WMD?

“At least he's got an excuse!”

“This crap about mystery ships steaming around in circles sure does sound like a misinformation campaign.”

“monkey - thanks giving me sometime. In my short google search, I was able to come up with these sources:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/01/27/national0654EST0495.DTL

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=126

Now, I haven't had a lot of time, so I need to reset the date ranges on some of these threads 'cause that's we I posted the news piece.

Speaking of reseting the dates:

I came up with these little ditties while I look back on this thread:

pedxing, As an American I am insulted by your remarks. You believe Saddam Hussein and accuse that the American men and women who are fighting this war will fabricate evidence?

You are pathetic. I always wondered how conspiracy theorists can dismiss the facts and base opinion on myths. Lots of demons in that head of yours."
bacpac
06:07:00 PM
04/07/03




"What facts are those, bacpac? Where are the chemical weapons? Last night it was reported American soldiers are no longer wearing protective chemical gear because the threat doesn't exist.

Alaska
09:35:12 PM
04/08/03

The Bush Administration presented a lot of evidence to the UN. Try watching CSPAN instead of Sponge Bob."
bacpac
04:09:49 PM
04/09/03




If you don't believe evidence would be manufactured if it weren't found - I've got some bridges to sell you.

Phony evidence appeared in advance to support the invasion - I can't believe you'd imagine it would appear, if needed to justify the invasion.

Still, I think there is real stuff somewhere - I could be wrong - but I'd be surprised if there wasn't any."
pedxing
04:14:18 PM
04/07/03

You state that the evidence is phony. You claim that it will be fabricated by the US soldiers.

It appears to me that you support Saddam's rhetoric."
bacpac
04:14:20 PM
04/09/03



More conspiracy theories.

What a bunch of boneheads."
bacpac
07:37:48 PM
04/09/03



And if you paid attention, the UN inspectors dismissed every bit of so called "US intelligence" as "total garbage." You just never give up with your propaganda, do you."
Alaska
08:51:10 PM
04/09/03



That is a lie. It never happened.

Quoting Bill Press is perfect. He is the classic wacky liberal. King of Conspiracy.

Get some facts and try again."
bacpac
09:14:42 PM
04/09/03




I haven't seen any information about faked documents. I did see arial photos of the Iraqis moving WMD materials from a bunker while the column of UN inspectors passed nearby heading to another bunker."
bacpac
06:29:31 PM
04/10/03





BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. Marines may have found weapons-grade plutonium in a massive underground facility discovered beneath Iraq's Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex, an embedded reporter told Fox News Thursday.
Coalition forces are investigating a stash of radioactive material found at the site south of Baghdad, the reporter, Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, told Fox News. The material was discovered at the complex, which is operated by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and is located south of Baghdad's suburbs. While officials aren't prepared to call the discovery a "smoking gun," two preliminary tests conducted on the material have indicated that it may be weapons-grade plutonium. The discovery of the underground labyrinth of labs and warehouses was unexpected, Fox News has confirmed, and forces in the area are testing a variety of things to best determine the significance of the find. So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have found 14 buildings that have high levels of radiation, Prine reported Thursday. His report noted that some of the tests have found nuclear residue too deadly for human contact.

Go to Fox News for the rest of the story"
Savage
07:13:39 PM
04/10/03





yeah, screw those backwards loosers! to hell with everybody! it's not worth trouble or money or blood to save people from living in terror. it's their problem and we are at fault anyway. let's just let them all kill each other and pretend we care, instead of actually doing anything about it."
stratdewd
04:43:28 PM
04/12/03




NIgal, yes i did.

the true flaming liberals will be conspicously quiet on this one.


