Bushite GOPers Rice and Gonzalez Lies Acted As Triggers for the Iraq Invasion and Occupation
So it is no surprise that at the end of this destructive presidency, news emerges that Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzalez lied about Niger uranium claim, one of the blatant lies that was used as an excuse to illegally invade and occupy Iraq.
Jason Leopold at Public Record reports: "Condoleezza Rice was verbally warned by a high-ranking CIA official in September 2002 that allegations that Iraq had sought large quantities of yellowcake uranium from Niger were untrue and that she, as national security adviser, should not allow President George W. Bush to cite it in a speech he gave that month about the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to new evidence obtained by Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
"The Niger uranium claim was removed from two speeches Bush gave in September 2002 after Rice spoke with the CIA official who advised her the intelligence was unreliable.
However, it was cited by President George W. Bush in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union Address as what became known as the “Sixteen Words”: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Rice and other White House officials blamed the CIA and claimed they were never advised the agency had doubts about the authenticity of the intelligence.
"Those 16 words helped the Bush administration win support from Congress to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq and directly led senior Bush administration officials to leak the undercover status of CIA operative Valerie Plame after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exposed the Niger uranium allegations as bogus.
"But new evidence obtained by Waxman suggests that Gonzales and Rice may have lied to Congress when they claimed the CIA green-lit use of the uranium claim in Bush's September 2002 speeches, in which Bush urged Congress to authorize the use of force in lraq.
“ 'For more than five years, I have been seeking answers to basic questions about why the President made a false assertion about such a fundamental matter,' Waxman wrote. As the President's National Security Advisor at the time, Condoleezza Rice asserted publicly that she knew nothing about any doubts the CIA had raised about this claim prior to the 2003 State of the Union address. And former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales asserted to the Senate - on her behalf - that the CIA approved the use of the claim in several presidential speeches. The Committee has obtained evidence that just the opposite is true.
“ 'This evidence would appear to raise serious questions about the veracity of the assertions that Mr. Gonzales made to Congress on behalf of Dr. Rice about a key part of the President's case for going to war in Iraq.' ”
More than 4,200 American military and tens of thousands wounded; hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children killed and wounded; millions of Iraqi refugees and a country destroyed, all based on Bushite lies.
Rice, Gonzalez, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of these war ciminals should be in the dock at The Hague.
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