Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice President Cheney
Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to the President
Dan Bartless, White House Director of Communications
Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary
Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley, Deputy National Security Advisor
Karen Hughes, Counselor to the President
James Wilkinson, Chief of Staff for the Secretary of the Treasury
Mary Matalin, Vice President Cheney's staff
Nicholas Calio, Assistant to the President, Legislative Affairs
Michael Gerson, Chief speechwriter
The group operated in strict secrecy, sifting intelligence, writing position papers and speeches, creating "talking points," planning strategy and timing of messaging, and feeding information to the mass media. It emphasized the nuclear threat, and Condoleezza Rice's statement achieved iconic status: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The stream of information was intentionally misleading and deceptive: that's the nature of propaganda. A Washington Post story on August 10, 2003, described the Group's overreach: "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence." A subsequent expose' was entitled, "Not One Claim Was True."(2)
In 2008 the Center for Public Integrity published the most comprehensive inquiry into the Bush Administration's record of intentional deception: Iraq: the War Card. The Center studied the public statements made between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2003 by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer, and his successor, Scott McClellan. Inventoried month-by-month, 935 of the statements were documented by the Center to be untrue.(3)
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