Many Abu Ghraib Inmates Were Not Personally Tortured By George Bush

Believe it or not, I have yet more to say about the Armenian Genocide. But in the meantime, I thought I might mention something that happened more recently than 1915.

A few weeks ago Condoleezza Rice was on Sean Hannity's radio program. And she once again demonstrated something I've long suspected -- that when you become a high US government official you swear an oath to never, under any circumstances, tell the truth.

One thing she and Hannity discussed was Iraq's purported WMD. According to this NewsMax article (which appears to be a rewritten press release):

Rice... confirmed that Saddam had acquired the technology to enrich uranium sometime before the U.S. attacked in 2003, and had amassed a 1.8-ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium before he was deposed.

"A lot of that enriched uranium comes from that period [before the first Gulf War]," Rice said.

Okay:

1. ALL of Iraq's uranium -- enriched and non-enriched -- was acquired before the first Gulf War. (And this uranium was under IAEA seal and thus inaccessible to Iraq.) To say "a lot" of Iraq's uranium was from the period before the first Gulf War means that Iraq procured some of it after the first Gulf War. This is not true. Rice was lying, just as I would be lying if I said, "A lot of the inmates of Abu Ghraib were not personally tortured by George Bush."

2. Iraq "acquired the technology to enrich uranium" during the 1980s. Then all of this technology was destroyed by the IAEA during the 1990s. So in a sense it's true Iraq got uranium enrichment technology sometime before 2003. In another sense -- that of the Merriam-Webster dictionary -- Rice was lying because she was attempting to create "a false or misleading impression." Rice was trying, without quite saying it, to make Hannity's listeners think Iraq had a nuclear program after the first Gulf War in 1991. It did not.

Strangely, Rice didn't mention that the New Yorker reported in 1994 that during the 1980s Saudi Arabia gave Iraq $5 billion to subsidize its nuclear program, and the US knew about this:

According to a former high-ranking American diplomat, the C.I.A. was fully apprised. "I knew about it," the diplomat says matter-of-factly, "and so did they." A senior White House official, asked about the Saudi government's involvement and American complicity, told us, "They did spend billions on the Iraqis. It was a different world. We were ready to overlook a lot of things the Saudis were doing for the Iraqis. It's consistent with all the other terrible things we did at the time"—to shore up Saddam.

We shouldn't be too hard on Condoleezza, though. How could she find out about that? I mean, it's not like she was Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan administration and then on the National Security Council under George HW Bush.