Fallguy?
I hope that no one here is under the illusion that a President, any President, writes his own speeches or checks the validity of all facts contained therein on his own. The white house guy acknowledges that similar claims originally contained in an October speech were taken out because of CIA reservations. He says he didn’t recall the October CIA reservations 4 months later when he reviewed the State of the Union. He takes responsibility for the fault of not having his memory triggered by the 16 words contained in the State of the Union.
Tenet takes the responsibility for the CIA failing to express their reservations to the white house again in January when they reviewed the speech.
Putting a little context to this, no one can make a claim that it was those 16 words that made us go to war with Iraq. The case was as compelling without those 16 words as it was with them. To me, the failure to find WMD yet is a bigger issue and more troubling about the competence of our intelligence services.
But with the Bush Administration saying these 16 words should not have been spoken, it does put the Brits in a tight spot. In fact, the actual statement by Bush is true (i.e. that British intelligence believes Iraq got uranium from Africa). ** To this day, the Brits stand by their belief. Bush is not being lambasted by Democrats for lieing. Rather, they are claiming that he should have said that our own intelligence services have reservations about this claim or belief. **
If British intelligence does believe Iraq got uranium from Africa, I don’t see where Blair can be considered a liar either. The intelligence may be bad, but that does not mean Blair lied. It is only if the British intelligence services did not reach the conclusion claimed (faulty or not) that Blair could be said to be a liar. Why the Brits seem to be standing behind their intelligence assessment while the US is expressing reservations about the assessment is certainly an interesting question.
So the President of the United States could be telling any old lie and not even realise it. Who really runs America? 
Come on Malik. Everyone knows that. ** It’s the friggin lawyers!!! **
P.S. Thankfully, I am one of the runners rather than the runnees. 
The President has the responsibility of assembling a team that will verify what information he receives and puts forth to the Public. If that teams fails to do so then the responsibility lies with the President.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
The President has the responsibility of assembling a team that will verify what information he receives and puts forth to the Public. If that teams fails to do so then the responsibility lies with the President.
[/QUOTE]
So Bush should apologise?
Niger puts the UK and USA on the spot…
The prime minister of Niger has denied claims his nation was involved in trying to sell uranium to Iraq and challenged his British counterpart Tony Blair to prove otherwise.](Yahoo News: Latest and Breaking News, Headlines, Live Updates, and More)
^ oh no! 
not niger!!! eeeek 
If there were WMD's to be found, they would have found them by now or would have found where they were destroyed.
…
Bush takes blame for nuclear claim
WASHINGTON, July 30 — President Bush on Wednesday accepted personal responsibility for a controversial portion of last winter’s State of the Union address in which he asserted that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material in Africa.I TAKE PERSONAL responsibility for everything I say, absolutely,” the president said at a White House news conference. Bush has been seeking to quell a controversy over a claim that has dogged his administration for weeks.
Bush had been asked before about the 16 disputed words in the State of the Union address, and had declined to take personal responsibility. Instead, CIA Director George Tenet did so, followed by a senior White House aide, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley.
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” the president said in his nationally televised address. But many CIA officials doubted the accuracy of the British intelligence — concerns that were not reflected in the decision to include the statement in the speech.
Can’t Find them.. Plant them](http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-8-2003_pg1_9)
According to a stunning report posted by a retired Navy Lt Commander and 28-year veteran of the Defense Department (DoD), the Bush administration’s assurance about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was based on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to “plant” WMDs inside the country. Nelda Rogers, the Pentagon whistleblower, claims the plan failed when the secret mission was mistakenly taken out by “friendly fire”, the Environmentalists Against War report.
still looking for WMD?
i think they should plant BLAIR in IRAQ and declare him WMD. i'm sure he won't mind at all :~)
Well it has turned from WMD which were ready to destroy the great American civilisation if they had not attacked immediately earlier this year to Iraq had a WMD programme and in future they will find a piece of paper on which some Iraqi offical had written WMD while trying to learn the alphabet and that will be praded through the streets of Washington and London as evidence that WMD’s existed. The nations of USA and UK will rejoice and the world will live in peace ever after.
The only reason action was imminent and we couldn't let the UN role play out is because all our excuses were unravelling to fast. Attack and let logic become "hindsight".
US tried to plant WMDs, failed: Pentagon whistleblower
Now the tune will change to - we didn’t need to find WMD at all. Infact, we KNEW before we invaded the country, that there weren’t any to begin with.
Iraq WMD search: Coming up short, Andrea Mitchell
Where are Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? Next week, the administration’s point man for the search, David Kay, returns to Washington with a status report.