CNN is on par with AL JAZEIR


and these people base their world views on their word...

it's all coming crumbling down...the house of cards...the smoke is clearing and the mirrors are fogging up


you mark my words, dems are in big trouble....

now that the hope that the war would go bad for us has been irrefutably stopmed into dust, their only hope is for the economy to go bad, and they will trytheir damdest to make the economy go bad. they will try to make us suffer to regain power. ...with the help of CNN, Jennings, Rather, and Brokaw, the BBC, and NPR they will come out every day and try to convince us that we are are all miserable . the fear tactics will be flying. and the country will reject them, lock, stock and barrell....


so let it be written, so let it be done......."
stratdewd
12:52:39 AM
04/13/03



It is a pattern
"When they can't refute me they insult me."
bacpac
12:40:06 PM
04/14/03



""The U.S. military has had considerably more success in turning
Iraq around than liberals have had in turning the ghettos around
with their 40-year 'War on Poverty.' So far, fewer troops have
been killed by hostile fire since the end of major combat in
Iraq than civilians were murdered in Washington, DC, last year
(239 deaths in Iraq compared to 262 murders in DC). How many
years has it been since we declared the end of major U.S. combat
operations against Marion Barry's regime? How long before we just
give up and pull out of that hellish quagmire known as Washington,
DC?" --Ann Coulter"
stratdewd
09:25:55 PM
12/09/03




almost 500,000 people in mass graves found. this is an undisputed fact.


that evil man in the rathole is the WMD and they found him."
stratdewd
01:28:10 PM
12/20/03





ahhhhhhhhhh, Memories.....I love a good cat fight. I suggest that we all, from time to time, reset the dates on these threads so we don't all have to cover the same ground again, or better yet in bacpac's case, don't put our foot in our mouthes.....”

“The blue dress of Baghdad
As David Kay's admission makes clear, the president misled Congress into approving his preemptive war. So why is there no talk of impeachment?

By Robert Scheer Salon

Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.

In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, both in preserving constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception in leading us to war on phony intelligence overshadows those scandals based on greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding administration, or those aimed at political opponents, such as Watergate. And the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to speak the truth.

A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction as a grave threat to the U.S. and the world, Bush spent this month's State of the Union defending the war because "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Bush said officials were still "seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs but noted that weapons searchers had already identified "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA Today and the Los Angeles Times echoed this fudging -- last year's "weapons" are now called "programs" -- declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had WMD and, "I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence."

Yet three days after the State of the Union address, Kay quit and then began telling the world what the administration had denied since taking over the White House: that Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of the military force it had been at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that he believed it had no significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs or stockpiles in place, and that the United Nations inspections and allied bombing in the '90s had been more effective at eroding the remnants of these programs than critics had thought.

"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990s. Somewhere in the mid-1990s the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated ... The Iraqis say they believed that [the U.N. inspection program] was more effective [than U.S. analysts believed], and they didn't want to get caught."

The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed Kay to set the record straight. The administration's systematic abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S. intelligence experts -- including several who quit in disgust -- have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?

After all, the president misled Congress into approving his preemptive war on the grounds that our very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we hesitated, allowing the U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud over New York, to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our dark reward.

Now that Kay -- who, it should be remembered, once defended the war and dismissed the work of the U.N. inspectors -- has had $900 million and at least 1,200 weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA and elsewhere had been telling us all along, are there to be no real repercussions for such devastating official deceit?”

“So who is going tpo tell all those innocent Iraqi's killed in this action "Gezz, bad intel. Sorry about that"?”

“So, have we found those nasty stockpiles of WMD yet?


Odd thing (and I'm seeing a pattern). The day after (or the day of) the Kay report, the Bush admin states that they are jocking into position for a Spring offense against Al-Queda/Taliban in the Paki border region. I'm sure they'll get right to it when we get back from Mars, or cut the deficit in five years, or was it ten years? What is it this week anyways, anyone keeping track? Maybe after we get Saddam and the attaks in Iraq stop? Or maybe when the troops come home from Iraq in June, or is it the end of June, we're only going to leave 20,000 troops back any ways wehn we leave. What? Yesterday I hear that now we're gearing up for a 3 year, 100,000 troop force in Iraq? Did I hear that yesterday as well?

Thie guy needs togo. All of you that support Bush are hyprocrites and supprot a lier. Some of the things said about Saddam NOW could be said about Bush. When do WE put him on trial?

