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Did Rumsfeld Lie?

Did he lie about claiming to KNOW where WMD's were?

  • Yes, he clearly stated that he knew where they were in the interview.

    Votes: 52 69.3%

  • No, he was talking about suspected sites

    Votes: 13 17.3%

  • On planet-x, Rummy is honest.

    Votes: 10 13.3%
  • Total voters
    75
Tricky said:
He did? Uranium that was of sufficient quality to make WMDs? Where was it?
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Mostly at Al Tuwaitha. Hundreds of tons of the stuff, IIRC, which was enough to make WMD's. The IAEA never confiscated his unenriched uranium stockpile. I had a big debate with Crossbow some years ago, shortly after the invasion, where I went through the IAEA documents that catalogued the stuff because he didn't believe me when I told him.

BTW, uranium doesn't last forever. Enriched uranium lasts a much shorter time. Radioactive, you know.
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U238, the most common isotope, has a halflife of about 4.5x10^9 years. U235, the second-most-common isotope and the one which enrichment is designed to concentrate, has a half-life of 7x10^8 years. Yes, it doesn't last forever. But it lasts long enough.
 
I suggest those of you still flogging the Saddam having WMD's or even an active WMD program idea over to the paranormal forum. Even your president has given up that charade.
 
thaiboxerken said:
He is just a former CIA analyst, what would he know about the intelligence?
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It's not just one former CIA analyst calling the Bush administration, (and it's allies), on the WMD lies before the war even started. Andrew Wilkie in Australia resigned when he knew there was going to be a war, based on false and misleading evidence. An analyst killed himself in Great Britain because he couldn't handle having to lie on the issue. There are other sources as well

http://thinkprogress.org/60-minutes-42306

Inteview on 60 minutes.
 
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/29/1083224526066.html

He sure needs to now. Sensational documents just released by the British parliamentary inquiry into Blair's stated reasons for war reveal what the British Joint Intelligence Committee told Blair (and the Australian intelligence services) six weeks before the war:
"The JIC assessed that al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq," the British parliamentary report says.
"The JIC report, 'International Terrorism: War with Iraq', also said there was no evidence Saddam Hussein wanted to use any chemical or biological weapons in terrorist attacks or that he planned to pass them on to al-Qaeda. "However, it judged that in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate regime policy." (Australia was told: war will fuel terror).


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Interview with Andrew Wilkie.

http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/All/01A33C10272BF7A2CA256CE500837A10

“It troubles me that Australia has adopted a position, a very strong position, based on incomplete information,” he says. “We do not have unrestricted access to all US information on this matter. There were certain things in [US Secretary of State] Colin Powell’s address to the UN Security Council a few weeks ago that surprised
at ONA.”

What is the basis of his conviction that Iraq does not pose a serious enough threat to justify a war? “Their military is very weak. It’s a fraction of the size it was when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Most of what remains is poorly trained, poorly equipped and of questionable loyalty to the regime. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is, I believe, genuinely contained. There is no doubt they have chemical and biological weapons, but their program now is disjointed and limited. It’s not a national WMD program like they used to have. Also, I am not convinced that Iraq is actively co-operating with al Qaeda. The bottom line is that this war against Iraq is totally unrelated to the war on terror.”
Wilkie is no bleeding-heart leftie. He had a successful career as an army officer before entering the shadowy world of intelligence. He graduated from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1984, held a variety of posts including army aide de camp to the governor*general, and rose to the rank of lieut*enant-colonel before retiring in 2001. During his last two years in the army, he was seconded to ONA as a strategic analyst, and returned there as a civilian after working for a time for a large American defence contractor.


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http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/All/01A33C10272BF7A2CA256CE500837A10


This reveals exactly what the game was that Bush and Co were playing. Even Wilkie, who had no doubts that Saddam was not the threat he was made out to be, thought there was something there to find. And that is what they were gambling on when they said they knew there were WMD. Even though Saddam was no longer a threat, a token amount would be found to parade around so that they could say the war was justified.
 
Jocko said:
I can think of one, buried in a garden on government orders. Not crucial in and of itself, but it does bear asking why Saddam would own just one such centrifuge... oh, silly me, of course Ken believes that. Saddam would never be so clever as to bury others in different places. That's just plain impossible.
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You need many thousands of them to make weapons grade uranium.
 
Ziggurat said:
Mostly at Al Tuwaitha. Hundreds of tons of the stuff, IIRC, which was enough to make WMD's. The IAEA never confiscated his unenriched uranium stockpile. I had a big debate with Crossbow some years ago, shortly after the invasion, where I went through the IAEA documents that catalogued the stuff because he didn't believe me when I told him.
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If you get away from the right-of-center articles, you find that this turned out to be a bust. The uranium could not be used for bombs and so it was handled somewhat shoddily. It looks like the greatest danger was environmental contamination, mostly because people were dumping the uranium to use the barrels for storage. I couldn't find a mainstream article on Al Tuwaitha that wasn't three years older or more.

