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Bush violated it:By JOHN W. DEAN ---- Friday, Jun. 06, 2003 Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious chance that it is the final scenario that reflects reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a pattern of manipulation by this administration." Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq. But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed "findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq," and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion. Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that "(t)he country swims on a sea of oil." more... By JOHN W. DEAN ---- Friday, Jul. 18, 2003 Purported Bush Fact 1: "The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons materials sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax - enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn't accounted for that material. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed it. "Source: Bush cites 1999 Report to the UN Security Council]. But most all the Report's numbers are estimates, in which UNSCOM had varying degrees of confidence.
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It short, in the State of the Union, the president transformed UNSCOM estimates, guesses, and approximations into a declaration of an exact amounts, which is a deception. He did the same with his statement about Botulinum toxin.
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Purported Bush Fact 2: "The Union Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin - enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hasn't accounted for that material. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed it."
Source: Bush cited the same UNSCOM Report. Again, he transformed estimates, or best guesses - based on the work of the UNSCOM inspectors and informants of uncertain reliability - into solid fact.
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Purported Bush Fact 4: "U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them, despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."
Source: Bush cites "U.S. intelligence" for this information, but it appears to have first come from UNSCOM. If so, he seems to have double the number of existing munitions that might be, as he argued "capable of delivering chemical agents."
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Purported Bush Fact 5: "From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."
Source: The three informants have still not been identified - even though the Administration now has the opportunity to offer asylum to them and their families, and then to disclose their identities, or at least enough identifying information for the public to know that they actually exist, and see why the government was prone to believe them.
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Purported Bush Fact 6: "The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb."
Source: The IAEA did provide some information to this effect, but the IAEA's own source was Iraq itself. According to Garry B. Dillon, the 1997-99 head of IAEA's Iraq inspection team, Iraq was begrudgingly cooperating with UNSCOM and IAEA inspections until August 1998.
Moreover, a crucial qualifier was left out: Whatever the program looked like in the early or mid-1990s, by 1998, the IAEA was confident it was utterly ineffective.
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Purported Bush Fact 7: "The British government has learned Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Source: Media accounts have shown that the uranium story was untrue - and that at least some in the Bush Administration knew it. I will not reiterate all of the relevant news reports here, but I will highlight a few.
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Purported Bush Fact 8: "Our intelligence sources tell us that has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
Source: Bush is apparently referring to the CIA's October 2002 report - but again, qualifiers were left out, to transform a statement of belief into one of purported fact.
more... John Prados May 02, 2005 John Prados is a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press). It has been rumored that the brief, antiseptic legal opinion—citing that a legal basis for the Iraq war did exist—that British Prime Minister Tony Blair received from his attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, did not actually reflect the advice of the top British government lawyer. That turns out to be true. Last week, when portions of Lord Goldsmith’s original opinion began to leak, the prime minister’s office rushed to release the original document. Goldsmith’s advice, rendered in a baker’s dozen of pages of closely reasoned text on March 7, 2003, diverges significantly from his previously released single-page approval for war. But its greatest significance is that the Goldsmith opinion puts before the public legal reasoning that undermines the justification in international law Bush used to wage an aggressive war against Iraq. That, in turn, negates Bush’s Congressional authorization to use force. Lord Goldsmith’s opinion strips the legal arguments down to their core and shows how flawed they were. These can be addressed in five areas, and a few further points on legality this side of the Atlantic will complete the story. Foremost is the matter of the U.N. Security Council action (Resolution 1441) passed on Nov. 8, 2002. Debate has long raged over whether 1441—by itself or in combination with earlier Security Council resolutions enacted during and after the Gulf War—authorized a resort to force against Iraq. Lord Goldsmith supplies an exhaustive analysis of the operative paragraphs of Resolution 1441 that shows how it required further U.N. action to approve force. Snip... Finally, there is the broad principle of proportionality. Force used against Iraq in service of the U.N. resolutions “must have as its objective the enforcement of the terms of the cease-fire ,” needed to be limited to achieving that objective, and had to be proportional to “securing compliance with Iraq’s disarmament obligations.” In other words, Goldsmith explicitly noted, “regime change cannot be the objective of military action.”
George Bush sought a congressional resolution authorizing force and secured it on Oct. 10, 2002. That resolution explicitly restricted the use of force to compelling adherence with “relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions,” and continuing threats from Iraq. This was not a blanket declaration of war. The resolution’s contingent authority evaporates if its conditions are not met.
We now know that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and very little in the way of programs to develop them. That is why the weapons inspectors, quite rightly, were not going to report a material breach—the inspectors could find no evidence of weapons. Iraq was in compliance with the Gulf War resolutions and had not invaded anyone—hence no threat to international peace and security. Washington’s assertion otherwise remained crucial to cover an aggressive war with a fig leaf of legality. That fig leaf has now disappeared. This is what Congress will consider during hearings on Iraq.
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