Although the Bush administration was going to war regardless of the intelligence evidence, it is a fact that every aspect of the intelligence record pertaining to this matter was politicized at the CIA:

Niger and the Intelligence Fabrication. The allegation that Iraq was trying to purchase nuclear materials from Niger was the key to the administration’s case for war. The CIA always had doubts about the authenticity of the Niger reporting but, when the item appeared in a DIA intelligence highlight on February 13, 2002, Vice President Cheney began to hammer the CIA about its views on Iraq’s search for enriched uranium to assist in its nuclear weapons program. In response to constant importuning from Cheney and Lewis Libby, the CIA asked Ambassador Joe Wilson to visit Niger. During the same period that Wilson traveled to Niger and reported back to the CIA, Marine Corps General Carleton Fulford and Ambassador Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick conducted their own investigations and reported back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, respectively. All three reported emphatically that there was no substance to the intelligence reporting that Iraq was trying to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Nevertheless, in October 2002, the National Intelligence Council produced a national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that concluded that Iraq was “shifting from domestic mining and milling of uranium to foreign acquisition.” The estimate ignored the consensus within the intelligence community that considered the clandestine reporting on a Niger deal a fabrication produced by members of the Italian military intelligence service. In an effort to compromise the results of the Wilson visit to Niger, Vice President Cheney instructed Scooter Libby to leak the specious language of the intelligence estimate to Judith Miller of the New York Times. Libby has been indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury about his role in outing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, which was another part of the campaign to undermine Ambassador Wilson’s public criticism of the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War.²

In December 2002, the NSC and the CIA negotiated language on the Niger uranium deal for the president’s State of the Union address. A senior CIA official, Alan Foley, convinced the NSC’s Robert Joseph that the Niger story could not be linked to CIA intelligence. But Foley agreed to the infamous sixteen words in the State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” a claim that was also false.

“Curveball’s” Phony Intelligence on Mobile Biological Labs. Similar slight-of-hand was played with intelligence on mobile biological laboratories. The sole source of the mobile labs was an agent codenamed “Curveball” who was handled by the German intelligence service and never given an asset validation from the CIA, which is customary in sensitive clandestine matters. The Germans had warned the CIA early in the process that they could not vouch for “Curveball’s” bonafides; some Germans warned that he was an alcoholic, others that he was a dissembler. The fact that he was trading information, in this case disinformation, for possible German citizenship seemed obvious to many members of the German intelligence service and even to several CIA officers, including the chief of the directorate of operation’s European division, Tyler Drumheller. German intelligence told Drumheller that “Curveball” was crazy and that it would be a waste of time for the CIA to debrief him.³ Senior members of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) warned the United States that “Curveball” never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so. “We were shocked,” the official said. “Mein Gott!! We had always told them it was not proven…it was not hard intelligence.”⁴

Drumheller and another CIA officer passed this information to CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, but the 2002 estimate embraced “Curveball’s” information and Secretary of State Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council in February 2003 shamelessly exaggerated it. Powell was reportedly furious when he learned in the summer of 2003 of CIA officers’ doubts about the information, which never reached him during his several days of intelligence exchanges spent at the CIA drafting the speech. But when Drumheller took his doubts to policymakers, he was told that the “war was not about intelligence, it was about regime change.”

Fifty days after the fall of Baghdad, on May 29, 2003, President Bush emphatically proclaimed that the United States “has found the weapons of mass destruction,” which turned out to be the mobile biological labs.⁵ This purported justification for the invasion of Iraq was repeated by every prominent member of the Bush administration over the next nine months. The CIA and the DIA went so far as to jointly sponsor and publish a White Paper in May 2003 that described the labs as the “strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” It emphatically refuted an explanation by Iraqi officials that appeared in the New York Times that referred to the trailers as mobile units for producing hydrogen.⁶ Two days before the president’s remarks, however, the Pentagon received a three-page field report from a team of U.S. and British experts in Iraq who examined the trailers, one of whom referred to them as “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”⁷ Thus at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the DIA, it was authoritatively known that there were no mobile biological labs before the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense heralded the so-called find as justification for the invasion.

