FROM Indictment for Dummies: A Reader-Companion to Vincent Bugliosi's "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder"

The following are excerpts and condensed excerpts from Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," which summarize key evidence in the case against George Bush for sending American soldiers to their deaths in Iraq under false pretenses. There is no substitute for reading the entire book, which is lively, impassioned, and thoroughly gripping. Bugliosi's writing style is that of a natural storyteller, who charges through his case with command and dry wit. Preface to Excerpts:

The evidence for the prosecution of George Bush for American soldiers' deaths in Iraq, under state law, is more concise than ever thanks to Vincent Buglioi's book, which has become a topic for discussion across the nation.

- A president has no immunity once he is out of office. He is just like everyone else. A federal pardon would have no jurisdiction over state or local prosecutions.

- Weapons of mass destruction are a side issue. Pakistan, the former Soviet republics, China, and many other countries possess them, and we aren't invading them. The real issue is whether Saddam was an imminent threat to the security of the United States, and whether he had a connection to 9/11. He was not, and he did not, and Bush knew it at the time he was telling the opposite to the American people. The classified report in which 16 US intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam was not an imminent threat was scrubbed of that conclusion, and presented to Congress. The right-wing talking point that Congress was "looking at the same intelligence" is flatly false. Congress, and the American people, were given a doctored version of the singular most important document in assessing the threat.

- Saddam was not an imminent threat because he was not a suicidal jihadi, but a rational, though brutal, dictator who wanted to live. He knew that attacking the US with WMD, or providing them to someone who would, would be suicide. He was found inside a spider hole begging "Don't shoot." He was so paranoid he slept in different bed every night. He had two different food tasters to guard against being poisoned.

- Jurisdiction for a state is established by the "effects" doctrine, a well-known part of the law which says if a state is affected by a crime which happens somewhere else; like Iraq, that state has jurisdiction.

- George Bush firmly linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein in the minds of many of the soldiers who signed up to go to Iraq. At the main gate of every military base in Iraq is a photo or image of the Twin Towers.

EXCERPTS FROM "THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER" BY VINCENT BUGLIOSI

Sections:

- Saddam Was NOT an Imminent Threat - Bush Claimed Saddam WAS an Imminent, Immediate Threat - The Drive to Link Iraq and 9/11 - Bush Used Thoroughly Discredited Information on WMD to Make the Case for War - Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix Said Iraq Was Cooperating When We Invaded - Bush Changes Ultimatum for Avoidance of War - The Drive to Link Saddam with 9/11 Was Successful. - Ignored Warnings of 9/11 - Bin Laden at Tora Bora - A Note on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Saddam Was NOT an Imminent Threat

• At the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Hussein's Iraq, after a devastating eight-year war with Iran that had concluded just three years earlier in 1988, was proven to be extremely weak. And since then, as everyone, including Bush's father, agreed, Iraq had even become much weaker because of the economic sanctions against it resulting from the Gulf War, as well as the great number of U.S. inspections that forced Iraq to destroy most of its weapons and all nuclear facilities. (Note: Hundreds of weapons inspectors were crawling about Iraq on the eve of war, in the most thorough inspections regime in history. - Editor)

• On October 15, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the press: "Iraq is Iraq, a wasted society for 10 years. They're sad. They're contained ... " The conclusive proof of the military weakness of Hussein's Iraq at the time of the war in Iraq was that it fell to Coalition forces in only three weeks, with 128 Americans dying, and 44 of these by accident or friendly fire. Thousands upon thousands of Iraqi soldiers died in the very short conflict. Army major Kevin Dunlop said in the midst of it, "It's not a fair fight. We're slaughtering them."

• The classified 2002 NIE report (the original top-secret CIA classified report which the Bush administration publicly promoted as its gold standard, its main evidence for going to war) was declassified in part in July 2003 and April 2004 says, "We judge that Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] and is capable of producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives." In the unclassified version of this report given to Congress just before the war vote, called the "White Paper," the White House, after the words "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives" in the original NIE report, inserted these words that were not in the report: "including potentially against the U.S. homeland."

• The classified NIE report stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles called UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents." But in the White Paper, the Bush administration left out a footnote to this in the original NIE report that stated that the U.S. Air Force director for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance did not agree. The Senate Select Committee said that by eliminating that footnote from the unclassified version, the White Paper given to Congress and the American public "is missing the fact that [the] agency with primary responsibility for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the [CIA] assessment.

• The White Paper said that Hussein was purchasing high-strength aluminum tubes, which were believed to be intended for use as "centrifuge rotors" in the production of nuclear weapons. But Congress and the American people were not told that the classified NIE report contained dissents from the U.S. Department of Energy as well as the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which said that they believed the tubes were "not intended" for and "not part of" any alleged Iraqi nuclear program.

