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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (13584)	11/9/2004 5:44:47 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 20773

A long string of disproven facts, or forced conclusions, was used by the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq. The worst of all was the nuclear 'smoking gun' which Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and others promoted in the months before Bush pulled out of the UN process. This was the basis for Bush's "mushroom cloud" warning in the State of the Union address before the war. Congress was waffling on giving the President the authority to use force, so the neoconservatives rolled out the nuclear smoking gun. What was the evidence? Hands on intelligence derived from an intercepted shipment of parts to Iraq -- Rice, Powell et all suggested the intercepted high quality 81mm aluminum tubes were clear and irrefutable proof that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. In Rice's words these tubes "could only really be used for nuclear weapons production" - as part of an uranium enrichment program (the same issue currently under the microscope in Iran). The problem with this? Its categorically untrue. The theory had been "thoroughly debunked", in the words of a top US nuclear expert, over a year before. The real nature of the tubes were known even before 9/11, in August of 2001. Who makes these claims that would contradict the Bush administration? Some UN whacko's? No. The very people who build uranium enrichment centrifuges... for the US. All this was known before Bush sought and got approval to use force against Iraq.