White House Lied About Iraq Nuclear Programs

An anonymous reader writes "This New York Times article reports that in 2002, the Bush Administration's assertions that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program were based on evidence that was doubted by the government's foremost nuclear security experts. Specifically, aluminum tubes most likely meant for small artillery rockets were interpreted by the administration as parts for uranium centrifuges." In a nutshell: while Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld were announcing to the American public that these tubes were slam-dunk evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions, they already knew that there was completely overwhelming evidence that the tubes were just for artillery rockets (as Iraq said) and that the tubes were totally unsuitable for use in centrifuges.

Comments

Re:Contempt of Congress

[beldraen]

Yes and no. The President is bound by all laws, but he cannot be tried while in office. He must either finish his position in office or be impeached and removed from office before he can be tried; however, it seems to be standing policy by each new president to pardon the previous president, as each wants the same from the following president. I wouldn't count on Bush being tried in a court of law unless he personally killed someone, in cold blood, with 10 witnesses, and was caught grinning into the camera.

michael's madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael: When you rip off posts from Drudgereport.com, The New Scientist and other well-read sites, make sure you follow the thread through to the point where they explain that the story was nothing more than a political hit piece.

For instance, check out an earlier NY Times piece that actually reinforces the administration's position. Or you could review that this hit piece was to be joined by CBS News in another attempted effort to push fraudulant information and sucker all the sheep out there.

Or should we expect a post from you about "critical national guard documents damage Bush" and experience a deja vu Slashdot experience?

Slashdot readers - you too can read it before Michael (or some alleged anonymous reader, just like the CBS anonymous sources) reads it and makes up a libelous headline damaging Slashdot credibility and objectivity:

Drudge Report
The New Scientist

and other excellent critical reads include:

Power Line
Weekly Standard
Little Green Footballs

Oh... I should warn you - if you're determined to vote for Kerry in spite of everything, do NOT go to the any of the above sites. It'll destroy any opportunity for ignorance you might have.

Re:High tolerance tubes

[sweatyboatman]

as the NY Times article points out, similar quality aluminum is found in tin cans and other commercial products. And the same material (with similar specs) was used to make rockets for the US Military.

If you RTFA it's very clear that the tubes would be completely useless in a nuclear program. And that the specs were consistent with the Iraqi army's requirements for these rockets.

And, as the article shows, all this was known to the current administration months before the Iraq war began.

Great reporting by the Times. Very eye-opening.

So the argument that Sadam was developing nuclear weapons was based on the discredited Yellowcake report from Niger. And on these aluminum tubes. Both of which were known to be suspect before the war began.

LIAR

[Doc Ruby]

What the hell are you talking about? They threatened to fire the Medicare auditor if he told anyone their actual estimated cost, because it exceeded Congressmembers' upper tolerance of $400B by at least 10%, now nearing 50%, before the program is even fully underway. This is the truth, and your tired denial with "liberal" as a smokescreen is sleazy. How do you like Representative Tom DeLay's criminal inducements to his fellow Republican, to vote for the bill in exchange for DeLay backing the reluctant Rep's son's campaign? Your own words apply only to the extent of not believing your Slashdot posts: they're part of the pack of lies destroying this country. Happy?

Re:LIAR

[james_in_denver]

I beg to disagree, Exhibit "A" was the forged documents purporting that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. It took the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency all of TWO HOURS to prove those documents were forgeries. The sophisticated tool that they used?????? Google Seems a signatory on that forged document HAD BEEN DEAD for a number of years. Didn't stop Bush & Co, (or even, sadly, Colin Powell) from ranting and raving about "mushroom clouds"....

Re:High tolerance tubes

[OWJones]

I read this story Saturday evening and the tubes that Iraq was shopping for were of a much greater tolerance than needed for their small artilery rockets.

Wrong wrong wrong WRONG!!!!

From the story:

It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of those tubes, also made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making rockets. According to the international agency, the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length, with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick.

The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a perfect match.

That finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on Intelink, a Web site for the intelligence community and the White House.

[...]

