Back to articles and reviews on Uncovered: The War on Iraq
Chas Freeman | George W. Bush | Richard Clarke | Mel Goodman | Ray McGovern | John Brady Kiesling | Robert Baer | Milt Bearden | Condeleezza Rice | David Albright | John Dean | Peter Zimmerman | Senator Bob Graham Joe Wilson | Scott Ritter | Patrick Eddington | Larry Johnson | Donald Rumsfeld | Ari Fleisher | Colin Powell | Hans Blix | Dick Cheney | David Kay | Senator Ted Kennedy | Karen Kwiatkowski | Rand Beers | David MacMichael
CHAS FREEMAN
I don't think it is an accident at all that so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious, misleading, deliberately so.
CHAS FREEMAN
Well the war really had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, there was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and the secular regime there and the religious fanatics who perpetrated 9/11.
CHAS FREEMAN
Ironically the major effect of the invasion of Iraq, in terms of weapons of mass destruction, has been to show that the inspectors were right all along.
CHAS FREEMAN
I don't think it is an accident at all that so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious, misleading, deliberately so.
CHAS FREEMAN
The only real connection is that having invaded Iraq we are likely to make it a focus of terrorism. We are likely to produce what the president has said Iraq represents, mainly the central battlefield in the war on terrorism. Why? Because we've sent a lot of Americans into a place where they're sitting ducks for people who think the only good American is a dead one.
CHAS FREEMAN
Well I don't think it's patriotic to stand by and remain silent while your country stumbles into disaster.
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JOURNALIST
Is U.S. credibility on the line over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? GEORGE W. BUSH
Uh, I'm not sure exactly what that means.
GEORGE W. BUSH
We found the weapons of mass destruction. Uh, you know, we found biological laboratories.
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RICHARD CLARKE
“…Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq."
RICHARD CLARKE
They wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying ‘We've looked at this issue for years, there's just no connection.'
RICHARD CLARKE
Osama bin Ladin had been saying for years, America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He'd been saying this, this is part of his propaganda. So what do we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us.
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MEL GOODMAN
It was clear that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program.
MEL GOODMAN
Iraq, and we have very good intelligence on this, was not part of the picture of terrorism before we invaded.
MEL GOODMAN
It was phony evidence, it was based on intelligence we had from Iraqi exiles who wanted this country to attack Iraq so these people could then take over in Baghdad and establish their own regime.
MEL GOODMAN
Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels and I think these are scoundrels. They have no argument now, they have no defense for what they did. The country is in a terrible international security situation that I think is perilous. So they're attacking the patriotism of others.
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RAY MCGOVERN
The evidence was simply not there.
RAY MCGOVERN VO
It was a bizarre warping of the intelligence process and they thought they were going to get away with it because who was going to see the classified version?
RAY MCGOVERN
The ties with Al Qaeda was just a scare tactic to exploit the trauma, the very real trauma, that the American people have felt ever since 9/11 and to associate that trauma with Iraq. As you know from the polls, most Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that was a very successful and very deliberate and very unethical and immoral operation on the part of the P.R. people of this administration.
RAY MCGOVERN
If there's no weapons of mass destruction, which there aren't. If there's no tie to Al-Qaeda, which there's not, maybe now there are. Then why did we go to war.
RAY MCGOVERN
George Tenet's analysts had spent a year and a half of torturous investigation, torturous analysis, to see if there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. They found none.
RAY MCGOVERN
It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true. Where are all these weapons? Where is all this VX? Where is all the anthrax?
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JOHN BRADY KIESLING
They were not given the opportunity to speak because no one wanted to hear what they said.
JOHN BRADY KIESLING
Every checkable piece of that intelligence that has come to public notice has proven to be false or at least self-serving in the extreme.
JOHN BRADY KIESLING
For me, America is this amazing land of opportunity, of beauty, of idealism, of hope. It is a beacon to the world. It's a place of fantastic people and what infuriates me more than anything else is that this administration has systematically slandered, libeled, blackened the image of America to our friends and allies around the world.
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ROBERT BAER
I was in chief of collecting information on Iraq through the mid-nineties. I know what we had, and what we didn't have, and I'm here to tell you there was no information.
ROBERT BAER
So you had this circular reporting and you had the New York Times admitting that it was using one source for all of its information about weapons of mass destruction.
ROBERT BAER
And on a lot of these stories the journalists didn't want to look into it because the editors told them to run with it, we're going to be supportive of the administration, it's the patriotic thing to do.
ROBERT BAER
It was a state that was on the verge of failure, now it is a failed state. Failed states cause terrorism…
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MILT BEARDEN
Preemptive war by its very nature is something that is entirely new to the United States of America and to what we call the Western Alliance.
MILT BEARDEN
We all know that the documentation on yellowcake from Niger was faked, but why doesn't anybody say who did it? Who faked the document…
MILT BEARDEN
The question remains, who did the document? Who forged the document? And why?
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CONDOLEEZZA RICE
It simply makes no sense to wait any longer.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.
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DAVID ALBRIGHT
It was a prosecutor making a case, using what benefited his case, ignoring evidence that would undermine his case, and there was no defense attorney to give us the other side.
DAVID ALBRIGHT
Everyone in Washington was believing them. And I thought people had really, somehow checked out of reality in order to go to war. That it was a war fever that had taken over.
