Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>Nothing said by Bush was "meant" to deceive anyone particularly the people of the USA and the people of Iraq<<<


If you make the case that Bush had no idea most of threats he pointed to from Iraq were bogus, then you instead make the case that Bush was criminally negligent. There were plenty of sources out there trying to help him tell the truth but as you seem to suggest, he chose to ignore them in favor of misleading the country.


""In his September 12, 2002, speech to the Security Council, President Bush claimed that Baghdad had made "several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." In early January, the IAEA contradicted Bush once again, arguing that the 81-millimeter aluminum tubes were "not directly suitable" for enriching uranium and were more likely meant for conventional artillery rockets. As David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector currently at the Institute for Science and International Security has explained, the 81-millimeter tubes, with their small diameter and thick walls, were poorly designed to enrich uranium. Indeed, he notes, "No one has ever ... produced significant amounts of uranium in a cascade of such machines." In fact, when Iraq was enriching uranium in the late '80s, it used tubes of an entirely different kind.

Experts inside the Bush administration itself agreed. While analysts at the CIA peddled the tubes-for-enriched-uranium theory, gas-centrifuge specialists at the Department of Energy (DOE) were skeptical. "I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," one DOE expert told The Guardian on October 9, 2002. But, undaunted, the president cited the aluminum tubes in his State of the Union speech."

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030324&s=trb032403