Another view of the Bush-Clair press conference from UK:
Gregpalast.com
"At the press conference, the questions moved from democracy to Blair's and Bush's jointly written work of fiction: the tale of Saddam's buying up nuclear mud from the African nation of Niger. The story was, as the English say, "bollocks," but George Bush gamely insisted that, "I strongly BELIEVE [Saddam] was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program."
Mr. Bush used the term "believe" several times. It seems that as a child, our President was awestruck by the repetitive annunciation of faith to revive Tinkerbell ("We believe in fairies, Tink! We really BELIEVE!"). He is apparently unaware that the decision to go war is supposed to be based, not on beliefs, but on hard intelligence.
Blair visibly squirmed through Bush's twisting and ducking around the simple question of why Bush slithered this African hot-dirt fable into the State of the Union address.
Faced with having to unmuddle the President's inchoate response, Blair hiked up his eyebrows then fetched up this stunner: "People don't generally know. in the 1980s that Iraq purchased 270 tons of uranium from Niger." Indeed, people don't know that, Tony, because your government and the US government did it's damned best to cover it up. In the 1980s, Saddam was OUR butcher in Baghdad, a buddy of Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior. During my investigations for BBC television, I discovered during the Reagan-Bush years, Saudi Arabians gave Saddam, with a wink and nod from the US and UK, $7 billion to build a nuclear weapon so he could incinerate his enemy, Iran. However, that was back before there was an 'Axis of Evil' and Iran was the Unicycle of Evil." |
