Iraq Interviews Available: “Had I known…”

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On July 11, 2003, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the press aboard Air Force One: “Had I known that there was a forged document here, would I put this in the State of the Union? No.”

RAHUL MAHAJAN
Mahajan, author of the new book Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond, has a Ph.D. in particle physics. In an IPA news release on Oct. 8, 2002 [www.accuracy.org/bush/], refuting President Bush’s claim made in his Cincinnati speech that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons,” Mahajan stated: “There’s no evidence that Iraq has gotten anywhere with seeking nuclear weapons. The pitiful status of evidence in this regard is shown by claims in e.g. Blair’s dossier that Iraq is seeking uranium from Africa, year and country unspecified… Unenriched uranium does Iraq little good, since enrichment facilities are large, require huge investment, and cannot easily be hidden.” Mahajan said today: “The administration has been claiming that they did not know that the Niger document was a forgery. Why then did the U.S. refuse for months to turn over this ‘proof’ to the International Atomic Energy Agency? When it finally turned over the evidence, the IAEA found out in a few hours that the documents were very crude forgeries. Considering the numerous other falsehoods and misrepresentations, it’s clear that this is a picture not of carelessness about one item but of a concerted drive to war based on lies, to serve motives that are becoming clearer — a military presence in the heart of the Middle East and control of the world’s second-largest oil reserves.”
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GLEN RANGWALA
Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, broke the story that the British intelligence dossier endorsed by Colin Powell was plagiarized from the Internet. In an IPA news release on Jan. 30, 2003 [www.accuracy.org/2003/], titled “Fact-Checking and Spin-Checking President Bush,” Rangwala responded to the claim that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” by stating: “The IAEA have repeatedly asked the U.S. and UK for information about this, without success.” On July 13, 2003, he co-authored an op-ed titled “20 Lies About the War” in the British newspaper The Independent. He said today: “The Bush administration is now claiming that the British have other material that they have not seen which supports the claim that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Africa. Why then isn’t this material turned over to the IAEA? And what could possibly be so secret that it cannot be shown to the Americans at the highest levels?”

DIANE PERLMAN
Perlman, a clinical psychologist and a contributor to The Psychology of Terrorism, said today: “We have to deal with both content (correcting facts and exposing lies) as well as process — the mystification and psychological manipulation of the public, exaggeration of a threat (a universal strategy for eliciting support for arms and wars)… There is an unquestioned presumption that even if all of this were true, war would be an appropriate response…”
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MARK CRISPIN MILLER
Miller is professor of media studies at New York University and author of The Bush Dyslexicon. On an IPA release dated March 18, 2003 [ www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031803.htm], titled “White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit,” Miller stated: “The most successful lie is that Iraq is tied to 9-11.” He said today: “The White House keeps hinting that Iraq was implicated in the terrorist attacks. On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice repeatedly implied that Islamic terrorism had been aided by Saddam Hussein. With him gone, she said, the Middle East no longer has ‘an atmosphere in which you have ideologies of hatred spawning people who slam airplanes in the World Trade Centers [sic].’ That claim is groundless. Before the war, there was no evidence of any such connections — and, in Iraq, no evidence has come to light these last three months.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Norman Solomon, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167


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