"It is the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he [Hussein] will acquire nuclear weapons, and a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein is not a pleasant prospect, for anyone in the region or for anyone in the world for that matter."
-----Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 7, 2002, at the Commonwealth Club of California
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."
-----Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002, National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
Bush said "a report came out of the...IAEA that they [the Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
-----President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Sept. 7, 2002
"Two debuts took place on Sept. 8 [2002]: the aluminum tubes and the image of "a mushroom cloud."...
No one knows when Iraq will have it's weapon, the story [in the Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002 New York Times] said, but "the first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Top officials made the rounds of the talk shows that morning. Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story. She said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes- described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as "dual use" items- were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
"Powell...when asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News, he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the "specialized aluminum tubing" that "we saw in reporting just this morning."
Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the tubes and said, "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
"We don't have all the evidence [but enough of a picture] that tells us that he [Hussein] is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
"We do know, with absolute certainty that he [Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."
-----Vice President Dick Cheney, Sept. 8, 2002, Meet the Press, confirming New York Times story and Condoleezza Rice statement on the aluminum tubes story]
“The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists.”
-----President George W. Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati
And yet.......
The claims that Iraq was rebuilding nuke facilities and that Saddam was meeting with his scientists were left out of Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address.
"Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute it's nuclear weapons program, [the State department's intelligence office] is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of U.N. inspectors or to project a timeline for completion of activities it does not now see happening." ------Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimate
"The IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
-----IAEA final report to the United Nations Security Council, March 7, 2003
The report [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report, July 9, 2004] said the CIA made a "significant shift" in it's position two months after Cheney began stating publicly that Iraq had actively reconstituted it's nuclear weapons program. The intelligence estimate, which echoed the administration's public claims, "was not supported by the intelligence" and relied on misstatements, concealment of doubts and suppression of evidence."
Reconstituted nuke program claim "Not supported by the evidence."
-----Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, July 9, 2004
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, said [Oct. 6, 2004, presenting his report to two Congressional committees] Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons has "decayed" continuously since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."
...."Duelfer's report contradicted a number of specific claims made by administration officials before the war.
It found, for example, that Iraq's "crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Gulf War was far from successful, nowhere near the "months away" from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced, and no weapon design was completed."
"He [Duelfer] added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program" ...Duelfer concluded they "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991.” [21]
“But on Jan. 27, - the day before the State of the Union Address – the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites… Mohamed ElBaradei [said] preliminary analysis… suggested that the aluminum tubes, “unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges.”
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.”
“There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring to news reports describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq’s former nuclear program. Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In these accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed.
A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush “was imprecise” on his source but stood by the crux of his charge.
“That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb, it will have a bomb,” said a U.S. intelligence analyst who covers the subject. “We had no evidence for it.”” "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence," by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2003, p. A1
The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has concluded that the White House made a questionable claim in January’s State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of it’s desperation to show that Hussein had an active program to develop nuclear weapons according to a well placed source familiar with the board’s findings.
“...the board believes the White House was so anxious “to grab onto something affirmative” about Hussein’s nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.
“The findings ...make it clear that the White House should share blame with the CIA for allowing questionable material into the speech.
“Saddam Hussein is out of the nuclear business.” – Defense Secretary Cheney to a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Jan. or Feb. 1991 during the Desert Storm bombing campaign.
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