The Prevarication Boxscore

In a comment in this thread on Eschaton, Jonathan laments that the following story is not getting enough play in the blogosphere, so here I’ll do my part.

A couple of days ago, the minority Committee on Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives released a report, entitled Iraq on the Record, that documents misleading statements made by the Bush Administration between March 2002 and January 2004 concerning the threat posed by Iraq. The investigators examined 125 public appearances made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice and identified 237 misleading statements therein.

Bush had the highest number of misleading statements, with 55 (including 11 in a single appearance!), with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell close behind (51, 52, and 50 respectively). Rice had the fewest public appearances (16) and thus the fewest number of misleading statements (29) but she had the highest number of statements that were false outright—8. The greatest number of misleading statements were made about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, and the highest number over any thirty-day period occurred in the month prior to the October 2002 vote in Congress authorizing military action.

On the web page, the committee even provides a handy search interface to the database of misleading statements. “Nuclear” pulls up 84 statements.