the legal basis for the president’s
war, which Democrats have since betrayed along with the troops they sent
to the battlefield. The Authorization bill begins with 23 “whereas”
clauses justifying the war. Contrary to Gore and the Democratic critics
of the Bush administration, only two of these clauses refer to
stockpiles of WMD. On the other hand, 12 of the reasons for going to war
refer to U.N. resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein.
Even if these indisputable facts were not staring Gore in the face, the
destruction of WMDs could not have been the “first rationale” for the
war in Iraq for this simple reason. On the very eve of the war, the
president gave Iraq an option to avoid a conflict with American forces.
On March 17, two days before the invasion, Bush issued an eleventh-hour
ultimatum to Saddam: leave the country or face war. In other words, if
Saddam had agreed to leave Iraq, there would have been no American
invasion. It is one of the most revealing features of the Democrats’
crusade against George Bush that they blame the war on him instead of
Saddam.
If its offer had been accepted, the Bush administration would have left
in place a regime run by the Ba’athist Party and headed by Foreign
Minister Tariq Aziz or some comparable figure from the old regime. The
idea was, that without Saddam, even such a bad regime would honor the
truce accords of 1991 and U.N. Resolution 1441. This would have led to
Iraq’s cooperation with the UN inspectors and the destruction of any WMD
or WMD programs that Saddam may have had — without necessitating a war.
Ignoring — and distorting — the facts about how and why his country went
to war, … repeats the slanders of the president — and therefore his
country — that have become a familiar aspect of our political life.
The charges are transparently designed to destroy the authority of
America’s commander in chief, while his troops are in harm’s way — an
unprecedented sabotage of a war in progress.
Even so, the argument that Bush manipulated the facts about Iraqi WMD to
pursue a war policy that was aggressive and unfounded is demonstrably
false.
Bush acted on the consensus of every major intelligence agency,
including the British, the French, the Russian, the German and the
Jordanian — all of whom believed that Saddam had WMD. In other words, he
cannot reasonably be accused of inventing the existence of Saddam’s WMD,
although that is precisely what Gore and other demagogues on the left do
on an almost daily basis.
Since every Democratic senator who voted for the war was provided by the
administration with a copy the intelligence data on Saddam’s WMD, the
charge made by Gore and other Democratic senators that they were
deceived is both cynical and hypocritical as well as false.
American pilots were engaged in a low-intensity armed conflict with the
Iraqi military over the “no-fly zones” the truce had created. Clinton
and Gore had allowed Saddam to get away with breaking the truce he had
signed for two reasons. First because they were preoccupied with the
fallout from Clinton’s affair in the White House; but more importantly,
because ever since Vietnam the Democrats had shown no interest in
deploying American troops to protect the national interest (and thus had
opposed the first Gulf War).
In 1998, Saddam expelled the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. Why would he do
so if it was not his intention to do mischief as well?
Specifically, why would he do so if it was not his intention to develop
the weapons programs, the WMD programs, that the Gulf truce outlawed and
that the U.N. inspectors were there to stop?
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 showed that Saddam’s mischief could have
serious consequences, not because Saddam had a role in 9/11, but because
Saddam celebrated and endorsed the attacks, had attempted to assassinate
an American president and had hosted terrorist organizations and
gatherings engaged in a holy war against the West.
The only reason Saddam allowed the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq in
the fall of 2002 was because Bush placed 200,000 U.S. troops on its
border. It would have been irresponsible of Bush to put those troops on
the border of a country which was violating international law unless he
meant to enforce the law. But the troops were there to go to war only if
Saddam Hussein failed to honor the 1991 truce, not to slake the
aggressive appetites of the president of the United States, as America’s
enemies — and Al Gore — maintain.
Saddam’s offer to allow the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq coincided
with Bush’s appearance at the U.N. in September 2002. His message to the
U.N. was that it needed to enforce its resolutions or become irrelevant.
If U.N. did not enforce the resolutions that Saddam had violated, the
United States would do so in its stead. Jimmy Carter and Al Gore marked
the occasion by publicly attacking their own president for putting such
pressure on Saddam Hussein. This was the beginning of the Democratic
campaign to sabotage an American war in progress, which has continued
without letup ever since.