But that made no sense, they argued in a new report, because Iraq wanted tubes made at tolerances that "far exceed any known conventional weapons." In other words, Iraq was demanding a level of precision craftsmanship unnecessary for ordinary mass-produced rockets.

More to the point, those analysts had hit on a competing theory: that the tubes' dimensions matched those used in an early uranium centrifuge developed in the 1950's by a German scientist, Gernot Zippe.

[...]

Over and over, the reports restated Joe's main conclusions for the C.I.A. - that the tubes matched the 1950's Zippe centrifuge design and were built to specifications that "exceeded any known conventional weapons application." They did not state what Energy Department experts had noted - that many common industrial items, even aluminum cans, were made to specifications as good or better than the tubes sought by Iraq. Nor did the reports acknowledge a significant error in Joe's claim - that the tubes "matched" those used in a Zippe centrifuge.

The tubes sought by Iraq had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters. When Energy Department experts checked with Dr. Zippe, a step Joe did not take, they learned that the walls of Zippe tubes did not exceed 1.1 millimeters, a substantial difference.

To sum up: a low-level analyst found an old centrifuge design that he thought the Iraqis were copying. He ignored the fact that the tubes were an exact match of rockets the Iraqis used earlier, and didn't even bother to ask the inventor of the original centrifuge whether or not the tubes could be used in that centrifuge.

End of story, WRT the "much greater tolerance" line.

-jdm

Energy Task Force had maps of Iraqi oilfields

[revscat]

I'd like to take this moment to remind everyone that Judicial Watch, that great thorn in the side of the Clinton administration, was able to get a FOIA request approved for the Cheney Energy Task force. This gives a LOT of credence to the "war for oil" thing:

CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE DOCUMENTS FEATURE MAP OF IRAQI OILFIELDS (Their caps, not mine)

First three docs:

Iraq Oil Map.PDF

Iraq Oil Foreign Suitors.2.PDF

Iraq Oil Foreign Suitors.1.PDF

So, before the war, the Vice President, like, has this task force thing, and they won't tell anybody what they talked about. But they had a map of the Iraqi oilfields AND lists of people who would be intersted in those fields. Oh, and the VIP himself? He's still pulling down mad money from Halliburton, to the tune of about half-a-mill a year.

But "War for Oil"? Man, that's just CRAZY talk right there. CRAZY.

Re:US Govt == Hypocrites

[Flamingcheeze]

Those very "agreements" that Germany was forced to sign were the direct cause of Naziism. Check your history.

The brutal treatment of Germany by the Allies after WWI was beyond inhuman. It created an incubator for fascism. We are foolishly repeating history now in the Middle East, and children being born today will pay for it dearly. I guarantee it.

They lied

[Tony]

Much of the evidence presented as "proof" had been discredited before the President's State of the Union address that presented the evidence as unequivocable. The yellow-cake evidence had already been determined to be a forgery, the British intelligence report that figured prominently had been shown to be a cribbed-together mishmash of outdated sources (a 5-year old thesis available off the 'net, and some stuff from one of the Jane's military references), the the "aluminum tubes" evidence had been widely discredited by experts in the nucular field. I read all of this after the UN presentation by Collin Powell, and before President Bush's State of the Union address.

The one piece of evidence that was kept rather quiet, mentioned obliquely as reports from defected Iraqi citizens, turned out to come from one or two con artists.

There was not one single piece of evidence that was valid, and anybody following the leadup to war could tell. Anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the evidence was labelled a "liberal," as if it were a dirty word. Hell, even Anne Coulter called those folks traitors.

To place so many citizens in harm's way (and to perform a national variety of vigilante justice) based on such questionable evidence took either an unbelievable amount of self-deception, or a desire to attack Iraq *in spite* of the evidence.

Considering there was *no link whatsoever* between bin Laden and Hussien, I can only interpret the evidence in one way: President Bush intentionally lied to the US citizens to follow a path to war with a beaten enemy. I don't know why. The "liberal" in me thinks it might be to benefit Halliburton and Bechtel. The realist in me realizes it might be nothing more than a distraction from the complete disaster in Afghanistan. Or there might have been a *real* reason to go after Iraq, one that had to be hidden from the world.