DAVID ALBRIGHT
The Bush Administration officials either routinely said or tried to give the impression that if Iraq had not fully accounted for all of a certain item related to chemical or biological weapons, then it must be there. And that's not at all what the inspectors said or found.
DAVID ALBRIGHT
I saw it as a deliberate attempt to take information, selectively take information, and try to basically say that Iraq poses an imminent nuclear threat and therefore action is absolutely necessary and I felt that was absolutely wrong.
DAVID ALBRIGHT
The administration showed photos of nuclear or former nuclear weapons sites in Iraq, pre-1991 nuclear weapons sites, claimed the new construction showed that they were ongoing nuclear weapons sites, complete nonsense.
DAVID ALBRIGHT
I think there was on the part of the media too much of getting into the upcoming of the war and not enough look at: “ Do we need to go to war?”
DAVID ALBRIGHT
The excitement was to make the case to go to war and that was the controversy the media loved. You know, it was the titillation of a WMD hitting us, not the titillation of conflict of attacking the administration.
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JOHN DEAN
Distorted beliefs, estimates and guesstimates that it appears he was misleading the public and the Congress.
JOHN DEAN
So it was a very vengeful act against the ambassador to try to hurt him by hurting his wife's career if not wishing her physical damage. I've never seen a dirty trick that could be a hit.
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PETER ZIMMERMAN
Well if you made it 12 years ago and it had a shelf life of two months, it may not be safe to drink, but it isn't sarin nerve gas any longer. And there's no way the agency could not have known that.
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SENATOR BOB GRAHAM
Who was it that asked for this review of the Niger nuclear material question? It was the Vice President.
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JOE WILSON
…a couple of senior administration officials leaked to Bob Novak that my wife was a CIA operative involved in the weapons of mass destruction business at the CIA.
JOE WILSON
What you're doing when you expose a CIA officer, of any name, you're basically taking their entire career and flushing it down the toilet.
JOE WILSON
A president of the United States and an administration that has come to office on a platform of restoring dignity and honor to the White House, what they did was neither dignified nor was it terribly honorable, nor was it germane to the issue at hand.
JOE WILSON
We owe our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and our marines, nothing less before we send them to battle.
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SCOTT RITTER
There were never any chemical weapons in that facility, I'm intimately familiar with that facility. I've inspected it a number of times…
SCOTT RITTER
The UN weapons inspectors knew that the truck shown by Colin Powell in those photographs were fire trucks, not decontamination trucks.
SCOTT RITTER
These mobile labs have now been shown to be nothing more than hydrogen generation facilities.
SCOTT RITTER
When you take a look at the mobile labs that Colin Powell discussed, he didn't put up photographs of these facilities; he put up artist's renditions of these facilities. Why? Because we have no proof they exist.
SCOTT RITTER
The media is culpable for the misleading of the American public. They bought into the Bush Administrations rhetoric.
SCOTT RITTER
I don't believe the mainstream media acted responsibly in regards to Iraq. You know, I was belittled, I was called a traitor, I was called crazy. Paula Zahn of CNN accused me of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid for making accurate statements in response to aluminum tubes.
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PATRICK EDDINGTON
The inspection regime worked. It was the most intrusive inspection regime in history and it worked. And at the end of the day that's another reason we went to war for nothing.
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LARRY JOHNSON
Former State Dept., Counter Terrorism
The media is supposed to be the Fourth Estate but they decided to completely climb into bed with the administration on this.
LARRY JOHNSON
I'm one of the ones who drank the Kool-Aid. But early on I felt there was some dangers going into the war and I tried to get an Op-Ed into the various major newspapers and the word that kept coming back was: “ nobody wants to hear this because we're going to war."
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DONALD RUMSFELD
His regime has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons and let there be no doubt about it.
DONALD RUMSFELD
We know where they are, they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
DONALD RUMSFELD
I don't know anybody that I can think of that has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons.
DONALD RUMSFLED
There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it and that's just a fact.
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ARI FLEISHER
We know for a fact there are weapons there.
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COLIN POWELL
Everybody knows that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
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HANS BLIX
It is somewhat puzzling, I think, that you can have a hundred percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence and zero certainty about where they are.
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DICK CHENEY
And we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.
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DAVID KAY
We are determined to take this apart. We have a tremendous group of dedicated American men and women involved in this, the best assets of the intelligence community can provide.
DAVID KAY
And unlike pre-war intelligence we don't require someone just to say something, we actually need the physical evidence.
DAVID KAY
…one of the first things that worried me was we had a big army running through Iraq in March and April. WMD was not used against them. Uh, nor was it found, that's sort of remarkable if they had large stockpiles.
DAVID KAY
Around the weapons programs, if a weapons program exist, you are going to find people, people engaged in the production, the technology, engineering and design. People involved in protecting the weapons, people prepared in moving them, and people involved in preparing to use the weapons. We found none of that.
DAVID KAY
Secret societies have their own rules. Secret societies generally don't fell an obligation to openly and democratically communicate.
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SENATOR TED KENNEDY
When you talk about a mushroom cloud how much more imminent threat could there be.
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KAREN KWIATKOWSKI
I felt that in my last year in the Pentagon, I felt that there was a great deal of contempt for the constraint on the government that our constitution lays out. And I also felt that there was an contempt for the constitution…
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RAND BEERS
It is fair to say that the Iraq war was a diversion from the war on terrorism.
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DAVID MACMICHAEL
Mark Twain's definition of patriotism is- Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.
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