I ask again: Whose going to go over to Iraq and tell those relitives of those 10,000 people killed to date, that we're sorry, we had bad intel? Those people didn't need to die. The agrument that it's better over there because Saddam is gone is an empty stance. How do you know it's better? I see no Iraqi oil on the market. I see us footing the bill. I see Iraqi people being killing daily, what different today? At least with Saddam in power, you had Civil order, this is a HUGE mess we've created. And speaking of that, how many more Osama's have we created because of this? What have we done to improve our standing on the Arab street? Nothing, but re-enforce the stigma.

Great Policy, Bee Double U Moron!”

“We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002”

“"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002”

“Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003”

“"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998”

“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002”

“We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002”

“C-bat....
It's an elecetion year... All 4 of them will change their tune.....”

“Yeah you guys are clearly on the right track. Its obvious that Bush and his administration fabricated the case for Iraq's WMDs.”

“no doubt snafu”

“Bush made them say it.”

“They werent wearing their tin hats”

“WoW! new information! I've never seen those quotes before. Thanks c bat!!!












whatnever”

“I don't see a smoking gun for impeachment.

As cbat and snafu point out, a lot of people were saying there were wmd's. I wouldn't be surprised if some turned out.

However, it was Bush that was saying that the danger of the WMD's was so certain and so imminent that we had to rush to war.

Other's - like the Dems that were quoted - were saying - we need inspections, we need to look and see, we need to let inspections run their course. Also, it was the Bush people who were trumping up all of this supposed new intelligence.

I do fault Hilary Clinton and Kerry for deciding that they should back their president in a time of crisis. I do fault them for feeling they needed to give him a strong hand and a blank check for negotiating with the UN. I understand their wanting to do it - but it seemed very clear to me that Bush wanted a war and was using the WMDs as a pretext, that he was trumping things up. Kerry and Clinton blew it. I understand the desire to back a president when crisis and war are in the air. I understand their worry about looking bad if the war stayed popular (Bill Clinton gained by supporting Bush I's war to free Kuwait, while many Dems regret having opposed it).”

“c bat - As always, context is crucial. You've been 'snopesed'.”

“What!?!? Half truths, smoke and mirrors to prove a point?!?!

I feel lied to again by Republican!

Rebuttle, c bat!?!?

Sources, cbat!?!!”

“As you say the "rush" to war.
I say is a very tuff call.
What do you do as prez.
The CIA is telling you IRAQ has WMD's. There is a psycho in power who has killed thousands of his own people. After 9/11, any type of threat of Terrorism is going to get top priority. So if Bush waits and lets Hussien hook up with Bin Laden, then next thing ya know dirty bomb or WMD ends up NYC. Then Bush is a idiot for letting it happen.
I agreed with the War, I say better safe then Sorry....Just my opinion...
I do hate seeing everday in the paper that our troups are being wounded and killed. Unfortunatly Freedom is not Free.
I do firmly believe, if 9/11 did not happen we would of not went to war with Iraq.
So maybe the true conspiracy is that our govt let 9/11 happen so we could go to war....NOT!”

“Context is so overrated.”

“Proved to be a set up. We lost
around 53,000 troops.It took a
Republican president to get out of
that one.How come no one hung LBJ?”

“David Kay is now saying 'everyone was wrong about WMD in Iraq.' Oh Really, Dave??


Did anyone else see Scott Ritter on C-SPAN this AM?”

“laqtis, reading the speaches in entirety shows that these politicians believed that unilateral action was not the approach to take. Big suprise. My point is that these guys were all talking about Iraq's WMDs. They believed they were there as much as Bush did at the times they gave those speaches.”

“c-bat - then I would sugest, if I might, that use correct context then next tme. Your post came across as trying to prove that the Dems are hyprocrites. Be a little more clearer and you won't have to back peddel so much. It tends to hurt the creditiblity, ya know?”

“elf - LBJ got out wen the getting was good. He knew he wasn't gonna get re-elected, so in fact, he hung himself. LBJ started the whole process of Americans becoming disillusioned by the Government and Nixon kept it going, IMHO.”

“P.S. - Nixon had plenty of opps to get us outta there before we finally did. Try not to paint a rosey picture of that clod.”

“backpedal? heh, you're funny. I stick by my point. none of those quotes even suggest that these guys were in approval of Bush's method of handling the situation, nor did I. but they all felt that the situation DID need to be handled. get off yourself dude.”