Considering the price tag in human life and our nation's honor and credibility, I'm not sure which would be worse.

Re:I see Slashdot is the new Fox News

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush Campaign Offices Burglarized

You officially fail it.

Scott Ritter

[hankaholic]

Google for Scott Ritter sometime.

Scott Ritter was a U.S. Marine who served in the Gulf war and acted as chief inspector of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM). He resigned his role as chief inspector after the CIA was caught trying to into the inspection teams in 1998.

In an interview with Paula Zahn, one of the United States' leading experts on Iraqi weapons programs left no question as to his feelings on the justification for war:

RITTER: What makes them convinced? What evidence do they have? We're talking about going to war here, Paula. [...] So frankly speaking, I'm going to need a hell of a lot more than some aluminum tubes before I'm convinced there's a case for war. The bottom line is in 1998 the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iraq had no nuclear weapons capability, none whatsoever, zero. So how suddenly are they now an emerging nuclear threat? We'd better have a heck of a lot more to go on than some aluminum pipes.

ZAHN: Let's talk more about what some say is the only independent voice in this whole argument, and that is the International Institute for Strategic Studies. And you just cited the study. In this report, it suggests -- and this report is just out this morning -- that Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months if it had foreign help.

Let me read to you what the conclusion was, that, "War sanctions and inspections have reversed and retarded but not eliminated Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long range missile capabilities, nor removed Baghdad's enduring interest in developing these capabilities."

RITTER: Paula, what do we have here? Rhetoric? Where's the facts? Enduring interest in weapons capability? What does that mean? What evidence do they cite for this enduring interest? You know, ballistic missiles, they say he has 12. What, did they grow? Where are they? They didn't have 12 when I was a weapons inspector.

Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? They talk about bulk agent in terms of Iraq's biological weapons program. What bulk agent? Where did they make it? Bulk agent has a three year lifetime in terms of storage in ideal conditions. The last time Iraq was known to have produced bulk agent was in 1990. That stuff, even if they held onto it, is no longer viable. So to have bulk agent today, Iraq would have had to reconstitute a manufacturing base in biological weapons. Where is it?

This report is absurd. It has zero factual basis. It's all rhetoric. It's all speculative and, frankly speaking, it's meaningless without, you know, with the sad exception that hawks in the Bush administration are going to point to this as justification for war.

We need a heck of a lot more than this if we're going to talk about sending our forces off to fight in a war in Iraq.

Scott Ritter was bashed by the media, who painted him as a traitor to the United States for failing to accept the White House's justifications. It's interesting how the media, often accused of being quite liberal, went out of their way to discredit Ritter and show loyalty to the White House in late 2002, yet reported of just which mouths had engulfed Clinton's penis could hardly be avoided during Monicagate.

The real story here isn't that the White House lied -- if you pay attention, White House officials "flip-flop" so much over the supposed motivations for war that even their caricature of Kerry looks rock solid. The real story here is that the media fell for the Iraq justification (or lack thereof) hook, line, and sinker, while doing the dirty work of discrediting Scott Ritter and ignoring or discrediting any other voices asking for more investigation for military action against Iraq.

You want links? Try these:

Documentation of "flip-flops" by the "liberal" media -- reporting the truth (that UN inspectors voluntarily left in December 1998), then

Re:Does it matter?

[Boronx]

1. His response in the days after 9/11

He let precious minutes fly by while the nation was under attack. There were several actions he could have taken to defend the country that he didn't because he sat motionless in a classroom.

2. He doesn't waffle on the issues

Bush said war was a last resort, but rushed to war, pulling out the UN inspectors when they wanted more time and had seen increasing cooperation.

Bush said he'd go after any country that helped the terrorists, but he's covered up involvement by the Saudi government in 9/11.

Bush attacked Saddam for phony nukes, while North Korea has an assembly line. Bush knew about the NK nukes weeks before the Iraq vote but decided not to disclose it.

