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A Daily Chronicle of Bush Administration Distortion January 27, 2004
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Bush Admits Misleading on WMD



Less than a year after declaring there was "no doubt the Iraqi regime continues to possess the most lethal weapons ever devised,"1 President Bush and the White House began to openly "back away from its WMD assertions today."2 The New York Times reported, "White House officials are no longer asserting that stockpiles of banned weapons would eventually be found" after their weapons inspector, David Kay said he "doesn't think [WMD] existed" after the 1991 Gulf War.3

The backtracking is reverberating throughout the Bush administration. While Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations last year that "our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent,"4 he said this weekend that it could actually be "zero tons."5 Powell told the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq "can produce anthrax," that it might "have produced 25,000 liters" and showed a video of an Iraqi plane that dumping "2,000 liters of simulated anthrax" as proof, but he now says they might have produced no anthrax at all.6

Similarly, Vice President Dick Cheney, said before the war, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," but now says the war was about Iraq's "efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."7 The vice president also cited a classified report8 his own Administration has labeled "inaccurate" as the "best source" of proof that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked.9

In response, the Administration is beginning to blame the intelligence community for the WMD fiasco, and planning an internal "review of prewar intelligence."10 Administration ally Kay concurred, arguing "I think the intelligence community owes the president [an apology] rather than the president owing the American people."11 Despite Mr. Kay's assertions, experts who knew the record of U.N. inspections knew that finding no WMD "was always a strong possibility . . .but Bush administration officials never acknowledged it."12

Earlier reporting found that senior Administration officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence,"13 and the White House set up a separate intelligence apparatus, the "Office of Special Plans," to "cherry-pick intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest."14 For example, the president's well-known declaration in last year's State of the Union, asserting that Iraq "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,"15 remained despite CIA demands to remove such allegations from his speech16.

Sources:
  1. Presidential Remarks, 03/17/2003.
  2. "White House Shows Less Certainty Now on Iraq's Arms", New York Times, 01/27/2004.
  3. "Kay: No evidence Iraq stockpiled WMDs", CNN, 01/26/2004.
  4. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, 02/05/2003.
  5. "5 GIs Die In Iraq Attacks", CBS News, 01/24/2004.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Remarks by the Vice President to Italian Leaders, 01/26/2004.
  8. "Critics blast Cheney for linking al Qaeda to Iraq", Scripps Howard News Service, 01/23/2004.
  9. DOD Statement, 11/15/2003.
  10. "White House to Review Prewar Intelligence on Iraqi Arms, New York Times, 01/26/2004.
  11. "Kay wants inquiry on weapons estimates", Charlotte Observer, 01/26/2004.
  12. "`They don't exist': Kay's words may boost global teamwork on arms control", Boston Globe, 01/25/2004.
  13. "The Stovepipe" The New Yorker, 10/27/2003.
  14. "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong", The Atlantic Monthly, January 2004.
  15. State of the Union, 01/28/2003.
  16. "White House: CIA questioned State of the Union address", Miami Herald, 07/23/2003.



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