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Afghan Absurdities
Americans have heard many news reports about Bush administration falsehoods on Iraq. However, the scams of Afghanistan have not gotten as much attention as they deserve. Following are some examples of how the Bush administration has misled the American people regarding Afghanistan.

In the wake of the U.S. military victory over the Taliban, President Bush warned America in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002,

Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears.... We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities.... What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning.

The news that al-Qaeda was targeting American nuclear reactors was the most chilling revelation in Bush’s speech. Senior CIA and FBI officials gave background briefings to the Washington media in the wake of the speech, amplifying the threat that Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda fighters were targeting U.S. nuclear-power facilities. This news made the terrorist threat far more ominous and may have spurred support for Bush’s preemptive war policy.

Two years later, the Bush administration admitted that the president’s statement was false and that no nuclear-power-plant diagrams had been discovered in Afghanistan. A senior Bush administration official told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found.” Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, who had testified in 2002 on this issue in closed hearings on Capitol Hill, commented that Bush was “poorly served by a speech-writer.”

When word began circulating that the nuclear-power-plant story was a hoax, at least one White House official refused to raise the white flag. Nucleonics Week reported that National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack denied that Bush ever claimed the nuclear-powerplant diagrams were found in Afghanistan. McCormack told Nucleonics Week, “We stand by the line in the president’s speech.” McCormack emphasized that, although Afghanistan was mentioned in sentences before and after the bombshell about discovering U.S. nuclear-powerplant diagrams, the word “Afghanistan” did not appear in that specific sentence....