U.S. OFFICIAL: WHITE HOUSE “TWISTED” IRAQ NUKE INTEL

“Did the Bush admin­is­tra­tion manip­u­late intel­li­gence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons pro­grams to jus­tify an inva­sion of Iraq?” Joseph Wilson, the for­mer ambas­sador to Gabon, asks in a Sunday New York Times op-​​ed.
“Based on my expe­ri­ence with the admin­is­tra­tion in the months lead­ing up to the war, I have lit­tle choice but to con­clude that some of the intel­li­gence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons pro­gram was twisted to exag­ger­ate the Iraqi threat.“
In 2002, Wilson was asked by the CIA to check out claims that ura­nium from Niger has some­how ended up in Saddam’s hands. Wilson did just that, and found that the asser­tions were bogus; Niger’s ura­nium indus­try was just too tightly-​​controlled, he con­cluded.
But Wilson was ignored, it seems. The Bush admin­si­tra­tion high­lighted the Niger case as a big-​​time exam­ple of Saddam’s push to build nuclear weapons. admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials even bran­dished doc­u­ments that “proved” the Niger ura­nium trans­fers. Those papers were later shown to obvi­ous forgeries.

July 6th, 2003 | Nukes | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.