False Pretenses

January 2008
False Pretenses

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Key False Statements

January 2008
Key False Statements

On September 8, 2002, Bush administration officials hit the national
airwaves to advance the argument that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes designed
to enrich uranium. In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Vice
President Dick Cheney flatly stated that Saddam Hussein "now is trying through
his illicit procurement network to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to
enrich uranium."

Condoleezza Rice, who was then Bush's national security adviser, followed
Cheney that night on CNN's Late Edition. In answer to a question from Wolf
Blitzer on how close Saddam Hussein's government was to developing a nuclear
capability, Rice said: "We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear
weapon. We do know there have been shipments going into . . . Iraq, for
instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to—high-quality
aluminum tools that only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge
programs."