Washington<\/p>\nPost<\/a><\/i>, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "said Secretary<\/p>\n
of State Colin L. Powell did not include the uranium allegation in the speech<\/p>\n
he gave to the United Nations on Feb. 5, eight days after the president spoke.<\/p>\n
She said that was because [the State Department] had questioned the matter."<\/p>\n
This suggests to me that top Administration officials realized before Feb. 5 that<\/p>\n
the State of the Union speech had included a dubious, but extremely significant,<\/p>\n
assertion. Why then did they not issue a statement casting at least partial doubt<\/p>\n
on the uranium story? Failure to withdraw a false claim of such enormous magnitude<\/p>\n
seems to me deeply unethical. It was not nearly enough to refrain from repeating<\/p>\n
the charge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Bush said in his January State of the Union Address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa—an extraordinarily important charge that could justify a preemptive war (on the assumption that Iraq would only need uranium for nuclear weapons). According to today’s Washington Post, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "said Secretary of State […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq-and-democratic-theory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}