THE HUNT for weapons of mass destruction, so far, has been a bust. Intelligence officials told NBC News there is no smoking gun. They thought they’d discovered a biological weapons lab, but it wasn’t one.
A massive CIA investigation, led by former U.N. weapons inspector Kay, is turning up only what former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein planned — not what he produced.
“He’s not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find — large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war,” said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector.
I was under the impression that they were going to try and sideline that report. Lets wait. I expect there will be some kind of pseudo-scandal at its time of release to take away the media's attention. You know there's not anything new in it because if there were Bush would have alluded to it in his speech last Sunday.
Instead he barely even mentioned WMD and cites have been scarce from all parts of the admin (tho that's also partly due to the 9-11 anniversary, time to bring back the "terror" aspect). It's interesting to note that while the American govt has almost entirely removed themselves from the WMD argument that the Brits are still struggling with it. Now that the inquiry is over there maybe they'll follow suit if they think they have the chance.
They found nothing…
Enough already! For](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/) a week or more I and others have been getting word that the long- awaited Kay Report – the systematic investigation into Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programs – might be delayed or never even issued at all.
The administration has been telling us for months that it would be released in mid-September. And now, of course, it’s mid-September.
Then a couple days ago NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that Kay’s survey had come up short, but implied that a report would indeed be issued when Kay returns to Washington this week.
But this morning the Sunday Times of London is reporting that “Britain and America have decided to delay indefinitely the publication of a full report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction after inspectors found no evidence that any such weapons exist.”
Let’s be honest: there’s no reason for delaying or refusing to issue this report, save for domestic political concerns in the US and Britain. None.
Do they need more time? Then they should take it. But fourteen hundred scientists, military and intelligence officials have been scouring the country for four months and interrogating most of the Iraqi government officials and scientists involved in weapons procurement and research. That’s more than long enough to produce a preliminary report. Indeed, it appears that Kay is delivering a report to George Tenet this week. The only question is whether it is published.
This isn’t the roll-out of a new government program or a press campaign that you can start or stop depending on which way the political winds happening to be blowing. This is the official US-UK government investigation in to the reason we invaded and occupied Iraq. Will the administration be embarrassed? No doubt. But they won’t be the only ones. Everyone in the US intelligence community thought the Iraqis maintained some WMD capacity. The irony of this whole mess is that the White House took the solid evidence of Iraq’s continued illicit weapons programs and hyped them all out of proportion to get the country into war, only to find out that even the ‘solid evidence’ turns out to have been false or greatly exaggerated.
Are there ‘sources and methods’ issues involved in releasing the report to the public? Maybe. And of course any report could be redacted. But the ‘sources and methods’ issue must be at least greatly diminished now since the Iraqi government no longer exists.
Here’s the bottom line: the only reason for supressing the Kay Report is to game and stymie the political debate within the United States. That’s unacceptable. Congress should demand the release of Kay’s report – even if redacted in some form. No more game playing. Let the chips fall where they may.
Iraq ‘shelved nuclear plans’
By Jon Leyne
BBC correspondent in Washington
Iraq’s nuclear programme may have been disbanded in 1991
New evidence acquired by the Washington Post newspaper suggests that Iraq made no attempt to restart its nuclear programme following the first Gulf War in 1991.
It follows the report presented by the weapons inspector David Kay earlier this month who admitted they had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The information obtained by the newspaper suggests there is no evidence of any renewed nuclear programme in Iraq in the last 12 years.
Perhaps even more seriously, the evidence suggests that the Bush administration did not take its own warnings very seriously either.
Rocket-making
The papers interviewed a senior Australian weapons inspector, Brigadier Stephen Meekin, as well as a number of other unnamed inspectors from the United States and Britain.
Kay: Inspectors did not find WMD
They all say that a set of aluminium tubes produced as the main evidence of Iraq’s nuclear programme were actually for making rockets.
The inspectors point out there has been no attempt to seize or destroy the tubes, something that might be expected if they could indeed be used for making nuclear weapons.
The Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted that the purpose of the tubes was still being discussed, but he is now facing more questions about his own comments from early in 2001 when he said Iraq had not developed a significant capability of weapons of mass destruction.
no WMD, no nuclear weapons, no nothing then why the hell USA went after iraq?
oho… You still don’t know? Open your eyes. It was Operation Iraq Liberation. Don’t you know - it was to give the gifts of liberty, peace and democracy… can’t you see how peaceful Iraq has become, minus the one or two deadly incidents each day for the past three months.