Bush was against Homeland Security Department until it started hurting him in the polls.

Bush was against a Senate 9/11 investigation until it started hurting him in the polls.

Bush was against the 9/11 commission until it started hurting him in the polls.

Bush was against Condi testifying to the commission until it started hurting him in the polls.

Bush imposed steel tariffs until it started hurting him in the polls, he quickly repealed them.

We attacked Iraq to disarm a dicator. Bush told Saddam if he disarmed we wouldn't attack.

We attacked Iraq because "of 9/11".

We attacked Iraq to bring Democracy to the mid-east.

Bush couldn't handle France's input on Iraq, but apparntly from Thursday's debate, he won't bat an eye lash towards North Korea without Chinese approval.

3. George is unpolished

George is a product of Yale, Andover, Harvard, and the state of Connecticut. Look at any private video of him before his first gubernatorial run.

4. George is a personally moral man

Q: when your not talking politics, what do you and [your father] talk about?"

BUSH: "pussy"

-to david fink of the hartford courant, at the 1998 republican convention, salon, 9 april 2000

Bush famously does not go to church.

5. He tells us we can succeed, not that we will fail

George Bush believes that what we are doing in Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Sudan is the best that we can do. That it's Hard Work. We all know that we can do better. That we could have donebetter.

Re:Whaaaa?

[demachina]

Poland is in the "bribed" part of the coalition. Their foreign minister flat out admitted last summer they were in Iraq to get a piece of the oil field action. Gotta give the guy kudos for honesty though I should think it would be a career limiting trait for a diplomat.

Its unfortunate Kerry didn't know about this statement and didn't throw it back in George's face when George was losing it on "Don't forget Poland".

One thing I'll give the British over the U.S. they make their Prime Minister stand up in front of the opposition and take a grilling. Its pretty obvious George is living in a cocoon, no one ever challenges him, and the first time he had to face some from Kerry he pretty much lost it. I also wager he simply can't deal with the issues unless its regurgitating his "message" or Cheney is whispering in his ear what to say. The debate seemed to prove that.

I'd have to say there may be at least a grain of truth to the rumours circulating about George's mental health. You don't come out of years of acute alcoholism and drug use, untreated, and not carry deep mental scaring, especially when you are under major pressure. The guy simply doesn't have what it takes to hold any position with any power.

Re:Whaaaa?

[targo]

If you care so much about global opinion why are you trashing this fine international coalition that our heroic president has formed. What do you say to Tony Blair? What do you say to Poland? Poland! Why does everybody forget that we were supported by Poland!

I know you're being sarcastic here but it should be noted that the governments of American allies pretty much went to war against the public opinion of their population (and some of them are paying for it now), that includes both Britain and Poland. In many cases (including Estonia, my own native country), "official" approval for US policy was achieved by simple bribery and threats. There was probably no country in the world but the US (where it took a lot of brainwashing and spineless media parroting everything the administration said) where the people would actually have believed the story of Bush administration.

What does Poland say to US?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you say to Poland? Poland! Why does everybody forget that we were supported by Poland!


The real question is what does Poland say to us. Here's what the President of Poland says about the Bush administration's justification to going into Iraq:

"That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride."

-President Aleksander Kwasniewski
(March 18, 2004)

Great way to build a coalition.

Full Story

Re:Whaaaa?

[Fnkmaster]

Rough breakdown of foreign troops deployed in Iraq: American = 170,000, British = 8,000, S. Korea = 2,800, Italy = 2,700, Poland = 2,400, Ukraine 1,500, Netherlands 1,400. Then about 20 other countries have contributed between 10 and 700 troops, neglible amounts in mostly supporting or specialized functional roles (this list includes Australia, with about 250 troops actually in Iraq, and Japan with 550).

Of these others, South Korea depends heavily on the US for their own national defense, Berlusconi and Bush are actually buddies, Poland has already stated they were duped by the US on the WMD issue, and were offered financial incentives, and I'm betting Ukraine and Netherlands have similar stories.

