THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
BUSH CLAIMS TO NEVER SAY IRAQ WAS "IMMINENT THREAT"
Wed Jan 28 18:42:36 2004
64.140.158.29

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THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2123413&l=16186  >
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BUSH CLAIMS TO NEVER SAY IRAQ WAS "IMMINENT THREAT"

Facing mounting pressure over charges that the White House deliberately
misled the American people about Iraq's WMD, President Bush is now claiming
that U.N. weapons inspectors were not allowed into Iraq before the war.
Yesterday, the president said, Iraq "chose defiance. It was [Saddam's]
choice to make, and he did not let us in."

But U.N. weapons inspections led by Hans Blix began on November 27th, 2003,
as noted by the State Department at the time. Over the course of the next
five months, those inspections found "little more than 'debris'" from a WMD
program that had long since been destroyed. The weapons inspectors were
forced to leave when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. President Bush then
"refused to permit the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq."

When asked about the issue yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan
claimed the entire WMD issue was unimportant because the Bush Administration
had never said Iraq was a threat. He said, "the media have chosen to use the
word 'imminent'" to describe the Iraqi "threat" - not the Bush
Administration.

But the record shows the Administration repeatedly said Iraq was an
"imminent threat." On May 7th, less than a week after the president
announced the end of major combat operations, White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer was asked, "Didn't we go to war because we said WMD were a direct
and imminent threat to the U.S.?" He replied, "Absolutely." Similarly, in
November 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "I would look you
in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself
this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent
threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six
months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent
threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a
month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you
must do something?" Most notably, Vice President Cheney said two days after
President Bush's 2003 State of the Union that Saddam Hussein "threatens the
United States of America."

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