Videotape Shows Powell, Rice, knew WMD Claims False

Australian journalist John Pilger claims to have incontrovertible proof that the Bush administration knew that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and its major figures admitted as much in spring of 2001. Pilger showed video footage of US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying in Cairo on February 24, 2001,"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours." He also reported that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said in April of the same year, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."


http://www.smh.com.au/
articles/2003/09/23/
1064082978207.html

Pilger's evidence gives substance to the recent charge by Senator Ted Kennedy that the Bush administration war on Iraq was a fraud, perpetrated in the knowledge that its primary public justification was baseless.

On the other hand, in his Fox News interview on Monday evening in the US, President George W. Bush admitted that he does not read the newspapers and only knows what is going on in the world from briefings given him by Andy Card and Dr. Rice. It is possible that Rice was part of a cabal in the White House that manipulated Bush into the war by feeding him false information. We already know that Rice's office was responsible for leaving in the State of the Union Address the fraudulent charge that Iraq had tried to buy Niger uranium.

Ret. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC Monday evening, as well. (Maria's is one of the best news shows on television). He was again critical of the way Donald Rumsfeld interferes with military operations, comparing him to McNamara in the Vietnam period. But unfortunately he continued to insist that weapons of mass destruction might yet be found in Iraq. Look, this is ridiculous. What might be found is a few underground holding tanks of chemical weapons. There was no post-1998 nuclear program, and there was no biological weapons program. The chemicals may or may not still exist, and may or may not still retain their effectiveness. They certainly had not been mounted on missiles, and they were not a threat to Britain and the United States. Chemical weapons are a battlefield weapon, not properly refered to as weapons of mass destruction, anyway.