As a result of Bush’s appeal, the U.N. Security Council voted
unanimously to present Saddam with an ultimatum, and a 30-day deadline
to expire on Dec. 7, 2002.
By that date he was to honor the truce and destroy his illegal weapons
programs or “serious consequences would follow.” The ultimatum was U.N.
Resolution 1441 — the seventeenth attempt to enforce a truce in the Gulf
War of 1991. The deadline came and went without Saddam’s compliance.
Saddam knew that his military suppliers and political allies, Russia and
France, would never authorize its enforcement by arms. This is the
reason the United States and Britain went to war without U.N. approval,
not because George Bush preferred unilateral measures, which is simply
another Democratic deception.
Since war was not the president’s preference, first, last, or otherwise,
the United States did not immediately attack. Instead, the White House
spent three months after the Dec. 7 deadline trying by diplomatic means
to persuade the French and Russians and Chinese to back the U.N.
resolution they had voted for and to force Saddam to open his country to
full inspections. In other words, to honor the terms of the Gulf War
truce that they, as Security Council members, had ratified and promised
to enforce.
Virtually all of the claims that make up the core of the Democrats’
attacks on Bush’s decision to go to war — that he manipulated data on
aluminum tubes to present them as elements of an Iraqi nuclear program
and that he lied about an Iraqi attempt to buy yellowcake uranium — were
never part of the administration’s rationale for the use of force, and
were not mentioned in the Authorization for the Use of Force
congressional legislation.
They were political attempts to persuade the reluctant Europeans to
enforce the U.N. ultimatum and international law. Even then, by offering
Saddam an escape clause, Bush provided an alternative to war. If Saddam
would re-settle in Russia or some other friendly state, the United
States would not invade.
For Gore and the president’s Democratic critics, all these facts count
for nothing. In their place is the great American Satan, George Bush.
According to Gore and the Democrats, America went to war for reasons
that are either illegitimate or immoral or both.
According to Gore, the sending of American troops to Iraq was an
imperial aggression, orchestrated by the president and his advisors who
manipulated the evidence, deceived the people, and ignored the U.N. to
carry out their malign intent: “The pursuit of ‘dominance’ in foreign
policy led the Bush administration to ignore the United Nations,” writes
Gore, showing his utter contempt for the facts.
What Bush actually ignored was the French, who built Saddam’s nuclear
reactor, collaborated with Saddam’s theft of the “oil for food”
billions, and threatened to veto any attempt to enforce international
law or the U.N. ultimatum.
Bush also ignored the Russians, who supplied two-thirds of Saddam’s
weapons, helped him sabotage the U.N. sanctions, and refused to enforce
the U.N. ultimatum.
What Bush did not ignore were the 17 U.N. resolutions designed to keep
the Middle East peace and protect the world from the consequences of its
failure.
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration’s position that the world community viewed Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat.
“The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world,” Stanzel said.
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. “In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”
Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.
Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.
The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.
“The cumulative effect of these false statements – amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts – was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war,” the study concluded.
“Some journalists – indeed, even some entire news organizations – have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, ‘independent’ validation of the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq,” it said.
When statisticians look at cold numbers, they have variously estimated the chances of the average person dying in America at the hands of international terrorists to be comparable to the risk of dying from eating peanuts, being struck by an asteroid or drowning in a toilet.
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people’s fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely than the rest to receive diagnoses of new cardiovascular ailments.
Almost all the people in the study lived outside New York or Washington and didn’t know any victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. But more than a 10th of them reported acute stress symptoms (like insomnia or nightmares) right after the attacks, and over the next three years more than 40 percent said they kept worrying about a terrorist attack affecting themselves or a family member.
Their worries were understandable, given the continual warnings from Washington. Officials repeatedly raised the color-coded level of the National Threat Advisory and sometimes explicitly warned of imminent attacks from terrorist cells supposedly operating in America. The alert level has never dropped below yellow (the third of the five levels). About a third to a half of Americans have continued to tell pollsters that they’re personally worried about being victims of a terrorist attack, and that an attack is somewhat or very likely within several months.
