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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (104295)	7/8/2003 4:37:15 PM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

"If you fabricate intelligence, that counts as a conspiracy to commit fraud." Do you think the use of the MisState of the Union Address rises to this level? I do. Time will tell. Bush Claim on Iraq Seeking Uranium Was Wrong (Update2) July 8 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush was wrong in his State of the Union Address when he said that Iraq tried to ``buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa,'' a spokesman said. Bush used the statement to bolster his administration's claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. It was part of a broader argument that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the U.S. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Bush based his assertion on what turned out to be a ``bogus'' report that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. The acknowledgement -- which Fleischer also made June 9 -- follows similar findings by a U.K. parliamentary committee and comments from a retired U.S. ambassador who had investigated the report and told the administration it was false. ``That information was erroneous and they knew about it well ahead'' of the president's Jan. 28 address, said Joseph Wilson, who the Central Intelligence Agency sent to Niger to investigate the report of Iraq's effort to buy uranium. ``Either the administration has some information that it has not shared with the public or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision in a case that had already been made -- a decision that had been made to go to war,'' Wilson told NBC's ``Meet the Press'' on Sunday. He made similar comments on other news shows and in a New York Times op-ed article. Learned Too Late National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said the administration didn't discover the Niger intelligence was false until February, after the president's speech. Anton said Bush didn't base his claim about Iraq's pursuit of African uranium on the Niger report alone, even as he conceded the additional intelligence -- which he wouldn't disclose -- wasn't strong enough to support the claim in Bush's speech. The senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said the Bush administration's admission only confirmed the obvious. ``The whole world knew it was a fraud,'' said Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. ``It's not a revelation.'' The intelligence panel should find out how the assertion got into Bush's State of the Union address, Rockefeller said. ``Who decided this was something they could work with?'' Other Reaction The White House's revelation didn't weaken the case for invading Iraq, said Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. ``The argument over whether to go to war with Iraq involved a large number of things,'' the Indiana Republican said. Former Iraqi President Hussein had defied the United Nations' desire to examine the country's weapon's capabilities and the ``credibility of the international community'' was at stake, Lugar said. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said the White House admission was ``more evidence of why we need to have a bipartisan investigation.'' ``It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information,'' he said. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said Bush's comments in January were ``not a mistake.'' ``It was no oversight and it was no error,'' said McAuliffe. ``The allegations against the Bush White House couldn't be more serious,'' he said. Democratic Senator Robert Graham also criticized the president. ``With this admission from the White House that the president misled us, George Bush's credibility is increasingly in doubt,'' said Graham, of Florida, who's seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Representative Tom DeLay, the No. 2 Republican in the House, shrugged off the issue. The decision to go to war on Iraq was ``morally right,'' he said. ``The overall reason we went into Iraq is sound,'' DeLay said. quote.bloomberg.com Rascal @patientpoliteinformedpatriot.com