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THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1316866&l=16074 >
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BUSH ADMITS MISLEADING ON WMD
Less than a year after declaring there was "no doubt the Iraqi regime
continues to possess the most lethal weapons ever devised," President Bush
and the White House began to openly "back away from its WMD assertions
today." The New York Times reported, "White House officials are no longer
asserting that stockpiles of banned weapons would eventually be found" after
their weapons inspector, David Kay said he "doesn't think [WMD] existed"
after the 1991 Gulf War.
The backtracking is reverberating throughout the Bush administration. While
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations last year that "our
conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and
500 tons of chemical weapons agent," he said this weekend that it could
actually be "zero tons." Powell told the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq
"can produce anthrax," that it might "have produced 25,000 liters" and
showed a video of an Iraqi plane that dumping "2,000 liters of simulated
anthrax" as proof, but he now says they might have produced no anthrax at
all.
Similarly, Vice President Dick Cheney, said before the war, "there is no
doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...to use
against our friends, against our allies, and against us," but now says the
war was about Iraq's "efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction." The
vice president also cited a classified report his own Administration has
labeled "inaccurate" as the "best source" of proof that Saddam Hussein and
Al Qaeda were linked.
In response, the Administration is beginning to blame the intelligence
community for the WMD fiasco, and planning an internal "review of prewar
intelligence." Administration ally Kay concurred, arguing "I think the
intelligence community owes the president [an apology] rather than the
president owing the American people." Despite Mr. Kay's assertions, experts
who knew the record of U.N. inspections knew that finding no WMD "was always
a strong possibility...but Bush administration officials never acknowledged it."
Earlier reporting found that senior Administration officials deliberately
"bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence,"
and the White House set up a separate intelligence apparatus, the "Office of
Special Plans," to "cherry-pick intelligence that supported its pre-existing
position and ignoring all the rest." For example, the president's well-known
declaration in last year's State of the Union, asserting that Iraq "sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa," remained despite CIA demands
to remove such allegations from his speech.
Visit Misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion. -->
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1316866&l=16075 >
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