Gunny Freedom needs source help again - justification for Iraq

[GunnyFreedom]

Please help me source the following facts....

FACT: UN Inspection teams knew that Iraq had no WMD's prior to the Iraq invasion, and had openly reported that fact

On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix's last report to the UN security Council prior to the US led invasion of Iraq, described Iraq as actively and proactively cooperating with UNMOVIC, though not necessarily in all areas of relevance and had been frequently uncooperative in the past, but that it was within months of resolving key remaining disarmament tasks. http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm and said further that Iraq was cooperating fully with the inspection teams, and that the UN Weapons inspectors were within months of resolving ALL the remaining disarmament questions. ie - checking the boxes, dotting the 'i's and crossing the t's

FACT: US Intelligence was not analyzed as a whole, but cherry-picked to produce a justification to go to war.



FACT: Iraq never attempted to obtain enriched uranium from Niger or anywhere else.



FACT: The purported document bearing evidence of Iraq's attempt to obtain enriched uranium from Niger was a forgery.



FACT: GWB used the threat of "a nuclear 9/11" to justify the invasion of Iraq.



FACT: the threat was EXTREMELY exaggerated by the Bush administration in order to justify invading a nation who had nothing to do with 9/11, had never attacked us, had never threatened us, had no WMD's and had not made any attempt to obtain nuclear weapons.

[Anti Federalist]

Give me few minutes Gunny, getting it now.

[Anti Federalist]

FACT: US Intelligence was not analyzed as a whole, but cherry-picked to produce a justification to go to war.

Finding Facts to Fit Premises -

Maloof and Wurmser set up shop in a small room on the third floor of the Pentagon, where they set about developing a “matrix” that charts connections between terrorist organizations and their support infrastructures, including support systems within nations themselves. Both men have security clearances, so they are able to draw data from both raw and finished intelligence products available through the Pentagon’s classified computer system. More highly classified intelligence is secured by Maloof from his previous office. He will later recall, “We scoured what we could get up to the secret level, but we kept getting blocked when we tried to get more sensitive materials. I would go back to my office, do a pull and bring it in.” George Packer will later describe their process, writing, “Wurmser and Maloof were working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it.”

CTEG’s activities cause tension within the intelligence community. Critics claim that its members manipulate and distort intelligence, “cherry-picking” bits of information that support their preconceived conclusions. Although the State Department’s own intelligence outfit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), is supposed to have access to all intelligence materials circulating through the government, INR chief Greg Thielmann later says, “I didn’t know about its [CTEG’s] existence. They were cherry-picking intelligence and packaging it for [Vice President] Cheney and [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld to take to the president. That’s the kind of rogue operation that peer review is intended to prevent.” A defense official later adds, “There is a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Defense Department and the intelligence community, to include its own Defense Intelligence Agency.

Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn’t support their own preconceived conclusions. The CIA is enemy territory, as far are they’re concerned.” Wurmser and Maloof’s “matrix” leads them to conclude that Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other groups with conflicting ideologies and objectives are allowing these differences to fall to the wayside as they discover their shared hatred of the US. The group’s research also leads them to believe that al-Qaeda has a presence in such places as Latin American. For weeks, the unit will attempt to uncover evidence tying Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, a theory advocated by both Feith and Wolfowitz. [Washington Times, 1/14/2002; New York Times, 10/24/2002; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Los Angeles Times, 2/8/2004; Quarterly Journal of Speech, 5/2006 ]

http://www.historycommons.org/searchResults.jsp?project=911_project&searchtext=Iraq+pre+war+intel&events=on&entities=off&articles=off&topics=off&timelines=off&projects=off&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=Go

[Anti Federalist]

FACT: Iraq never attempted to obtain enriched uranium from Niger or anywhere else.

Numerous embedded links in both these stories. - AF

The London Daily Telegraph reports that it has obtained a copy of a memo purportedly written to Saddam Hussein by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, describing a three-day “work program” Atta participated in at Abu Nidal’s base in Baghdad. The memo, dated July 1, 2001, also includes a report about a shipment sent to Iraq by way of Libya and Syria. The Telegraph asserts that the shipment is “believed to be uranium.” Future Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi backs the validity of the document. [Daily Telegraph, 12/14/2003]

But Newsweek quickly reports that the document is probably a fabrication, citing both the FBI’s detailed Atta timeline and a document expert who, amongst other things, distrusts an unrelated second “item” on the same document, which supports a discredited claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. [Newsweek, 12/17/2003] Very few media outlets pick up the Telegraph’s story. It will later be revealed that many forged documents purporting a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda were left in places for US troops to find (see Shortly After April 9, 2003).