“Hey, Snopes said these were "TRUE" quotes, nice try Violin! Yep, they're actual and true quotes. I know they're true quotes because I went to the original gov't websites and the speeches/statements these were taken from. Now of course many (not all) of these people were against the war as a solution to these known WMDs, but no doubt they sincerely believed the intelligence sources that said Saddam had WMDs. Which is the point.

Again, whether someone believed war was the answer to Sadda's WMD is a good, healthy debate. But there was no doubt these quotes are true and they believed Saddam did have WMDs and was a threat. Sorry it's not just a "Bush thang" for you guys. Sometimes history sucks, eh? We need to quit documenting liberals, it seems to come back and bite them.”

“"Yeah you guys are clearly on the right track. Its obvious that Bush and his administration fabricated the case for Iraq's WMDs......."

"C-bat....
It's an elecetion year... All 4 of them will change their tune....."


"no doubt snafu....."

"They werent wearing their tin hats......."

"......My point is that these guys were all talking about Iraq's WMDs....."



Your right, you win. I se where your coming from now....”

“and that would be tonge FIRMLY in cheek, just incase you didn't get it.”

“Bush directly controls the CIA and the U.S. Senate Committee On Intelligence and the British Intelligence and the governments of most members of NATO and even the Democrats in Congress. He's a powerful dude, that Bush feller, yes he is, uh huh.

Now, if only Bush could've stopped Saddam from bribing France and China and Russia with oil to be against the war, he might've had a slam dunk. Saddam's oil money sure went a long way to influence those in power to be against the war.”

“With the yellow cake Uranium, there is a clear record of Bush pushing and pushing for the CIA to agree he could say it. Bush policy drove the intelligence.

Also Buck - did you notice that snopes also showed how the quotes were taken out of context... some from before changes in the situation?”

“Funny how how the pr-war people were trashing Scott Ritter as a nut case. They, especially the bush-backers, were working hard to silence and discredit him - mebbe they ought to have listened.”

“AND if you are going to quote Pelosi from 1998, how about George Bush the elder from 1998:

"We should not march into Baghdad . . . . To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero . . . assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."”

“and going one further, how Clouter calls the former Ambassidor whose wife was exposed as a CIA opperative a "Clown" evertime she gets.

and how all right wingers are calling O'Neil names and sayng he has a personal vendda.

Anyone else see trend here? Anyone who speaks out against Bush is labled as a Commie, a Clown, unAmerican, etc. Happens here as well....”

“Hey pedxing, the ONLY point I'm making with these quotes is not whether someone believed we should go to war or not over the WMDs, but merely that they truly believed WMDs existed. Period.

In this manner, these quotes ARE in context. These quotes aren't being used to say these Dems supported WAR, but merely that they believed Saddam had WMDs and was a threat. I say this a lot.”

“I'm not callin' O'Neil bad names. Just the opposite, he's honest, he says he didn't find WMDs, he says Bush is not to blame and that Bush didn't "force" anyone to say anything, and that we need to re-asses our intelligence capabilities in the region. What's to get pissed off about that?”

“Oops, sorry, I was referring to David Kay, not O'neil. Believe who you want.”

“That list was probably fabricated by the Bush Admin. too”

“I never said they were false quotations Buck. I said they were taken out of context. That’s why so many people, myself included, have concluded that it is futile to interact with you. You ignore any arguments you can’t handle and twist others to the point of absurdity.


Its obvious many people were surprised that we haven’t found anything. But it seems pretty clear now that there is very little or nothing to be found. Certainly not the “Oh my God, we’re all going to die” imminent threat story the administration told repeatedly to justify an invasion.

Why has no one apologized to Hans Blix or Scott Ritter for making them out to be incompetent, untrustworthy or crazy?

Why is the administration resisting an investigation into how they got it so wrong? Even John McCain (who was a consistent Iraq hawk) is supporting an independent inquiry.

We had intelligence analysts complaining before the war that they were being pressured to distort their findings. The neocons were so sure that the CIA was being obstructionist that they set up the Office of Special Plans to cherry pick data from questionable sources and present it directly to the administration and the NSA without first having it reviewed by the CIA.

