Iraq War

The United States was engaged in a war in Iraq from March 20, 2003, until December 18, 2011. The most notable incidents of lying and deception during the war involved (1) the United States' violation of the Geneva Conventions and the country's subsequent denial of its direct connection to prisoner abuse at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, the Abu Ghraib prisons, and other military sites; and (2) the United States' mischaracterization of Iraq as a country that possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Records from international organizations as well as several U.S. government agencies confirm the U.S. government had been cautioned of [Page 547]its violation of the Geneva Conventions as early as January 2002. The George W. Bush administration disregarded these allegations until 2004, when photographs of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, leaked and the scandal went viral.

While there exist thousands of photographs and videos of the abuse in Abu Ghraib, only a handful of pictures circulated in the media. When these photographs became public, the U.S. government negated any awareness of prisoner maltreatment, exculpated senior officials who knew and took part in the organization of these acts, and attributed the incidents of abuse to a group of low-ranking soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib.

Regarding the distortion of Iraq as a country armed with WMD, the U.S. and British governments accepted allegations provided by foreign intelligence that incriminated Iraq as possessing WMDs. These documents, later discovered to be false, stressed that since the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had continued to develop WMD with the intentions to damage neighboring regions and disrupt the world's stability. By the time President Bush made his State of the Union address in 2003, an array of these claims had already been exposed as faulty, although the president's speech perpetuated the information as credible. Later in 2003, the lack of evidence against Iraq directed the White House to correct the widespread misconceptions by suggesting the real concern regarded Iraq's program for developing WMD and not the weapons themselves. Investigators from the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) never found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.