Why did Clinton, in 2004, say there were WMD in Iraq?
"LISBON (AFP) Jan 09, 2004
Former US president Bill Clinton said in October during a visit to Portugal that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said late Thursday.
"When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime," he said in an interview with Portuguese cable news channel SIC Noticias."
spacewar.com
tonyspencer.com
"Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors."
mojones.com
Shrillary?
"President Bush and two inspectors he appointed to find the weapons have all said the evidence of the weapons has not turned up, and the president announced shortly after he won the 2004 elections that the search for Saddam's WMD was over. But at the same time, Mr. Hoekstra is not alone in his concerns about the whereabouts of Saddam's arsenal. Prime Minister Sharon and his Israel Defense Force chief of staff during the Iraq war, Moshe Yaalon, have said weapons were transferred from Iraq to Syria before the war, a view also promoted by a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada. Senator Clinton last week acknowledged that the possibility is still a live one, saying, "there were no weapons, or if there were, they certainly weren't used or they were in some way disposed of or taken out of the country."
In the weeks before and following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, at least 10 facilities believed by American, European, and Israeli intelligence to be for the production and research of chemical and biological weapons were systematically looted by members of Iraq's Republican Guard, ordered by the regime's leadership to destroy and hide evidence of the programs, according to current and former intelligence officials from America, Britain and Israel. In interviews with the New York Sun, these officials reflect the position of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in the months after the war: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
nysun.com
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