Every informed person knows by now that the Saddam-toppling episode in Baghdad was a staged exercise by a psyops team of the Pentagon and was not a spontaneous reaction by Iraqis. This makes Bush uninformed or deliberately lying.

His remarks to Fort Hood soldiers on April 12, 2005

For millions of Iraqis and Americans, it is a day they will never forget. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty.

Shame on Bush for trying to equate the staged propaganda story of toppling Saddam with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bush is no Reagan. We don't know whether Bush merely reads what is given to him when he gives speeches, or looks at them first and decides to lie, or simply is uninformed (he has certainly shown himself to be woefully uninformed lately). But there's no excuse for misleading thousands of soldiers at Fort Hood-there are plenty of other topics that are 1 that he could talked to them about, without having to resort to lies.

Sources: Seattle Post-Intelligencer- May 30, 2003

We do want to feel good, to believe that we are good. We want to be seen as virtuous liberators, not conquerors. Yet these two signature stories from the invasion of Iraq are, in fact, too good to be 1.

Shortly after the world was wowed by TV coverage of the toppling of Saddam's statue, doubts were raised. A Reuters photo of the square was circulated showing a much smaller crowd than the close-up TV footage implied. Eyewitness accounts belied the news coverage of a "jubilant" crowd: " ... it happened at only about 300 meters from where I was, and it was a very small crowd. The rest of the square was almost empty, and when we inquired as to where the crowd came from, it was from Saddam City (a poor neighborhood some distance away). In other words, it was a rent-a-crowd" (Rev. Neville Watson, interviewed on SBS-TV, Australia).

British columnist Robert Fisk, writing from Baghdad on April 11 for The Independent, described the statue episode as " ... the most staged photo opportunity since Iwo Jima." And this from David Robie, senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology: "I watched BBC World in the lead-up to the toppling. The square was largely empty except for three strategically positioned U.S. Abrams tanks and an armored personnel carrier plus a small paltry crowd of 100 or so, many of then apparently journalists. A BBC World news presenter kept asking, 'Where is everybody?' "

Los Angeles Times (archived article from July 3, 2004)

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel -- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that ...

Video Clip from Keith Olbermann's Countdown (shows that it was not Iraqi civilians, as reported by news sources such as Time, CNN, but US soldiers who brought down the statue.

Cheering Iraqs Staged

Massive End the Occupation Protest in Iraq April 9, 2005(see how empty the square is in first photo)