Media Matters for America Details False Claims Made by Bush Administration Regarding Iraq's WMDs
3/17/2006 3:13:00 PM
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To: National Desk, Defense Reporter
Contact: Daniela Colaiacovo, 202-756-4124 or dcolaiacovo@mediamatters.org, Jeremy Funk, 202-756-4109 or jfunk@mediamatters.org, Both of Media Matters for America
WASHINGTON, March 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following was released today by Media Matters for America:
March 19th will mark the third anniversary of the Iraq War. The occasion is sure to spark coverage of the false Bush administration statements about the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath of the invasion.
In response to assertions by media figures, including Bill O'Reilly, that President Bush's pre-war claims had been vindicated, Media Matters for America compiled several examples of claims made by Bush regarding Iraq's weapons capability. In each of these cases, his unequivocal assertions were not only found to have been false, but determined to not have been justified by the intelligence available at the time.
Iraq's aluminum tubes were intended to enrich uranium
In an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Bush told his audience, "Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The "evidence" he went on to cite included the claim that Iraq had "attempted to purchase high- strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." More than three months later, in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president repeated this claim: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he 1/8Hussein 3/8 has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
But in contrast to Bush's firm statements, the various U.S. intelligence agencies disagreed over the purpose of the aluminum tubes -- a dispute that the president was well aware of. While the CIA concluded that the tubes were suitable to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs, both Department of Energy (DOE) experts and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had dissented from this view.
These agencies' position that the tubes were "poorly suited" for uranium enrichment was included in the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided to Congress in October 2002. Prior to his October 7 speech, the CIA delivered to the president a one-page summary of the NIE's findings, which noted that DOE and INR believed the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," rather than a nuclear bomb. Despite this disagreement, he and other administration officials went on to repeatedly cite the tubes as solid evidence that Iraq's nuclear program had been revived.
Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa
In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But months earlier, the CIA had voiced serious doubts about the basis for the uranium assertion and implored administration officials not to include it in Bush's speeches.
Specifically, the agency sent two memos to the White House expressing such doubts. Further, then-CIA director George J. Tenet directly asked then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley not to use the claim. INR similarly responded in the October NIE that claims of Iraq seeking to purchase nuclear material from Africa were "highly dubious." These warnings led the administration to remove a uranium reference from the October 2002 Cincinnati speech.
Nonetheless, they included the claim in the 2003 State of the Union. On July 22, 2003, Hadley took responsibility for the administration's use of the claim in Bush's State of the Union address. He acknowledged, "I should have asked that the 16 words be taken out."
Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons
In an Oct. 5, 2002, radio address, Bush asserted that "Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." In his speech in Cincinnati two days later, he unequivocally declared that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons." Months later, on March 6, 2003, the president further claimed that "Iraqi operatives continue to hide biological and chemical agents."
But the intelligence did not justify the president's unequivocal claims. For example, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report published the in September 2002 had found "no reliable information" to substantiate the claim that Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons. Moreover, while the intelligence community believed Iraq possessed biological agents that could be quickly produced and weaponized, the October NIE made clear that the agencies lacked hard evidence to back up this assumption: "We had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agents, or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal."
Iraq's unmanned drones could attack enemies near and far
In the year preceding the war, the president and other senior administration officials repeatedly emphasized the threat of Iraq mounting an attack on U.S. soil as a major rationale for war. In the October 7 speech, for example, Bush claimed that Iraq had a fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be used to deliver chemical or biological weapons. "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," the president declared.
But the ability of these drones to carry out such attacks was a matter of dispute among intelligence agencies. While the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had endorsed the view that the Iraqi UAVs could be used by Iraq to attack its neighbors and possibly the United States, analysts at the U.S. Air Force -- which controls the U.S. fleet of UAVs -- dissented from this view in the October 2002 NIE. They contended that the planes were unarmed reconnaissance drones -- a conclusion endorsed by analysts at the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
But months later, Bush continued to cite the UAVs as a threat to the United States. On February 6, 2003, he said, "Iraq has developed spray devices that could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles with ranges far beyond what is permitted by the Security Council. A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland."
Iraq would mount unprovoked attack on U.S.
Moreover, the president's broader claims suggesting Iraq's ability to attack the U.S. without provocation overlooked the intelligence community's unanimous conclusion that the likelihood of such an attack was minimal.
