Britain’s Independent, home of the execrable �ber-idiotarian Robert Fisk, picks up a deliberate misquote of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in a truly shoddy piece of anti-American “journalism” with a headline that bears no relation to the truth: WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz “admitted” no such thing; here’s the Vanity Fair/Independent distorted version of what he said:

“For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.

And here (thanks to LGF reader William) is Wolfowitz’s statement in full and in context, showing it to be much more detailed and nuanced than the dishonest crap being put forth by the Independent:

Wolfowitz: The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but — hold on one second —

(Pause)

Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to —

Wolfowitz: — there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.

Kellems: By the way, it’s probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I’ve witnessed, so —

Q: This is extraordinary.

Kellems: You had good timing.

Q: I’m really grateful.

Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.

The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there’s the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we’ve arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.

Q: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia —

Wolfowitz: I was. It’s one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don’t understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.

The maddening thing about the Independent’s lie is that it’s already being widely reported in US media, by “journalists” too lazy and stupid to do the research and find out what was actually said.

UPDATE: The Independent apparently sourced its quote from Vanity Fair, where the interviewer admits he didn’t record the interview. But the headline, “WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz” is pure Independent.