If Bushco thought they could make a case for these being WMDs or even potential WMDs, they'd be trumpeting it to the stars. The fact that they are not doing so tells me that they know it would just be another embarassment. Heck, they called a hospital waste dump a WMD site, so you'd think their reaction to a real nucular stockpile would be, "Wheee-doggies! Put that sucker on the front page." But oddly, they are quiet about it. Sorry Ziggy, this one doesn't pass the sniff test.

Ziggurat said:
U238, the most common isotope, has a halflife of about 4.5x10^9 years. U235, the second-most-common isotope and the one which enrichment is designed to concentrate, has a half-life of 7x10^8 years. Yes, it doesn't last forever. But it lasts long enough.
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There are more factors than just the half-life. Weapons need new parts, new casings etc. Plus, there is no evidence that Saddam ever had any nukes to fix. Even if he did have this highly questionable pile of uranium, it would take many years to manufacture a weapon even if he had facilities to do so which there is also no evidence for. They have some blueprints in a file cabinet. Not very scary.
 
Jocko said:
I can think of one, buried in a garden on government orders. Not crucial in and of itself, but it does bear asking why Saddam would own just one such centrifuge... oh, silly me, of course Ken believes that. Saddam would never be so clever as to bury others in different places. That's just plain impossible.
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Alas, it was also a red herring.

MSNBC said:
But for the Bush administration, things quickly began to go wrong with the Obeidi story. True, Obeidi said he’d buried the centrifuge equipment, as he’d been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant’s fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime. If true, this was a terribly inconvenient fact for the Bush administration, after months in which Secretary of State Colin Powell and other senior officials had alleged that aluminum tubes imported from 11 countries were intended for just such a centrifuge program. Obeidi denied that and added that he would have known about any attempts to restart the program. He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program. And he stuck by his story, despite persistent questioning by CIA investigators who still believed he was not telling the full truth.
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You guys are really not doing your case any favors by recycling old embarrassments for Bushco.
 
Tricky said:
If you get away from the right-of-center articles, you find that this turned out to be a bust. The uranium could not be used for bombs and so it was handled somewhat shoddily.
...
Sorry Ziggy, this one doesn't pass the sniff test.
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You're reading more into my claim than is actually contained in it. I'm aware that this uranium stockpile wasn't much of a threat - there's a reason that the IAEA didn't confiscate it. I'm just saying he had it, and that he didn't actually NEED to go anywhere else for the raw materials (the reason seeking uranium from africa would be significant is it would let him play with the material without the IAEA oversight he had to worry about on his known stockpiles). That was my only point. The enrichment process has always been, and will always be, the biggest barrier to nuclear weapons. Uranium ore by itself, or even processed yellowcake, really isn't that hard to come by.

There are more factors than just the half-life[/URL]. Weapons need new parts, new casings etc. Plus, there is no evidence that Saddam ever had any nukes to fix.
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Yes, of course. Had he ever had a nuke, we would be having a very different debate today. But I was only talking about the uranium itself.

Not very scary.
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Never claimed it was.
 
Ziggurat said:
Here you go:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/26/sprj.irq.centrifuge/index.html

"(CNN) -- The CIA has in its hands the critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology -- parts needed to develop a bomb program -- that were dug up in a back yard in Baghdad, CNN has learned."
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Yep. Same red herring I mentioned. You notice the item is three years old. That should be plenty of time to find the rest of the parts or some other scientists who were part of the program. Maybe they were all killed.
 
Ziggurat said:
You're reading more into my claim than is actually contained in it. I'm aware that this uranium stockpile wasn't much of a threat - there's a reason that the IAEA didn't confiscate it. I'm just saying he had it, and that he didn't actually NEED to go anywhere else for the raw materials (the reason seeking uranium from africa would be significant is it would let him play with the material without the IAEA oversight he had to worry about on his known stockpiles). That was my only point. The enrichment process has always been, and will always be, the biggest barrier to nuclear weapons. Uranium ore by itself, or even processed yellowcake, really isn't that hard to come by.
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LOL. Well, you did say it was enough to make WMD's, when in truth, all the uranium of that quality in the world wouldn't be enough to make WMDs. But that's okay. I know you are not claiming there were WMDs or even incipient WMDs, yet it appears you still don't throw out WMD's as a good reason for going into Iraq. Obviously, the US knew about this stockpile long in advance. They didn't need to invade to find it.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Feel free to apply for the JREF challenge for the paranoral ability of KNOWING how alternate timelines will turn out.
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For your information; interpreting words (in English at least), means doing so in context and attempting to understand the intended meaning behind the words (sentences even!). I could have qualified that word even more by explaining this further within quotes within the sentences, but I didn't think it was necessary, and now I have spent at least one minute explaining what is meant by sarcasm; if you take my point?:mad:
 
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