The Carnegie Endowment has issued a damning report into the misuse of intelligence and called for a repudiation of preemptive war.

It is critical to understand what went wrong. It is also critical that we not go to war again on the basis of imagined threats. We’ve lost a great deal of credibility and only confirmed the views of those who consider us bullies and imperialists.”

“bah!”

“"Anyone who speaks out against Bush is labled as a Commie, a Clown, unAmerican, etc. Happens here as well...."
- laqtis
02:30:47 PM
01/30/04


From today's Paul Krugman column:
"These people politicize everything, from military planning to scientific assessments. If you're with them, you pay no penalty for being wrong. If you don't tell them what they want to hear, you're an enemy, and being right is no excuse."”

“I think we're all growing weary of this, but I'll humor you. My apologies to everyone else.

I never said they were false quotations Buck. I said they were taken out of context. That’s why so many people, myself included, have concluded that it is futile to interact with you.


Violin, the quotes are NOT out of context in the proper context that these Dems thought Saddam had WMDs. Why is that "out of context" to you? If I used these quote as an argument that these Dems were FOR war, then they would be out of context. They didn't all think war was a solution to Saddam's WMDs, and it would be out of context for me to use the quotes in that manner. But I'm not. These quotes merely show that these Dems DID think that Saddam had WMDs and was a threat. That is a fact. It's true. It's documented. It's in writing on their own websites. And it's in proper context. Period.

Certainly not the “Oh my God, we’re all going to die” imminent threat story the administration told repeatedly to justify an invasion.

This lie is getting old. Of course the libs here will say I'm being repetitive and being all invalid and stuff, but look at your sentence. It's wrong. Bush thought Saddam was a present and gathering threat, he did not say Saddam was an "imminent" threat. That's your own fabrications. Which is cool, we all have our agendas and tainted glasses and biases and we want to hear and see what we want to hear and see, and we filter out the rest.”

“the problem is not that Bush thought and said there were WMDs, but that he started a war on that pretext without giving the UN inspection team time to do their jobs and offer a complete perspective. he rushed to war without getting the entire picture.”

“OK. Yesterday you said I was immoral and today you call me a liar. That's cool. Ha ha! Woo-boy! I respect you even if you are a condescending clown.

Here are some imminent threat quotes for yoy to choke on:


"There's no question that Iraq was a threat to the people of the United States."

- White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, 8/26/03



"We ended the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."

- President Bush, 7/17/03



Iraq was "the most dangerous threat of our time."

- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 7/17/03



"Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat...He was a threat. He's not a threat now."

- President Bush, 7/2/03



"Absolutely."

- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03



"We gave our word that the threat from Iraq would be ended."

- President Bush 4/24/03



"The threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be removed."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 3/25/03



"It is only a matter of time before the Iraqi regime is destroyed and its threat to the region and the world is ended."

- Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, 3/22/03



"The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

- President Bush, 3/19/03



"The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations."

- President Bush, 3/16/03



"This is about imminent threat."

- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03



Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies."

- Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/31/03



Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world."

- Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/03



Iraq "threatens the United States of America."

- Vice President Cheney, 1/30/03



"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/29/03



"Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons. Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world that is distinct from any other. It's a danger to its neighbors, to the United States, to the Middle East and to the international peace and stability. It's a danger we cannot ignore. Iraq and North Korea are both repressive dictatorships to be sure and both pose threats. But Iraq is unique. In both word and deed, Iraq has demonstrated that it is seeking the means to strike the United States and our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03



"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. They not only have weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction...That's why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat."

- President Bush, 1/3/03



"The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands."

- President Bush, 11/23/02



"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 11/14/02



"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America."

- President Bush, 11/3/02



"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq."

- President Bush, 11/1/02





"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to American in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein."

- President Bush, 10/28/02



"The Iraqi regime is a serious and growing threat to peace."

- President Bush, 10/16/02



"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."

- President Bush, 10/7/02



"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency."

- President Bush, 10/2/02



"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is."

- President Bush, 10/2/02



"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined."

- President Bush, 9/26/02



"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02



"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02



"Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses. What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."

- Vice President Dick Cheney, 8/29/02”