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Cheney Continues to Defend Iraq
Based on "Best Intelligence"
(but 'we would do exactly the same thing’
anyway)
 On
NBC's "Meet the Press", Vice President Cheney once again defended his
past statements linking Iraq and the al Qaeda network, and on the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, continuing to assert
their decisions were based on the best intelligence he had at the time
and this intelligence was accepted widely.
But the fact is their "intelligence"was
not the best available at the time. The report from the
experts on the scene, the independent investigators with years of
experience, the persons in-the-know, was and continues to be ignored.
Following
Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United nations
on February 6, 2003, the U.N. weapons inspectors disagreed: in their the
third progress report they informed Mr. Powell and President Bush
that "they had not found any weapons of mass destruction."
Following the presentation, France, China and Russia suggested giving
the inspectors more time.
Now, it turns out that the best
intelligence available at the time was indeed the inspectors, and not
that portion of the US government along with the so-called "world intelligence
community" that concluded the certain existence of WMD.
Now, we know that President Bush and his
administration were negligent not to consider more carefully the
conclusion of the U.N. Inspectors, those experts on the scene and in the
best position to know. |
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Yet, even this Sunday on "Meet the
Press", Mr. Cheney continued to defend the invasion on the basis of
the threat of WMD, even
though none were found, because everyone thought Saddam Hussein had
WMD.
Remarkably, Mr. Cheney continued on
"Meet
the Press" to say that even if the CIA had told President Bush that
there were no weapons of mass destruction, President Bush would have
ordered the invasion of Iraq. |
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Not only did the Bush administration
appear to ignore the facts regarding the existence of WMD, consider in hindsight
other remarks at that time:
- Mohammed Aldouri, the Iraqi
ambassador to the United Nations, said his country has cooperated
with inspectors and proved that it does not possess weapons of mass
destruction. "An empty hand has nothing to give. You cannot give
what you don't have. If we do not possess such weapons, how can we
disarm ourselves of such weapons? Indeed, how can they be disarmed
when they don't exist?" Aldouri asked the council.
- U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld said Friday evening that if the United States opts to take
action against Iraq -- without the blessing of the United Nations --
it would have plenty of company. The coalition "will very likely be
as large or larger than the coalition that existed in the Gulf War,"
Rumsfeld said. "The United States will not go it alone. It will go
with a great many countries.
- He (Blix) told the council that
the inspections can succeed even without complete cooperation from
Baghdad -- contradicting what U.S., British and other officials have
said.
- "We have to date found no evidence
of ongoing prohibited nuclear activities in Iraq," ElBaradei said,
adding that there are "a number of issues under investigation, and
we're not in a position to reach a conclusion about them."
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