The NIE stated that an Iraqi attack on the U.S. would likely only occur if "Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable." Moreover, the NIE classified the confidence level for this judgment as "low." INR went a step further, concluding that Hussein was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland even if 1/8his 3/8 regime's demise is imminent."
As with the intelligence community's conflicted assessments concerning the purpose of the aluminum tubes, the president was directly informed in January 2003 of the widely-held view that Iraq was unlikely to consider attacking the U.S. unless attacked first.
Despite having read the intelligence agencies' assessment of the threat, Bush said on February 25, 2003, "The risk of doing nothing, the risk of the security of this country being jeopardized at the hands of a madman with weapons of mass destruction, far exceeds the risks of any action we may be forced to take." In his 2003 State of the Union address, he continued to emphasize the risk of an unprovoked Iraqi attack. "The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological, or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country," he said in the speech. "The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. But we will do everything to defeat it."
Iraq could launch an attack in 45 minutes
On Sept. 26, 2002, President Bush repeated a claim put forth by British intelligence that "the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order were given." On Sept. 28, he again made the claim in his weekly radio address.
But the administration chose not to consult the CIA before making this assertion. If they had, however, they would have learned that two weeks earlier, the agency had objected to the claim that Iraq could mount an attack so quickly. In discussions with the British government, the CIA had noted that the claim was based on a single, unreliable source and had advised British intelligence to remove it from a dossier they had compiled on Iraq's weapons capability.
Who is the liar?
The above examples support the argument that in 2002 and 2003 the Bush administration often disregarded the misgivings among the intelligence community about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq. Whether senior Iraqi generals believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs does not change the fact that the many in the U.S. intelligence community doubted he did and that the Bush administration chose to ignore them. This is the argument that many have made:
-- Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV): In a November 1, 2005, floor statement, Reid referred to how the Bush administration "consistently and repeatedly manipulated the facts" in making the case for war. "Obviously we know now their nuclear claims were wholly inaccurate," Reid said. "But more troubling is the fact that a lot of intelligence experts were telling the administration then that its claims about Saddam's nuclear capabilities were false."
-- Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL): In the "Additional Views" section of the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 report on prewar intelligence, Sen. Durbin, along with Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-NY) and Carl Levin (D-MI), described Bush's claims that Iraq could launch an attack in as little as 45 minutes as an example of how the administration "repeatedly overstated what the Intelligence Community assessed at the time."
-- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.): In a March 5, 2004, speech, Kennedy cited Bush's claims concerning the aluminum tubes. He responded: "In fact, as we now know, the intelligence community was far from unified on Iraq's nuclear threat. The administration attempted to conceal that fact by classifying the information and the dissents within the intelligence community until after the war, even while making dramatic and excessive public statements about the immediacy of the danger. ... The evidence so far leads to only one conclusion. What happened was not merely a failure of intelligence, but the result of manipulation and distortion of the intelligence and selective use of unreliable intelligence to justify a decision to go to war. The administration had made up its mind, and would not let stubborn facts stand in the way."
-- Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.): "The facts speak for themselves," Kerry said in a November 14, 2005, floor statement. "The White House has admitted that the president told Congress and the American public in the State of the Union address that Saddam was attempting to acquire fuel for nuclear weapons despite the fact that the CIA specifically told the Administration three times, in writing and verbally, not to use this intelligence. 1/8... 3/8 This is not relying on faulty intelligence, as Democrats did; it is knowingly, and admittedly, misleading the American public on a key justification for going to war."
-- Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.): In an October 24, 2005, floor statement, Leahy said, "We know that the key public justifications for the war -- to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and supporting al Qaeda -- were based on faulty intelligence and outright distortions and have been thoroughly discredited."
-- Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean: In a July 12, 2003, CNN interview, Dean cited Bush's uranium claim as evidence that he misled the country into war with Iraq. "The big deal is not so much that we went to war over a deal between Iraq and Niger which didn't exist and that the administration knew ahead of time it didn't exist," he said. "The big deal is the credibility of the United States of America and the credibility of the president in telling the American people the truth and the rest of the world the truth."
-- Former President Jimmy Carter: In his book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, November 2005), Carter wrote that the Bush administration was determined to attack Iraq using "false and distorted claims after 9/11."
More information can be found at
http://www.mediamatters.org.http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=62586
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