No Links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The intelligence community initially tried to convince policymakers that there were no significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, but some senior members of the Bush administration, particularly the president and the vice president, argued that Iraq was behind the terrorism of al Qaeda in an effort to manipulate congressional and public opinion. President Bush said on September 25, 2002 that “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror” and, at a press conference in December 2005, he repeated this observation.⁸ Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld claimed on September 27, 2002 that he had “bulletproof” evidence of ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, and Secretary of State Powell described a “potentially…sinister nexus between Iraq and al Qaeda, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.”⁹ The most explicit statement of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda came from Vice President Cheney, who argued that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia in April, several months before the 9/11 attack.¹⁰ The Czech intelligence service denied such a meeting ever took place and the intelligence community had authoritative information based on telephone intercepts that Atta was actually in the United States during the month of April.

In actual fact, the information that Iraqis had trained al Qaeda members to make bombs with deadly gases came from a top al Qaeda operative, al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was tortured in Pakistan and recanted his claims in 2004. As a result, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements, nearly two years after the Defense Intelligence Agency informed policymakers that al-Libi had lied.¹¹ But when the White House wanted more support for the argument regarding Iraqi-al Qaeda links, CIA director Tenet obliged with a letter to the Senate and House intelligence committees falsely asserting evidence of such links, and CIA analysts wrote the section in Secretary of State Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) describing the links.

A CLASSIC CASE OF POLITICIZATION

Prior to the State of the Union message, CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin briefed the president on “the case” for war based on the CIA’s intelligence on WMD. President Bush found the presentation inadequate, particularly because he found that it wasn’t “something that Joe Public would understand or gain a lot of confidence from.”¹² Bush turned to Tenet and remarked “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?” The CIA director jumped up from his wing-backed chair in the Oval Office and gave the president the answer the administration desperately wanted, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!” In fact, there turned out to be enough misinformation for two slam dunks: the president’s State of the Union in January and the secretary of state’s address to the United Nations in February 2003.

Although the intelligence community played only a minor role in the planning for war, the failures of intelligence were stunning and comprehensive and point to major problems within the community, particularly within the CIA. There was no understanding of the intentions and motivations of Saddam Hussein; of the decrepit state of Iraq’s political, economic, and military situation; and the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no programs for reconstituting the capabilities that existed before Desert Storm in 1991. And it can now be stated definitively that the CIA was egregiously wrong on every aspect of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, biological, and chemical. Every aspect of the CIA’s findings on the so-called huge stocks of biological and chemical weapons was incorrect, and their conclusions about the so-called nuclear program were created for the most part out of whole cloth and, in some prominent cases, fabricated. Nevertheless, the CIA continues to display no interest in understanding the analytical failures that took place. Neither a post-mortem nor an accounting of lessons learned has been produced to suggest that the CIA has refined its processes for the collection and analysis of intelligence.

The Phony National Intelligence Estimate and the Phony White Paper. It is instructive to examine the NIE titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” (October 2002) and the unclassified “White Paper” because of the specious nature of their assumptions and conclusions. Every one of these assessments’ claims was false, including charges on stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; reconstitution of nuclear weapons; and the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles. The estimate was the most egregious example of intelligence politicization in the history of the CIA. The fact is that Iraq did not have any of the weapons that the CIA claimed it had and had no production programs for making such weapons. The declassified estimate, moreover, the so-called White Paper, was even more egregious, serving as an example of policy advocacy to support a decision to go to war. This violates the CIA’s charter that prohibits propagandizing political matters for the American public.

The estimate concluded that Iraq had “stocked at least 100 metric tons and as much as 500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents—much of it added in the last year,” and even speculated on clandestine attacks against the United States with chemical or biological weapons. The estimate considered all key aspects of Iraq’s biological weapons program to be active and that “most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.” Actually, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors regularly investigated many of these facilities and recorded correctly that there were no active biological weapons programs at sites such as the Fallujah III plant and other locations. The estimate also contained worst-case language about a non-existent anthrax program, and the White Paper gratuitously added language about a potential threat to the U.S. homeland. As former director of IAEA, Hans Blix, concluded, “Never before has a nation had 100 percent confidence about its intelligence with 0 percent information.”

The unclassified White Paper omitted much of the more balanced language in the classified version. The classified version estimated that Iraq would not obtain nuclear weapons until 2009, but the White Paper drops the dates and suggests the imminent possibility of Iraq going nuclear. The estimate and the White Paper linked a great deal of construction at Iraqi military sites to chemical and biological weapons, but neither the UN nor IAEA inspectors believed that such linkage was credible. The classified estimate contends that “Saddam probably does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make them,” but the White Paper drops the word “probably.”¹³ Both the classified and unclassified versions develop scenarios for Iraq acquiring nuclear weapons within twelve months, although UN and IAEA inspectors found no facilities that were even capable of building a nuclear weapon or enriching uranium to weapons grade.

