NY TIMES
BUSH ARGUMENT IS LAUGHABLE, WMD!
Tue Jul 15 13:47:04 2003
208.152.73.155

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/opinion/15TUE2.html?th

Uranium Quicksand

In trying to defend the indefensible in its depiction of Iraq's nuclear
weapons program, the Bush administration is now making a legalistic
argument that would be laughable if the matter were not so serious.
Because the British government believed in January that Iraq had been
trying to import large quantities of uranium from Africa, top
administration officials are saying, Mr. Bush was technically correct
when he cited the British concerns in the State of the Union address.
The explanation conveniently glosses over the fact that long before Mr.
Bush delivered the speech on Jan. 28, American intelligence officials
had concluded that the British charge was probably unreliable.

The British-made-us-do-it defense might be more compelling if London had
a better track record when it came to assessing Iraq's unconventional
weapons programs. In fact, parts of the British dossier on Iraq's arms
that was published with great fanfare in February were lifted verbatim
from unsubstantiated Internet sources. Prime Minister Tony Blair's
warning last September that front-line Iraqi military forces could
launch chemical or biological weapons on short notice proved to be
embarrassingly misinformed once the war in Iraq began.

George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was wary enough of
the uranium report that he advised the White House last October to
remove a reference about it from a speech Mr. Bush was planning to
deliver in Cincinnati. It was dropped. Secretary of State Colin Powell
found the supporting evidence so questionable he choose not to cite the
accusation in his presentation about Iraq to the United Nations Security
Council in February.

Yet the charge still found its way into the State of the Union speech.
Mr. Tenet has accepted blame for the C.I.A.'s failure to tell the White
House to yank it, but the real question is why the White House put it in
the address - and kept it there - long after it had been debunked. The
decision to attribute it to British intelligence was clearly a desperate
effort to get around the objections that had been raised by the C.I.A.
and other American intelligence agencies. By clinging to that weak
justification, the White House is only compounding its mistake. The
honorable response at this point would be to concede the error and
apologize to the American people.
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• Editorial: Grim news from Iraq — daily times, Tue Jul 15 16:15