1. "Someone"

Senator Bill Nelson (FL):

I, along with nearly every Senator in this Chamber, in that secure room of this Capitol complex, was not only told there were weapons of mass destruction - specifically chemical and biological - but I was looked at straight in the face and told that Saddam Hussein had the means of delivering those biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction by unmanned drones, called UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. Further, I was looked at straight in the face and told that UAVs could be launched from ships off the Atlantic coast to attack eastern seaboard cities of the United States. Is it any wonder that I concluded there was an imminent peril to the United States?

As far as I know, it has never been revealed who that "Someone" was that told the Senators about this threat... was it Cheney? They always say he's got 'gravitas'.

Bush also claimed (threatened):

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States."

mp3 audio - or - slideshow format

2. Dick Cheney

If you missed the Downing Street Memo Hearings, this is from CIA veteran Ray McGovern's opening statement:

On August 26, 2002, less than 5 weeks after the briefing at 10 Downing Street, Vice President Cheney gave a major speech in which he said, "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the first-hand testimony of defectors including Saddam's own son-in-law."

This was a lie.

Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told us just the opposite when he defected in 1995. Again, he told us just the opposite. You can find it on page 13 of his debriefing report. He said, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." How did Kamel know this? He was in charge.

They were destroyed in July 2001. I'm sorry, in July 1991 at his order. Why? To prevent the U.N. inspectors from finding them after the war. And everything else, everything else Hussein Kamel told us checked out to be true.

Cheney's lie would have been able to stand were it not for the conscience of another patriotic whistle-blower who gave the text of Kamel's debriefing to Newsweek 4 weeks before the war as the drumbeat for war got louder and louder in early-2003. Newsweek broke the story on February 24, 2003, several weeks before the attack, but the information was suppressed by U.S. media.

mp3 audio of this statment

3. Bush

10/01/02 "Of course, I haven't made up my mind we're going to war with Iraq." - list of such lies

This theme was a huge part of selling the war. At the time, they were claiming that "war was a last resort" often, this vote in Congress was supposed to scare Saddam into disarming, it was not a "vote to remove Saddam from power", as Bush claimed.

11/11/05 "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

Again, the vote was not to remove Saddam from power - this is a HUGE lie. Wouldn't it be nice if someone in the media would actually call him on that lie in a tv interview... I dream of the day that a tv journalist decides to risk their career and really grill Bush, not just move on to the next question.

4. Condoleeza Rice

get the video

"The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda... or we could take a bolder approach..."

That's not how they sold us the war!

It wasn't like, "let's spend $300 billion to remake the Middle East" - it was "We don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of a Mushroom Cloud." (mp3)

5. Rumsfeld

(mp3 audio)

"So the money's gonna come from Iraq's Oil Revenue as everyone has said. They think it's gonna be something like $2 billion this year, they think it might be something like 15... 12 next year, they think it might be something like 18 to 20 plus... 19? - the next year."

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Other sources proving Bush's claim (that Congress had same intelligence) to be false - ie a flat out lie. But the mainstream media reports it as if it's true, just like they did with the pre-war lies.

Bush Resurrects False Claim That Congress Had "Same Intelligence" On Iraq

Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument