MEDIA ADVISORY: Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg

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MEDIA ADVISORY:
Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg
Press should expand focus beyond "16 words"

July 18, 2003

Five months later, the truthfulness of one claim in George W. Bush's State
of the Union address has become the focus of growing media scrutiny. The
attention media are paying to this single assertion should be part of a
larger journalistic inquiry into other misstatements and exaggerations
that have been made by the Bush administration about Iraq.

In the January 28 speech, Bush claimed that "the British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa." That assertion was similar to claims made
previously by administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin
Powell (CBS Evening News, 12/19/02), that Iraq had sought to import
yellowcake uranium from Niger, a strong indication that Saddam Hussein's
regime was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

In fact, the Niger story, as documented by journalist Seymour Hersh (New
Yorker, 3/31/03) and others, was based on crudely forged documents. In
addition, the administration's own investigation in March 2002 concluded
that the story was bogus. As one former State Department official put it,
"This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the
other side. It was done, shot down" (Time, 7/21/03).

Bush's use of the Niger forgeries has received considerable media
attention in recent days. Much of this reporting has been valuable, and
some outlets have broadened the inquiry beyond one passage in a speech.
The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, for example, suggests (7/16/03) that
the uranium claim remained in the State of the Union address because
"almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by
U.N. inspectors in Iraq."

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

The article is an email with no link that was sent to me as a subscriber. They have some interesting things at this link:
http://www.fair.org/

from time to time. I guess lately the truth hurts too much.

water.

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