Those 16 Words Still Smell (Dennis Hans, DU front page)

[Brotherjohn]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/07/24_16words.html

Maybe this has been posted on, and maybe it's preaching to the choir, but I just wanted to kick Dennis Hans' excellent and concise rebuttal to those who are now attempting to exonerate Bush and the "16 words" (and by proxy his entire case for war).

Hans makes several excellent points, among which are:

- The entire paragraph of the SOTU was misleading (not to mention much of the rest of the address itself), not just the infamous "16 words".

- There is STILL no reliable evidence that the "16 words" claim is true , despite recent claims to the contrary. He and others, such as David Corn in his "Nation" articles (and I believe Josh Marshall in his talkingpointsmemo.com blog), address this very well.

- Questions about the intelligence the Bush White House was using to make the case for war were public knowledge at the time. Most people forget (or never knew) this because most people did not read beyond the headlines. From the IAEA reports which often directly contradicted Bush's claims to newspaper stories in papers such as the Washington Post (you know, where Bush lives) citing substantial disagreements about the aluminum tubes just days before the SOTU. Bush would have us now believe that the intelligence was thought to be solid at the time, and he had no choice. But questions about the intelligence were rampant and public, and they were so at that time.

- The U.S. and the British were/are themselves in violation of Resolution 1441 by failing to turn over evidence to the IAEA concerning their accusations that Iraq had tried to by uranium. After months of having the (now known forged) documents in their possession, the U.S. finally gave these documents to the IAEA just a few days before the war, at which point they were conclusively determined to be forgeries within a day. As for the last remaining "evidence", an unsubstantiated claim by British intel from an unnamed source, well, that has yet to be revealed to anyone, which to me means that Britain is STILL in violation of Resolution 1441.

- The statement heading the infamous paragraph of the SOTU detailing the alleged Iraqi nuclear threat had NO relevance whatsoever to 2003, and applied to what the IAEA found after the Gulf War, in 1991 ("The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.") Bush felt comfortable citing (more properly, "cherry picking") and praising IAEA evidence throughout the SOTU. Yet he forgot to mention that the very same IAEA had concluded that the aluminum tubes were likely NOT for uranium enrichment and likely for just what the Iraqi's were claiming. He forgot to mention that the IAEA had so far found "No evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities", and expected "to be able, within the next few months... to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programme." He also conveniently forgot to mention (while implying a very current and dangerous threat) that the WMD programs found "in the 1990s" pre-dated the Gulf War in 1991 and were subsequently determined by the IAEA to have been completely dismantled.

Bush "forgot" to mention a lot. But a lie of omission is a lie nonetheless.

There is much more, but I just wanted to give this a kick. It amazes me to this day that Bush defenders say things like "everyone thought they had weapons" and "Bush was acting on solid intelligence". It was common knowledge at the time that neither of things were true.