31Blog Leading to
Continuation of blog series on the administration push to
invade
Fourth week of March, 2002:
Vice Pres. CHENEY:
No, not at all. What I came away with, Bob, is the sense that they share our
concern, and that--that the--the notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil
wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical
weapons, that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a
frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it. And part of my task
out there was to go out and begin the dialogue with our friends to make sure
they were thinking about it.”
Note that Cheney responds to this
question, typically, first with an innocuous generality that “they share our
concern,” and then with a segue into imaginary nuclear weapons.
Same day -- Cheney also appears on NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert:
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Enormously
important part of the world from the standpoint of the United States,
enormously complex set of problems and issues that are all sort of
interrelated; a sense of opportunity and danger, if you will, simultaneously.
It's an area that we've got major commitments in, in terms of
Same day -- Cheney appears on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer:
BLITZER: Are you still committed to trying to get U.N. weapons inspection teams
back into
CHENEY: What we said, Wolf, if you go back and look at the record is, the
issue's not inspectors. The issue is that he has chemical weapons and he's used
them. The issue is that he's developing and has biological weapons. The issue
is that he's pursuing nuclear weapons.
It's the weapons of mass destruction and what he's
already done with them. There's a devastating story in this week's New Yorker
magazine on his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq back
in 1988; may have hit as many 200 separate towns and villages. Killed upwards
of 100,000 people, according to the article if it's to be believed.
This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And
he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time, and we think that's cause
for concern for us and for everybody in the region. And I found during the
course of my travels that it is indeed a problem of great concern for our
friends out there as well too.”
Again,
Cheney sticks to general statements that our friends in the region are
concerned. He is back in
http://wid.ap.org/documents/libbytrial/jan24/DX64.pdf
All
signs indicate that the CIA effectively tries to wash its hands of the uranium
issue, since with good reason it has remained unimpressed by the evidence of
that purported Iraq-Niger uranium deal. Given how long the CIA delayed acquiring
the documents, the agency must have known or surmised early on that they were not
going to pan out as proofs.
Same day – Just hours before a deadline
imposed by the courts in a lawsuit brought by conservation groups and others,
the Department of Energy releases thousands of pages of documents from the
administration’s energy task force, spearheaded by Vice President Cheney.
Thousands of documents are missing; many others are partly blacked out. But
even the incomplete documents reveal that the administration met in spring 2001
only with representatives of the oil industry, not with environmental
organizations of consumer advocates. According to Judicial Watch, the thousands
of missing documents include emails.
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