The White Paper also obfuscates the importance of dissent in the classified estimate and downplays the expertise of the dissenters. For example, the CIA links Iraq’s attempts to obtain aluminum tubes to a centrifuge enrichment program and notes that there are “some intelligence specialists” who link the tubes to conventional weapons. It should have been noted that the “some” in this case referred to the opposition of the Department of Energy, which houses the most serious expertise on centrifuge technology. The several analysts at the CIA with their modest engineering credentials were certainly no match for the Ph.D. scientists at the Department of Energy. The White House and CIA handling of the aluminum tubes issue points to a campaign orchestrated by both institutions to make the case for going to war. The fact that Saddam Hussein made no attempt to hide purchases of these tubes also argues against their use in a nuclear weapons program.

The post-war inspections of the Iraqi Survey Group, which was operated by the CIA, found no evidence of any chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of the weapons themselves. One of the most ludicrous aspects of the estimate concerned a so-called capability for Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to threaten the United States itself with chemical and biological warfare agents “if brought close to, or into, the U.S. homeland.” It is difficult to imagine a scenario that has Iraq covertly bringing UAVs into the United States; the U.S. Air Force took an unusual dissent, which the White Paper did not even bother to repeat.

The unclassified version of the estimate had two purposes: to create the impression that the intelligence community was of one mind and united on the threat of WMD from Iraq, and to support the Bush administration’s strong view that Iraq WMD represented a threat to the U.S. homeland.¹⁴ This effort on the part of the CIA was immoral, illegal, and unconscionable, involving the deletion of all examples of uncertainty in the classified document and the addition of worst-case views in order to create the impression of a gathering threat.

The CIA repressed numerous reports that noted the absence of Iraqi WMD, including the authoritative reports of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, General Hussein Kamal, who defected to Jordan, briefed UN inspectors, Jordanian intelligence, and the CIA, returned to Iraq, and was summarily executed. Kamal told the debriefers in 1995 that Iraq’s strategic program was larger than the CIA estimated before the 1991 Desert Storm war, but that it no longer existed. Kamal had first-hand knowledge that “chemical weapons were destroyed;” after all, it was Kamal who ordered the destruction of the chemical stocks. The same was true for biological weapons, and “in the nuclear area, there were no weapons.”¹⁵

Kamal also told UN officials in 1995 that Iraq had two SCUD launchers and one of them was disassembled, but the CIA estimate and White Paper recorded dozens in the Iraqi inventory.¹⁶ Several months before the estimate and White Paper appeared, the CIA told Congress that it did not know how many missile launchers Iraq had or how many warheads there might be to put on top of the rockets. Similarly, the CIA repressed the clandestine reporting of Iraqi Foreign Minister Sabri who corroborated the evidence of Iraqi destruction of their WMD programs.

In fact, the CIA sponsored its own intelligence collection that corroborated all of Kamal’s information on Iraqi WMD. The agency’s assistant director for intelligence collection, Charles Allen, commissioned an unusual program that involved Iraqi-Americans in the United States. Allen’s ingenious scheme sent about thirty of these individuals to Iraq to gather information from close relatives who were scientists with access to information on strategic programs. As late as September 2002, Sawsan Alhaddad, a doctor living in Cleveland, reported to the CIA on her conversations with her Iraqi brother, an electrical engineer who worked in the Iraqi nuclear program. The engineer contended that the nuclear program had been shut down for years, which corroborated information from other Iraqi scientists and engineers that had been gathered right up to the start of the war in March 2003. Nothing from these reports appeared in the national intelligence estimate or the president’s daily brief.¹⁷

Post-Script

A senior CIA analyst, Paul Pillar, has written an authoritative account of the Bush administration’s misuse of the intelligence it received in order to “justify decisions already made,” but he falsely argues that the agency did not compromise any of its own assessments or estimates in the process.¹⁸ It is true that intelligence had nothing to do with the decision to go to war, which was decided upon early in the first term of the Bush presidency, no later than in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The senior members of the Bush administration paid little attention to the intelligence assessments on Iraq and requested no specific intelligence on Iraq other than summaries of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and non-existent ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Unlike the Johnson administration and the use of force in Vietnam, the Bush administration did not request CIA memoranda as a check on the intelligence provided by the Pentagon. Bush and the senior members of the administration cherry-picked the intelligence they wanted, whether it was bogus intelligence on Niger’s uranium stocks or unsubstantiated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s links to Osama bin Laden. The infamous national intelligence estimate of October 2002 was not requested by the Bush administration, which was aware of the differences within the community on key aspects of the Iraqi problem, but by the Senate intelligence committee. Bush and Cheney had fixed opinions about Iraq, and sensitive intelligence information would not change their thinking.