In the total breakdown, the US represents about 85% of the troops currently deployed, the British about 7%, and a bunch of other countries have contributed a token amount of troops to show their 'support' for the country that their economies depend on. As you can see, it's not just about the breadth of the coalition as it is about its depth, and the types of countries that are 'members' and their reasons for being there.

Re:Explaining that 45%

[FredFnord]

How about Reasoned Compromise: "May not agree with his every last item of policy, but in comparing the two likely candidates, he is at least closer to the preferred side of issues involving government spending, taxation, business incentives, and military functions."

Um... yeah. Except that, let's see, where the heck did I see that article? Ah, here:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/28/comedy.po litics/
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/20 04_03_late-night-knowledge-2_9-21_pr.pdf

Of a simple six-question quiz on stances that the candidates hold on major issues, the average person got less than three questions right.
'Who wants to privatize Social Security?'
'Which one doesn't like assault weapons?'
'What is the cutoff income for Kerry's tax increases?' (50k, 100k, 200k, or 500k)
'Who is a former prosecutor?'
'Who favors making the recent tax cuts permanent?'
'Who wants to make it easier for labor unions to organize?'

People who didn't watch any 'late-night comedy show' scored 2.6 out of 6 right. 2.6. Now, even being charitable and assuming that people can't remember numbers (200k, hint hint) and that people don't remember that before becoming President, GWB's only political experience AT ALL was as Governor of Texas, that's still totally utterly pathetic. Do you realize that it means that MORE THAN HALF of those surveyed scored between 0 and 2 out of 6? And that only one of the questions had more than two possible choices?

If you answer that quiz randomly, you get 2.75 right, on average. Let me say that again. If you don't speak English, and just randomly pick an answer for each question, you get a 2.75.

People who watched Jay Leno got 2.95, David Letterman viewers got 2.91, and viewers of The Daily Show, astoundingly enough, got 3.59. Frequent (more than 3 days a week) network news viewers got 40% right, frequent cable news viewers got 48% (they didn't differentiate out Fox viewers, which might have told a different story), and newspaper readers got 46%. Less than half! The only group of people who averaged more than half were viewers of The Daily Show, who were what, 14% more informed than newspaper readers? (Wow, not to digress or anything, but that's kind of neat.)

Anyone who was paying any attention at all got six, and could have done so while drunk and standing on his or her head. The amount of illegal substances that would have been required to make me score 2 would have incapacitated a small midwestern town.

The American public doesn't even know what the two candidates stand for, and you think they're seriously giving weighted averages of all of the different stances and coming up with a decision?

The extent of your optimism awes me.

-fred

Re:Whaaaa?

[Some Bitch]

Is it, in fact, enough safer that we can feel justified in basically ticking off the entire rest of the world aside from England

Don't think we're not pissed off, we are. We just don't blame you, we blame Blair for being such a slimy bastard and ignoring the largest protest ever held in the UK. Oh, and your media for skewing things to the point where a large part of the US has gone from opposing the war to supporting it (insert Goebels quote about patriotism here).

Re:Whaaaa?

[Spyffe]

No. George Bush claimed in his State of the Union address of the 28th, that Saddam was trying to buy tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

These tubes were made of the wrong kind of aluminum for uranium enrichment. They were too long and too narrow to be suitable. This was in the IAEA report the Bush administration, and the entire UN Security Council, had seen. It was not speculation, it was based on real tubes seized in Jordan. The administration, with Bush as its mouthpiece, lied.

In his speech to the Security Council which underscored the need for war, Colin Powell told the Council that the tolerances for the tubes were better than for any rocket even the US uses. He had, actually, been informed that the tubes were manufactured to comparable tolerances as US rocket tubes. The administration, with Colin Powell as its mouthpiece, lied.

Seems like much ado about nothing, right? But this is the cornerstone of the Administration's belief that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. These tubes were the only hard evidence they had going for them.

They weren't just willfully gullible in taking biased reports from a no-name in the CIA which contradicted evidence from DoE experts (a crime of which Kerry and Edwards are also guilty), but they willfully lied. This is now clear.

