We’ve seen time and again that the major Western news media are not above staging news, faking photographs and documents, ignoring important stories that don’t fit their agenda, and filing “articles” that are so biased they shouldn’t be accepted as opinion pieces. But there’s at least one news service that has established a pattern of blatantly lying to its readers—the British Broadcasting Corporation: The BBC accuses Bush of ‘claiming victory’ in Iraq again. He didn’t.

This is what the relevant part of the BBC report said:

He said recent troop reinforcements had brought about “a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror”.

Surely this is more ammunition for the President’s many critics. There he goes again! They’ll be shrieking. We knew he was stupid, but this is unbelievable!

If you read the speech, however - I happened to see the excerpt in question on Hugh Hewitt’s blog - you’ll find that Bush didn’t say that at all. (If you don’t want to read the whole thing use your browser’s ‘Find’ field to search for ‘victory’ – it’s the first instance.)

What he said was the following:

The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around – it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

Here’s the BBC report, for completeness: Bush speech hails Iraq ‘victory’. They should be ashamed, but they won’t be.