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White House Denies Spreading Iraqi WMD Falsehoods
The Bush administration yesterday dismissed a report that found that The study issued this week by the Center for Public Integrity found that senior administration officials on more than 500 occasions following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to al-Qaeda, or both.” “I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. “As you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence,” she said. “The other thing that the study fails to do is say that after realizing that there was no WMD, as we thought as a collective body that there was, that this White House, the president set about to make reforms in the intelligence community to make sure that it doesn’t happen again,” Perino added (Agence France-Presse I/NASDAQ.com, Jan. 23). Meanwhile, a British government panel has ordered the release of a 2002 Foreign Office document on The dossier might be the first to include the now-discredited claim that an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction could be launched within 45 minutes, reports say (see GSN, Dec. 20, 2006). The Information Tribunal, which handles freedom of information cases, dismissed government arguments against releasing the document. “We will be studying the decision of the Tribunal,” a Foreign Office spokesman said (Agence France-Presse II/Middle East Online, Jan. 23).
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