Fake Uranium Evidence

[Izaak]

Seems like much ado about nothing, right? But this is the cornerstone of the Administration's belief that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. These tubes were the only hard evidence they had going for them.

Bush also claimed that Sadam was trying to buy uranium from Africa, even though the administration knew there was no evidence of that. And the scandal goes even deeper than that. When the man they assigned to investigate the uranium rumors (retired ambassador Joseph Wilson) revealed the truth (that the evidence was forged), the administration retaliated against him by revealing to the world that his wife was a CIA agent (thus placing her life in danger and risking American security).

And before you discount this as liberal spin, the reported who outed Wilson's wife is Robert Novak, a well known conservative reporter, and he has confirmed that his sources were a pair of senior whitehouse staff member. This assertion is backed up by additional investigation from the Washington Post. A special investigator has been appointed, and even the President has been questioned. The rumors abound now that the two staff member have already been identified (the names have even been leaked), but the Bush administration has put pressure on the FBI to hold off on the arrests until after the election.

Of course there is no proof that Bush himself ordered the retaliation against Wilson, or that he even knew about it, and in fact I believe it very possible that he did not. The evidence so far indicates a couple of staffers reporting directly to Vice President Cheney. It is entirely possible that Cheney took this action upon himself without consulting with the President. Either way, a couple of alarming things remain: The administration used the uranium evidence to support their case for the Iraq war even though they had been told the evidence was bunk. Furthermore, senior staffmembers in the whitehouse broke the cover of an undercover CIA agent (an agent involved in the hunt for weapons of mass distruction no less)... a treasonous act by any measure.

Re:Whaaaa?

[Trailwalker]

Apprdoximately 50% of the eligible voters actually bothered in 2000. This means only 25% of the eligible voters wanted either one. Actually, a bit less than that. Nadar and other third party candidates drew off some votes.

A "none of the above" choice would draw more voters.

Re:Israel

[wass]

Well, newsflash- if the right to vote is contingent on religion, you're not a democracy.

Newsflash to you - Arabs can vote in Israel. There are even several Arab officials elected to the Knesset (ie, the Israeli parliament).

Re:Whaaaa?

[mr100percent]

According to the White House, the reports that Iraq submitted did not show that they were destroyed. I found it amazing that 24 hours after the Iraqi government released a 1500 page report disclosing what they had and used to have, the White House was calling it lies and omissions. Who reads that fast?

By March 2003, Iraq was destroying its Al-Samoud II missiles, the ones that if you stripped of all payloads somehow went slightly further than the UN sanctions allowed. Everybody knew it wasnt a big deal, a technicality really, as empty missiles would not be a threat and they'd never launch them empty anyway, but Iraq was getting rid of them anyway, they saw the threat of invasion looming.

Quickly skimming the UNMOVIC and IAEA inspections reports, I don't see any UN assertions that there were WMDs. In fact, the conclusion states" "we have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons programme since the elimination of the programme in the 1990s."

Cheney has signed away those 433,000 options...

[LinuxParanoid]

To quote from a nice paragraph at factcheck.org:

The "Gift Trust Agreement" the Cheney's signed two days before he took office turns over power of attorney to a trust administrator to sell the options at some future time and to give the after-tax profits to three charities. The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney's home state), 40% will go to George Washington University's medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education , a charity that provides financial aid for low-income students in Washington, DC to attend private and religious schools.

The agreement states that it is "irrevocable and may not be terminated, waived or amended," so the Cheney's can't take back their options later.

The actual PDF of the agreement can be found here.

That's what you're talking about, right?

--LP

Re:Let's apply a little criticle thinking here

[AdamHaun]

Or the other option--he's part of an ideological movement which believes that attaining American "global leadership" should be our mission in the future, and that Iraq is a good first step to gaining a foothold in the Middle East. Check out:

http://www.newamericancentury.org

Here's their statement of principles(note the signatures):

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinc iples.htm

Look, here's a letter to President Clinton from 1998 advocating a regime change in Iraq, for the same ridiculous reasons(again, note the signatures):

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonlette r.htm