Although the Senate intelligence committee’s report did not accuse the administration of politicizing the intelligence, the CIA ombudsman told the committee that the administration’s “hammering” on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the CIA. A former deputy director of central intelligence, Richard Kerr, remarked that there was “significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection” between Iraq and al Qaeda.¹⁹ Kerr headed a group of former senior intelligence officers that prepared three reports on the intelligence community’s performance in the run-up to the Iraq war that cited “intense policymaker demands in the run-up to the war,” which some in the community believed “constituted inappropriate pressure on intelligence analysts.”²⁰ Most of the hammering on Saddam Hussein’s so-called efforts to purchase “yellowcake” uranium from Niger came from the vice president and, as a result, the fabricated report ended up in the 2002 national intelligence estimate, even though the U.S. intelligence community had disavowed it. There is typically political pressure on the CIA, particularly when policies fail, and it is up to CIA leadership to make sure analysts tell “truth to power.”

But there was little “truth” in CIA finished intelligence on Iraq. Iraq’s entire nuclear program, including facilities and infrastructure, had been destroyed. The weapons design facility and all production equipment had been destroyed, and the use of gamma detection equipment would monitor any resumption of an effort to enrich uranium or plutonium. There could not be as much certainty about the chemical and biological weapons programs because of the more difficult verification and monitoring environment. Nevertheless, in this area as well, the destruction of the Muthanna State establishment meant there was no capability to fabricate new agents. In a formal acknowledgement of the obvious, the CIA eventually issued a classified report (“Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s”) revising its prewar assessment on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991.²¹ High-level Iraqi sources had reported that chemical and biological weapons programs had ended, but these reports never appeared in CIA finished intelligence.

IMPLICATIONS

The politicization of intelligence creates serious consequences for the interests of the United States.

—Any distortion of evidence of Iraqi WMD makes it harder to gain international cooperation in the war against terrorism and the campaign to prevent the spread of WMD. These efforts require international support. Information from foreign intelligence services has been essential in the capture of all al Qaeda terrorists thus far; any success in stopping the strategic weapons programs of Iran and North Korea, both more advanced than those of pre-war Iraq, will require international help.

—Any misuse of intelligence by the White House, such as the forged documents on Niger, or politicization of intelligence by the CIA, such as the national intelligence estimate of October 2002, weakens the key instrument in preventing further terrorist acts and thus undermines U.S. national security interests. The misuse of intelligence during the Vietnam War prolonged a brutal and costly war. The manipulation of intelligence during Iran-contra in the 1980s led to political embarrassment for the Reagan administration. The misuse of intelligence on the Soviet Union led to unprecedented peacetime increases in defense spending despite the decline and decay of the Soviet Union. Any administration’s use of intelligence for political ends is unacceptable, particularly to make a specious case to go to war.

—Finally, one of the worst possible scenarios for U.S. security interests, and those of the international community, would be learning that WMD materials had been looted or smuggled from Iraqi weapons sites. As former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer noted during the Iraq war: “(WMD) is what this war was about and is about. And we have high confidence that it will be found.” We lost an opportunity to verify any remnants of WMD in Iraq in the spring of 2003 when the U.S. military occupation made no attempt to investigate possible WMD sites, not even Tuwaitha, where Iraqis previously stored supplies of enriched materials. The only way to ensure that such sites were not looted of old materials was to deploy inspectors who had examined these sites in the 1990s.

It was unconscionable to report “Curveball’s” information on biological weapons because the two key factories for production of anthrax and botulinin toxin were destroyed long before the Iraq war, and there was no ability to reconstitute a biological manufacturing base that was not monitored by Western intelligence agencies. “Curveball,” the only source for Iraqi mobile biological labs, was the brother of a senior aide to Ahmad Chalabi, which should have discredited him immediately. Also, he was an alcoholic totally discredited by the German intelligence that had debriefed him. So much of the intelligence on key aspects of the WMD issue and the so-called links between Iraq and al Qaeda were single-source collections, with no corroboration inside the intelligence community. Nevertheless, prior to his resignation from the CIA in May 2004, then CIA director Tenet told an audience at Georgetown University that “when the facts are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong.”

