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White House Exaggerated Iraq Threat, Kennedy Says By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) charged the Bush administration Friday with misrepresenting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and consequently justify war (see GSN, March 5). In a speech hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Kennedy said U.S. President George W. Bush engaged “in pure unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam’s ability to provide nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda justified immediate war.” To date, the Iraq Survey Group — the unit searching for evidence of Iraqi WMD efforts — has found no large-scale WMD stockpiles. The issue of prewar Iraq intelligence is the focus of inquiries by the House and Senate intelligence committees and a planned examination to be conducted by an independent commission. In what he described as “an indictment” of the Bush administration “in its own words,” Kennedy cited claims made by Bush and his senior officials before the war that he said went beyond the available intelligence at the time. Kennedy quoted both Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice as having warned prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom that, without action, the proof that Hussein was seeking to develop nuclear weapons could be “a mushroom cloud.” He also quoted Bush as having described prewar Iraq as a “unique and urgent threat” and as a “grave threat.” “Nuclear weapons. Mushroom cloud. Unique and urgent threat. Real and dangerous threat. Grave threat. This was the administration’s rallying cry for war. But those were not the words of the intelligence community. The community realized that Saddam was a threat, but it never suggested the threat was imminent or immediate or urgent,” Kennedy said. In a book set to go on sale tomorrow, former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix also said that Bush, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, probably knew he was exaggerating the threat posed by prewar Iraq, according to Reuters. Reuters quoted Blix as stating in his book, Disarming Iraq — The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, that it was “probable that the governments were conscious that they were exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the political support they would not otherwise have had.” “I am not suggesting that Blair and Bush spoke in bad faith, but I am suggesting that it would not have taken much critical thinking on their own part or the part of their close advisers to prevent statements that misled the public,” Blix wrote (see GSN story today). The charges leveled by Kennedy and Blix follow comments made earlier last week by former U.S. chief weapons inspector David Kay, who said in an interview with the London Guardian that Bush should publicly acknowledge the errors in prewar intelligence on Iraq (see GSN, March 3). In his speech Friday, Kennedy also criticized CIA Director George Tenet for failing to correct senior Bush administration officials in their public assessments of Iraqi WMD efforts. In a speech last month at Georgetown University, Tenet said CIA analysts never described prewar Iraq as an “imminent” threat (see GSN, Feb. 5). “Why wasn’t CIA Director Tenet correcting the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense a year ago, when it could have made a difference, when it could have prevented a needless war, when it could have saved so many lives?” Kennedy said. He called on Tenet to use a scheduled appearance this week before the Senate Armed Services Committee to say “plainly” whether he believes the Bush administration misused intelligence to build support for war. Ultimately, the invasion of Iraq was based more on domestic political concerns than on a possible threat to the United States, Kennedy charged. “Why would the administration go to such lengths to go to war? Was it trying to change the subject from its failed economic policy, the corporate scandals and its failed effort to capture Osama bin Laden? The only imminent threat was the November congressional election. The politics of the election trumped the stubborn facts,” he said. Bush must be held accountable for his actions on Election Day, Kennedy said. “There’s no greater responsibility that president has than bringing a country to war,” Kennedy said. “If we cannot have the confidence in the president to explain and to lay out to the American people the factual situations on war and peace, then I think that that confidence and trust is violated, and we have to go in a different direction,” he said.
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