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Comment by notadoc | Hacker News Reader

> I think the whole "fake news" thingy seems to politicaly motivated.

Sure, branding real news as fake news is politically motivated, whereas labeling what is the clearly the equivalent of the most absurd supermarket tabloids as "fake news" is accurate and appropriate.

It is curious that many people are somehow oblivious to tabloid headlines when they appear on the internet, whereas nearly everyone discards the supermarket checkout stand "The Pope is a space alien!" stories.

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And then there's everything in between. That's where the actual debate is. Was "WMDs in Iraq!" fake news in 2002, 2003, or 2004?

Watching this has helped me, at least somewhat, decipher what is said in the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc

Of course, it doesn't help for outright lies like WMDs in Iraq.

Though your broader point holds, they did in fact find WMDs in Iraq, but it wasn't really big news (or especially serious weapons)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

The WMDs that Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfield, and Colin Powell were referring to were nuclear weapons [1] though, not chemical weapons. We already knew he had chemical weapons:

>President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mush...

Oh you're definitely correct, I was just surprised when I learned that fact, and there's a bit of a "No WMDs at all!" echo chamber.

By that tho they use WMDs as shorthand for "none of the WMDs they claimed were there, were". Almost exclusively.

Which is true.

That's the first time I hear about nuclear weapons in this context - I was always under impression that this was about chemical weapons, which they found a lot of evidence of after the invasion.

I specifically recall LOTS of talk about "mushroom clouds" from the Bush administration leading up to the war. We knew they had chemical weapons because we sold them to them.

Read the article I linked above. It's from that time period and Cheney and others specifically tried to link Iraq to nuclear weapons and Al Qaeda. It was fear-mongering and lying to justify the war and the Bush administration knew it: http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/dick-cheneys-biggest-lie-...

Wow! This is interesting. I thought the "WMDs in Iraq" was fake news, turns out the "no WMDs in Iraq" is fake news! So much fake news, hard to sort everything out.

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