http://www.historycommons.org/searchResults.jsp?searchtext=Iraq+Niger+Uranium&events=on&entities=on&articles=on&topics=on&timelines=on&projects=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=Go&timeline=complete_911_timeline

The case for war was made on many grounds, but WMD was surely the most convincing, at least to the general public. Tony Blair regaled the Brits with tales of how Saddam could order the deployment of terror weapons "within 45 minutes," and Bush, not to be outdone, declared that the contiental U.S. was in danger from unmanned Iraqi drones capable of wreaking destruction on American cities. Clouds of deadly anthrax, chemical weapons, and other bioengineered horrors were conjured by the War Party as imminent threats, but the argument that Saddam was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons was the trump card in the President's deck, and he played it in his 2003 state of the union address

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

This assertion that the U.S. had to act to avert a nuclear catastrophe was echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said of Saddam on the eve of war

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Three months later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was backpedaling as fast as he could:

"I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons."

Yet Cheney's definitive assertion was the culmination of a long string of public statements by the President and his top officials that Saddam could acquire and deploy nukes in the near future. In a Cincinnati speech last year, Bush averred that Saddam "is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon," a line of argument prefigured by Condoleeza Rice's pronouncement on CNN the day after the first anniversary of 9/11:

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

It turns out that the only smoking gun is the one left in the hands of the President after he shot off his mouth and propounded what the White House now acknowledges was inaccurate information. But who supplied the ammunition? What was the source of the intelligence that convinced White House speechwriters to include the reference to uranium?

The aluminum tubes were soon shown to be unsuited to producing nuclear materials. But this uranium business is particularly embarrassing for the President, who faces a rising chorus of questions about the course and conduct of the continuing war in Iraq, since the whole thing turns out to have been a crude hoax.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3737

[Anti Federalist]

FACT: The purported document bearing evidence of Iraq's attempt to obtain enriched uranium from Niger was a forgery.

Many, many source documents in the footnote section - AF

The Niger uranium forgeries refers to falsified classified documents initially revealed by Italian intelligence. These documents depict an attempt by the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase "yellowcake" uranium ore from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating what they called weapons of mass destruction, referred to as WMD, in defiance of the United Nations Iraq sanctions.

President George W. Bush cited the documents in a sixteen-word sentence in the January 2003 State of the Union; when the International Atomic Energy Agency later determined the documents were forged and the U.S. government declassified a 2002 Central Intelligence Agency report casting doubt on the documents' veracity, the administration was criticized by many for its decision to include the sentence. See "Sixteen Words Controversy" below.

Yellowcake, a mixture of different uranium oxides and other uranium compounds, is the leachant obtained from uranium ore in the early stages of refinement. At this stage the natural isotopes of uranium are present in their natural ratios. After refinement, further processing, isotopic separation is needed to make depleted uranium or enriched uranium for use in a nuclear reactor or a nuclear weapon.

U.S. intelligence officials received the forged documents on October 7, 2002, the same day President Bush launched a new hard-line public relations campaign targeted to increase public support for the Iraq war. He kicked off the campaign with a speech in Cincinatti, Ohio, in which he referenced Hussein's seemingly apparent growing nuclear capabilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A line in President Bush's State of the Union address alleging that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa should never have been included in the speech, CIA Director George Tenet said Friday.

In a statement released Friday evening, Tenet said that the CIA had seen and approved the speech before it was delivered, and he took responsibility for the mistake.

"The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," he said.

The CIA director also said, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency."

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/11/sprj.irq.wmdspeech/

Course' Tenent went on to receive the Congressional Medal Of Freedom - wtf?

[Anti Federalist]

FACT: GWB used the threat of "a nuclear 9/11" to justify the invasion of Iraq.



FACT: the threat was EXTREMELY exaggerated by the Bush administration in order to justify invading a nation who had nothing to do with 9/11, had never attacked us, had never threatened us, had no WMD's and had not made any attempt to obtain nuclear weapons.

Sources posted above will confirm these two.

I have lots more, but hope that helps Gunny.

[GunnyFreedom]

Wow, thanks so much AF -- you rock!

This is awesome, and way faster than I had anticipated. I'm still not finished drafting my reply that these are needed for!

[Anti Federalist]

Wow, thanks so much AF -- you rock!

This is awesome, and way faster than I had anticipated. I'm still not finished drafting my reply that these are needed for!

More than welcome sir, glad to be of help.:)