“It’s amazing how enduring these feelings of fear are, but look at what’s been going on,” said Alison Holman, a professor of nursing science at the University of California, Irvine, the lead author of the study. “I’d be surprised if those terrorist alerts didn’t contribute in some way to the ongoing worry about terrorism in our sample.”
Another of the authors, Roxane Cohen Silver, also at U.C. Irvine, is a psychologist who is on an advisory council to the Homeland Security Department.
“I’ve regularly pointed out to the department that there are psychological consequences to the raising of the alert,” Dr. Silver said. “Now we’re demonstrating that it may have physical consequences.”
The researchers caution that they’re not sure how serious the physical consequences are, because they’re relying on people reporting that their doctors have diagnosed new cardiovascular ailments. Also, studies like this show correlations, rather than an identifiable cause and effect. But since the researchers have taken into account reports of people’s health problems and anxiety that were collected before Sept. 11, and the levels of lifetime and continuing stress, they’re confident they’ve identified a worrisome increase in heart disease.
After controlling for various factors (age, obesity, smoking, other ailments and stressful life events), the researchers found that the people who were acutely stressed after the 9/11 attacks and continued to worry about terrorism — about 6 percent of the sample — were at least three times more likely than the others in the study to be given diagnoses of new heart problems.
If you extrapolate that percentage to the adult population of America, it works out to more than 10 million people. No one knows what fraction of them might consequently die of a stroke or heart attack — plenty of other factors affect heart disease — but if it were merely 0.0003 percent, that would be higher than the 9/11 death toll.
Of course, statistics of any sort, even when the numbers are rock solid, don’t mean much to people when they’re assessing threats. Risk researchers have found that even when people know the numbers, they’re less worried about death tolls than about how the deaths occur. They have good reasons — called “rival rationalities” — for fearing catastrophes that kill large numbers at once because these events affect the whole community and damage the social fabric.
Living in Fear and Paying a High Cost in Heart Risk The sponsors of the New York campaign were so pleased with the results that they papered the subways with congratulations to the riders: “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.” But as William Neuman reported in The Times, the ads neglected to mention the number of terrorists arrested as a result of the tips: zero.
Meanwhile, how many subway riders were given diagnoses of new heart problems after riding to work every morning looking at ads reminding them that they might be blown to bits any second? Not zero, if you believe the new study.
Even before this study, some doctors were arguing that terrorism wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the related “epidemic of fear,” as Marc Siegel called it in a 2005 book, “False Alarm.” Dr. Siegel, of the New York University School of Medicine, pointed to studies linking fear of terrorism with increased risk of heart arrhythmias and elevated levels of an enzyme that correlates with heart disease.
“The fear response causes the heart to pump harder and faster, the nerves to fire more quickly,” Dr. Siegel said. “Excess triggering of this system of response causes the organs to wear down. For a person who is always on the alert, the result is a burned out body.”
It’s not fair to blame public officials alone for this fear epidemic. We in the news media have done our part to scare people. (More on how the “terrorism industry” distorts risks can be found at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) But since there hasn’t been an attack in America for six years, for domestic drama we’ve had to rely on dire predictions of politicians and security officials.
What if the alerts stopped? What if the security officials looked at this new medical evidence — or at their own perfect record of false alarms — and decided that the nation did not need to be in a perpetual state of yellow alert? What if they even decided that Americans could survive without any color at all?
I guess that’s a hopeless fantasy. No politician wants to be blamed for failing to anticipate a terrorist attack. No bureaucrats willingly abandon a system that keeps them employed.
But maybe these officials could be induced to take one more precaution. The next time they raise the threat level to orange or red, they could add, “Warning: Heeding this alert may be hazardous to your health.”
Uh….you don’t actually expect us to believe you typed all that; do you?
You could have just cut to the point and said that Maud is a goober or something. We all know that her comment has no bearing on the smog in L.A. or her “doo-doo” brown Prius.