The Phony Iraq-al Qaeda Link. Key members of the Bush administration did their best to encourage this charge, starting with President Bush who accused Iraq of sending “bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda” and providing al Qaeda with “chemical and biological weapons training.”²² “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda,” according to Bush, was “because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”²³ Vice President Cheney referred to “overwhelming evidence” of these links, and Secretary of State Powell referred to links that existed “over the years” in a nexus that “combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.”²⁴ Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that the link existed “over a span of some eight to ten years” and, when Iraq denied any linkage, Rumsfeld flippantly replied “And Abraham Lincoln is short.”²⁵ Most of the intelligence used in Secretary of State Powell’s speech to the UN in February 2003 was discredited in 2002. Finally, before and after the invasion of Iraq, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice repeated the myths of Iraqi training in chemical and biological weapons for members of al Qaeda and that the United States needed to prevent the day that Saddam Hussein would hand “just a little vial of something” to the terrorists.²⁶

If the intelligence community is ever again to be in a position to tell truth to power, then the ethics of intelligence collection and analysis must be revived and revamped. The pattern of corrupt tradecraft in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq points to a larger problem within the intelligence community that will not be fixed by bureaucratic reorganization or new layers of authority. The new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has never acknowledged the existence of genuine ethical problems.

More than three years after the start of the war against Iraq, there has been no attempt by the Senate intelligence committee to learn how the administration used the intelligence that it received or to investigate the illegal activity of the Office of Special Plans in the Defense Department in producing bogus intelligence. Senate intelligence chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) continues to drag his heels on this investigation, the so-called “Phase Two” investigation, and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the panel’s ranking Democrat, has offered no protest. The exaggeration of intelligence by top administration officials, particularly with reference to Iraqi nuclear programs (“the smoking gun cannot be a mushroom cloud”) and Iraqi links with al Qaeda, was obvious. Unfortunately, there has been no attempt to build an official record of their distortions. And the corruption of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War has received no investigation from the CIA itself or the congressional oversight committees.

Footnotes
¹ Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, “Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2003, p. 1.
² Dafna Linzer, “Prosecutor in CIA Leak Case Corrects Part of Court Filing,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2006, p. 8.
³ James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, New York: Free Press, 2006, p. 117.
⁴ Bob Drogin and John Goetz, “How the U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball’,” The Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2005, p. 1.
⁵ Joby Warrick, “Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2006, p. 1.
⁶ The New York Times, May 22, 2003, p. 16.
⁷ Warrick, “Lacking Biolabs,” p. 22.
⁸ President George Bush, Remarks in Meeting with President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, September 25, 2002, see
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020925-1.html, The Washington Post, December 27, 2005, p. 17.
⁹ Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Says U.S. Has ‘Bulletproof’ Evidence of Iraq’s Links to al Qaeda, The New York Times, September 28, 2002, p. 9; John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman, “The First Casualty,” The New Republic, June 30, 2003, p. 24.
¹⁰ Meet the Press: Interview with Vice President Cheney, NBC television broadcast, December 9, 2001.
11 Douglas Jehl, “Report Warned Bush Team about Intelligence Suspicions,” The New York Times, November 6, 2005, p. 14.
¹² Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 249.
¹³ “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” National Intelligence Council, Washington, DC, October 2002.
¹⁴ Jessica T. Mathews and Jeff Miller, “A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates,” Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004.
¹⁵ Thomas Powers, “The Biggest Secret,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006, p. 11. See Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
¹⁶ John Prados, Hoodwinked: the Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War, The New Press, 2004.
¹⁷ Risen, p. 75.
¹⁸ Paul Pillar, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, p. 77.
¹⁹ “Decoding Mr. Bush’s Denials,” editorial, The New York Times, November 15, 2005, p. 28.
²⁰ “Issues for the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas, Studies in Intelligence, Volume 49, Number 3, 2005, p. 53.
²¹ Greg Miller, “CIA Corrects Itself on Arms,” The Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2005, p. 1.
²² President George W. Bush, “World Can Rise to This Moment,” Speech, February 6, 2003.
²³President Bush, Statement after Cabinet Meeting, June 17, 2004.
²⁴ Secretary of State Colin Powell, Speech to the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003.
²⁵ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Department Briefings, February 4, 2003.
²⁶ National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Interviews on “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday,” March 9, 2003 and September 7, 2003.