President George W. Bush stated on Friday: “While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. … [Critics] know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.”
The following nuclear policy analysts are available for interviews:
IMAD KHADDURI
Khadduri worked on the Iraq nuclear weapons program beginning in 1981; he left Iraq in the late 1990s. He is author of the book Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions and currently edits the “Free Iraq” blog. In November 2002, Khadduri wrote the article “Iraq’s Nuclear Non-Capability.” Before the invasion of Iraq, he warned that if the U.S. occupied Iraq “rivers of blood” would flow. He said today: “The lack of outrage on the part of people in the U.S. — as well as in Arab countries — over the lies leading to war and what is happening now in Iraq is amazing…”
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JOHN BURROUGHS
Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, said today: “The International Atomic Energy Agency’s head Mohamed ElBaradei was very clear in early 2003 that there was no evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program. ElBaradei said that they needed only three more months to confirm the absence of a program, but they didn’t get that three months because Bush started the invasion. Hans Blix, head of UNMOVIC, responsible for chemical and biological weapons inspections, was saying at the same time that they had not found any programs or weapons but that there were still uncertainties regarding Iraq’s accounting for destruction of prohibited materials and that they wanted to continue their inspections.
“It was then and is now flatly untrue to say that the world was agreed that there were mass destruction weapons or programs in Iraq; the responsible UN agencies were not at all reaching that conclusion.” Burroughs is co-author of the piece “The UN Charter and the Iraq War,” which appears in the new book Neo-Conned! Again. Burroughs participated in an analysis, organized by the Institute for Public Accuracy, of Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address which scrutinized many of these issues as Bush was making his claims for war.
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2003 State of the Union Analysis
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
