An Online Scavenger Hunt on Prewar Claims: What Did You Find?

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON — While reporting for an article in The New York Times today, I spent a while rummaging around in the new online database assembled by the Center for Public Integrity, which allows users to do keyword searches of every public statement made by President Bush and his key advisers about Iraq, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, from just after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, until after the fall of Baghdad.

For all the power of search engines and Boolean logic, and for all the foregone conclusion of the enterprise, there’s still an element of serendipity in this kind of approach to reliving the past. You never know what you’ll come up with. You might not even be all that sure what, precisely, you are looking for. Even knowing that every single document in this compilation has been published elsewhere already, it’s inevitable that you’ll find something to raise your eyebrows.

One striking feature of the material in the data base was the sheer opacity of some of what important people were saying, based on intelligence that most people now acknowledge was spurious.

For example, about ten weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Tim Russert of NBC News asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whether she agreed with an assessment by the Czech government that Iraqi agents met with one of the hijackers who flew into the World Trade Center.

“In evaluating the report,” Ms. Rice replied, “certainly one would have to suspect that there’s no reason to believe Saddam Hussein wouldn’t do something exactly of that kind; that he would not be supportive of terrorists is hard to imagine. But this particular report I don’t want to comment on, because I don’t want to get into intelligence information.”

Now, was that a lie? Or a demurral? A confirmation, or a non-denial? Hard to say. But if there is one lesson that journalists learn over and over, it is that a fuzzy answer should be a red flag.

Asked what had surprised him during the center’s own look at its data, Charles Lewis, who founded the center, mentioned several things. One was the sheer number of lies — that’s his word; the center is definitely taking a stand on this, referring to the project as the “False Statements Database.” The next surprise he mentioned was how many times it was former Secretary of State Colin Powell whose statements were wrong — second only to President Bush himself. Mr. Lewis said he was sure why that was so — maybe it was because of Powell’s role drumming up international support for the Administration’s policy. In any event, the observation shows that Mr. Lewis, too, came to the task with preconceptions.

The database is more than just a collection of transcripts with a customized search engine. It also includes newspaper articles, books, and government reports published later, allowing a user to compare some of what is known now to what was said then. (For example, it includes the follow-up reporting by Jim Risen of The Times that helped debunk the Czech report about the hijacker Mohammad Atta supposedly meeting with Iraqi intelligence handlers in Prague.)

Mr. Lewis said that he hoped people would send in even more data, documents, and statements to add to the database. Social bookmarking tools included in the site, like Diggit and del.icio.us, will enable users to combine their efforts and share their results.

Meanwhile, on the first day of the site’s operation today, it appeared to be overwhelmed by traffic — there was quite a lag waiting for its pages to load.

Once the crowd thins out, readers who visit the project, at publicintegrity.org, are invited to return here and report back on which search terms generated the most striking results and what kinds of things turned up that were the most surprising.

I’ll report back myself, with a couple more intriguing searches and results.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/an-online-scavenger-hunt-on-prewar-claims-what-did-you-find/