Prometheus 6

Cheney Questions Kerry's National Security Judgment
DNC Chairman Says 'Call off the Republican Attack Dogs'
The Associated Press
Monday, April 26, 2004; 2:00 PM

FULTON, Mo., April 26 -- Vice President Cheney said Monday that Sen. John Kerry "has given us ample grounds to doubt" his judgment on national security…

Hm.

Vice President Dick Cheney as recently as January referred to the trucks as "conclusive" proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. CIA Director George J. Tenet later told a Senate committee that he called Cheney to warn him that the evidence was increasingly suspect.

Then there's the British American Security Information Council's findings (hit the appendix if you're lazy, that's what appendices are for), The Carnagie Endowment for International Peace's findings (the full report is linked below the fold, but here's the two page summary if you're lazy; that's what two page summaries are for).
The Atlantic

The record is littered with unduly confident and conclusive administration assertions about Iraqi WMD, as well as about Saddam's much-touted but unproven ties to al Qaeda. Bush, Cheney, and Powell purported to be certain of "facts" about which the intelligence was far short of certain. They omitted the intelligence agencies' caveats, cautions, and dissenting views. And they stretched the findings of Hans Blix and his U.N. inspectors, who now appear to have been far closer to the mark than the administration officials who portrayed them as patsies. Examples:

• Bush and others repeatedly stressed that Iraq "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" if it "is able to produce, buy, or steal" highly enriched uranium, as he told the U.N. on October 7, 2002. He ignored the intelligence community's view that Iraq was highly unlikely to get enriched uranium in less than five years.
• "Iraq ... has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon," Bush said in the same U.N. speech. Previously, Cheney had said (on August 26, 2002) that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons" and (on September 8, 2002) that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Neither Bush nor Cheney disclosed that the State Department doubted these claims or that the State and Energy departments thought that (as we now know) the aluminum tubes had nothing to do with uranium enrichment.
• In his now-famous January 28, 2003, assertion that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush ignored the CIA's strong doubts that Saddam had done any such thing.
• "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," which could be turned over to terrorists and used to kill "thousands or hundreds of thousands" of Americans, Bush told the nation on March 17, 2003. He ignored the intelligence community's view that Saddam was unlikely to turn such weapons over to terrorists.
• "We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas," Bush said on October 7, 2002. He ignored a September 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency statement that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."
• Just over two weeks ago, Cheney touted as "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi WMD programs two flatbed trailers, found last spring, that he said were mobile biological weapons labs. This certitude appears indefensible in light of Kay's testimony the next day that these trailers were to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps rocket fuel#8212;not biological weapons—and that this was the consensus view of intelligence officials.

Some 30 more-or-less overblown administration statements are catalogued in a 106-page January 8 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Washington Post, Aug 2003

This article is based on interviews with analysts and policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal documents and technical evidence not previously made public.

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.
• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.
• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.
• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."
• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.

Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.

"I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' " said one of the policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package."