• The main source the Bush administration relied upon to claim that Iraq had a fleet of mobile labs (or "factories") producing biological poisons (proven by UN inspectors to be false information before the war) was an informant aptly code-named "Curveball" by his German handlers. Curveball claimed that he had actually been a part of the team that built the labs. Although Bush used "information" from "Curveball" in several prewar speeches, including his 2003 State of the Union address, and Secretary of State Powell used the same information in his address before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, and everyone agrees that Curveball's information was one of the most important pillars Bush and his administration used to justify going to war, the CIA itself never even personally interviewed Curveball, a Baghdad-born chemical engineer who sought political asylum in Germany in 1999 after earlier being fired from his job and jailed for theft. But the biggest problem is that "Curveball" was a completely unreliable informant. Curveball's German handlers in the BND (German intelligence service), who knew him well, said that Curveball was "not a psychologically stable guy. He's not a completely normal person." Indeed, when Tyler Drumheller, in 2002 the head of clandestine services in the CIA's European division, met with the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington, the German officer told Drumheller that Curveball, a heavy drinker, had had a mental breakdown and was "crazy. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator." Just one example of a Curveball fabrication: In Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations he said that "an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer [Curveball] actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents." But the Presidential Commission on Illegal Weapons noted in its 2005 report that when the alleged 1998 accident happened, Curveball "was not even in Iraq at that time, according to information supplied by family members and later confirmed by travel records."

• By far the most serious and inexcusable change the Bush administration made in its White Paper is that the classified NIE report said that Hussein would only use the weapons of mass destruction he was believed to have if he were first attacked; that is, in self-defense. It read: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war. Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland if Baghdad feared [that] an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable ... " (Editor's note: In other words, a conclusion by 16 US intelligence agencies that Iraq would attack us only if we attacked first, was completely deleted from the report given to Congress and the American people.)

Bush Claimed Saddam Was an Imminent, Immediate Threat

• Iraq could act "on any given day"; that "before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger must be removed"; "Some ask how urgent this danger is to America. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time"; "Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime" gives weapons of mass destruction "to a terrorist ally"; Iraq constituted "a threat of unique urgency"; "Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes."

• On the evening of October 7, 2002, when he spoke from Cincinnati, Ohio, at the Museum Center, Bush told the nation that Hussein was "a great danger to our nation," either by Hussein himself using "unmanned aerial vehicles" with "chemical or biological" payloads "for missions targeting the United States" or by providing these biological or chemical weapons to a "terrorist group or individual terrorists" to attack us. Bush framed the threat as being imminent when he said this could happen "on any given day."

• The classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA to the Bush administration and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 1, 2002, gave Bush notice, prior to the speech in Cincinnati, that the CIA did not consider Hussein an imminent threat to this nation. So when Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7 that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him.

• A March 6, 2004, New York Times article, quoting several U.S. government officials, said, "U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Bush administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons." But these reports were "dismissed" because "they did not conform" to the Bush administration position. "It appears," one government official put it, "that human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting and useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq."

• The Los Angeles Times, which interviewed five senior officials from BND (German intelligence services,) reported in its November 20, 2005, edition: "The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast" when he heard Powell use Curveball's information in his speech before the United Nations as "justification for war." [7] The official told the Times: "We were shocked. Mein Gott. We had always told them [U.S.] it [what Curveball said] was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence." It was simply a report on what Curveball told them which they forwarded on to U.S. intelligence agencies (specifically the CIA and DIA), never saying the information contained in the report was verified. Another German official told the Times: "This was not substantial evidence. We made clear [to the U.S.] we could not verify the things he said."

• A CONCLUSION: What do all of the above deliberate deletions and distortions in the White Paper -- every one of which went in the same direction, to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein and Iraq -- show very clearly? They show, unmistakably, the state of mind of Bush and his people to deliberately lie and distort the truth to further their objective of persuading the American public and Congress that it was the right thing, in self-defense, to go to war with Iraq now. (Editor's note: "State of mind" is an element in the crime of murder.)

The Drive to Link Iraq and 9/11

• In an interview with Good Morning America in 2004, Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, said that on September 12, just one day after 9/11: "The President in a very intimidating way left us -- me and my staff -- with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11."

