WASHINGTON, February 14, 2008 — An influential member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs grilled Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on February 13, citing a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity on the Bush administration's campaign of misinformation to sell the Iraq war.

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• Read the Center study

Iraq: The War Card, the much-quoted report released January 23 in concert with the Fund for Independence in Journalism, revealed that President Bush, Rice, and six other top administration officials made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The study concluded that these false statements were part of an orchestrated campaign “that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

“I have a stack of these false statements right here, all 935 of them,” Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida and chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on Europe, told the secretary. “This study found, Madame Secretary, that you personally made 56 false statements to the American people where you repeatedly pump up the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and exaggerate the so-called relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

Rice, who was the national security adviser during Bush’s first term, was visibly angry and testy throughout the exchange, which lasted roughly six and a half minutes. “Congressman, I take my integrity very seriously and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false, or that I thought to be false, in order to pump up anything,” she said. “Nobody wants to go to war.”

Asked by Wexler whether she chose to use only those intelligence assessments that supported the administration’s position, the secretary said she blamed the National Intelligence Estimate, which she described as “the collective wisdom of the intelligence community.”