An old video showing United States President Joe Biden being confronted by a war veteran over his support for the 2002 invasion of Iraq, is being shared with the misleading claim that it is recent.
BOOM found that the viral video is from March 2020 from a campaign event when Biden was then the Democratic presidential nominee and had not been elected yet as the president of the United States.
The video is doing the rounds on social media again as March 20, 2023, marked 20 years since the United States and its coalition forces invaded Iraq on a mission to topple dictator Saddam Hussein and find weapons of mass destruction. Back in 2002 as a senator, Biden had voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq which had been was called for by Former President George W. Bush alleging that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
However, the US coalition did not find any such weapons, and in March 2005 the WMD Commission which was established by Bush, acknowledged in a report that the "WMD" fiasco was “one of the most public – and most damaging – intelligence failures in recent American history.”
In the viral video, a man confronts Biden on his past support for the Iraq war and saying "blood is on your hands".
The video is being shared with the caption when translated to English reads, "AMERICA: FREE SPEECH. Here's what he says to President Biden of America: "Millions are dead in Iraq. We actually fought in your damn wars. You sent us to hurt civilians. Millions of people died in Iraq. Actually, we fought your wars. You sent us to injure civilians..."
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The same video is viral on Twitter with several misleading captions.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral video is from March 2020, when US President Joe Biden was the Democratic Presidential nominee.
During a campaign event in Oakland, California on March 3, 2020, war veteran Michael Thurman asked Biden: "We are just wondering why we should vote for someone who voted for a war and enabled a war that killed thousands of our brothers and sisters [and] countless Iraqi civilians." reported The Independent on March 5, 2020.
We found several reports from March 2020, with the same video reporting on the incident.
The Twitter handle 'About Face: Veterans Against the War' had tweeted the video on March 4, 2020, with the caption, "Two veterans confronted @JoeBiden about his record of supporting war during his campaign stopover in Oakland on Super Tuesday"
On its Medium blog, About Face: Veterans Against the War, states that Thurman and another war veteran who confronted Biden are members of their organisation.
Biden's history on voting for the Iraq War
Biden has been criticised for his record on voting for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 as a top-ranking Democrat in the Senate: the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Explaining his vote in September 2019 in an interview with NPR, Biden had said that he had taken Former President George W. Bush at his word claiming that he voted in favour based on a commitment he had received from Bush that he would not go to war in Iraq.
Biden has also been previously fact-checked when he had has claimed in 2019 that despite voting to authorise military force against Iraq he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began, later claiming that he misspoke. (Read FactCheck.org factcheck on it here)