Report raps ex-White House pair on Iraq claims

[Americanhero1]

WASHINGTON – Former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales misled Congress when he claimed the CIA in 2002 approved information that ended up in the 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq's alleged effort to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program, a House Democrat said Thursday.

In a memo to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which he chairs, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., also expressed skepticism about assertions by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that she was unaware of the CIA's doubts about the claim before President George W. Bush's speech.

The committee's Republicans do not endorse Waxman's report, said Frederick Hill, press secretary for Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the committee's top Republican.

Iraq's alleged attempt to buy uranium was one of the justifications for the Bush administration's decision to go to war. The claim has since been repudiated.

Waxman said his investigation showed the CIA had warned at least four National Security Council officials not to allow Bush, in three speeches in 2002, to cite questionable intelligence that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium. The sentences were stripped out of those speeches but made it into the State of the Union address.

In a 2004 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gonzales said the CIA had orally approved the inclusion of the claim in two 2002 speeches, although it did not appear in the final drafts. Gonzales later become attorney general.

Former CIA Director George Tenet wrote at length in his memoir about three memos the CIA had sent to the White House explaining why it doubted the claim and believed it should not be included in the speeches.

In July 2003, Rice acknowledged that the claim should not have made it into the speech based on what she had learned in the months since the State of the Union.

Waxman said Gonzales, and Rice to a lesser degree, misled the public and Congress.

Rice "asserted publicly she knew nothing about any doubts the CIA had raised about this claim prior too the 2003 State of the Union address," according to the memo. Gonzales "asserted to the Senate — on her behalf — that the CIA approved the use of this claim in several presidential speeches."

The Waxman memo said the evidence raises "serious questions about the veracity of the assertions that Mr. Gonzales made to Congress on behalf of Dr. Rice about a key part of the President's case for going to war in Iraq."

The Democrat's report is based largely on the testimony of a former CIA official and Obama transition adviser, Jami Miscik, who was deputy director of intelligence at the CIA. Miscik told the committee that in 2002 she spoke personally with Rice to dissuade her from allowing the claim to be in a speech.

Miscik was interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for its separate 2004 report on prewar intelligence and gave a different account, a Senate official said. That report blamed poor CIA management for the information's use in the State of the Union, saying there was no reliable process for approving the use of intelligence in presidential speeches.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081219/ap_on_go_co/iraq_cia

[muman613]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2006/06/22/report-hundreds-wmds-iraq/

WASHINGTON--

The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213

New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.

Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.

But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.

"There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Sounds like a last ditch effort of the Democraps to withdraw in disgrace like they always wanted to... Such slimeballs the Democrats turned out to be.