• At a meeting in August 2002 of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency on the proposed war in Iraq, Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's under secretary of Defense for Policy, showed up at the meeting (which several DIA analysts said was very unusual) and proceeded to criticize the CIA's failure to turn up any link between Bin Laden and Hussein. The obvious message was that he didn't want them to do likewise. (Feith at the time was running a rogue intelligence operation out of his office for the Bush administration that was dedicated to finding any real or imagined link between Hussein and Al Qaeda -- regardless of how poor the source -- to help make its case for war. A favorite source of Feith's shadow intelligence unit was the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a sworn enemy of Hussein whom the Bush administration at one time was grooming to replace Hussein when he fell, and whose "information" was sometimes flat-out fabricated.)

• David J. Dunford, a Middle East specialist for the State Department who was put in charge of the Iraq Foreign Ministry right after the invasion, said that prewar in the Bush administration, "you could feel there was a drive to go to war no matter what the facts."

• Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, said that in 2003 there was significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the [Bush] administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than any he had seen in his thirty-two years at the agency.

• Kenneth Pollack was a Clinton administration National Security official who strongly and outspokenly supported the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on June 20, 2003, which was after the war started, he said he had heard "many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastised for failing to come to more alarming conclusions."

• In an article in the journal Foreign Affairs on February 10, 2006, retired CIA agent Paul Pillar, who oversaw CIA intelligence assessments about Iraq from 2000 to 2005, accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq. "Intelligence was misused publicly [i.e., to the American public] to justify decisions that had already been made." He wrote that as a result of political pressure, CIA analysts began to "sugarcoat" their conclusions regarding the threat posed by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

• Though we obviously have no admission from Bush or his people that they cooked the books and distorted the truth to take us to war, the closest thing to an admission from an insider is contained in the famous "Downing Street Memo" from Bush's staunch ally in the war, Britain. The July 23, 2002, memo, written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide of British prime minister Tony Blair, was not really a memo but the minutes of a meeting between Blair and members of his war cabinet on the impending Iraq war. The minutes (memo) said that Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (the equivalent of our CIA), told Blair at the war cabinet meeting that, from his meetings in Washington with Bush administration officials, it was obvious that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

• Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit, said during the Bush administration's relentless buildup for war: "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level [Bush administration] pronouncements, and there is a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA."

* Addressing the 9/11 attacks on American soil, Bush said, "With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." In other words, Hussein helped Al Qaeda take down the Twin Towers so we went after Hussein and Iraq.

• In Bush's January 20, 2004, State of the Union address he said, "After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got." In an Independence Day speech in West Virginia on July 4, 2005, Bush said, "The war we are fighting [in Iraq and Afghanistan] came to our shores on September the 11, 2001. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people ... We will bring our enemies to justice." On February 24, 2006, in talking to the American Legion in Washington, D.C., about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush expressly said, "We're taking the fight to those that attacked us." There is only one way to interpret this: Iraq was involved in 9/11. What other interpretation can you possibly put on these words?

• Bush had an additional and very effective way to convince the American people that Hussein was involved in 9/11, and that was simply to lie to them by alleging Hussein had a close relationship with Al Qaeda. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. They're equally as bad. They work in concert," Bush said on September 25, 2002. "We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," and that "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said in his speech to the nation on October 7, 2002. "We know he's got ties with Al Qaeda," Bush said about Hussein on November 1, 2002. The Bush people correctly reasoned that if one believed these assertions, it would not take an Olympian leap of logic to conclude that Hussein most likely joined with Al Qaeda on 9/11. Particularly when most Americans already viewed Hussein as a villainous figure capable of nefarious deeds.

• To make its point of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration's modus operandi was to either flat-out lie, or present as true, evidence that they knew was highly questionable. An example was the report that surfaced soon after 9/11 that Czech security officials had been told by an informant that Mohammed Atta, an Al Qaeda terrorist who flew one of the highjacked planes into one of the Twin Towers on September 11, met in Prague on April 9, 2001, with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence agent stationed in Prague. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission investigated the matter and concluded that the meeting never took place. They learned that Czech officials were unable to confirm the story, and that the sole source for the story made his report to them after it had been reported in the Czech media that Atta had been in Prague a year earlier. What's more, they learned that the FBI had a photograph of Atta taken by a bank surveillance camera showing him inside a bank in Virginia on April 4, 2001, and his cell phone records showed his phone was used in Florida on April 6, 9 (the day he was supposed to be in Prague), 10, and 11. The Bush administration ignored all of this evidence and continued to cite the original, unconfirmed "I saw Elvis and he is still alive" report to Czech officials to lead Americans to believe before the war that Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda in 9/11.

• Though all of official Washington already knew there was no connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda, on September 8, 2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its long-awaited report in which it said that it had found no evidence that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda or that he had provided safe harbor to the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which again directly contradicted claims made by the Bush administration in its lead-up to the war. To the contrary, the committee concluded that "Saddam did not trust Al Qaeda or any other radical Islamist group and did not want to cooperate with them, ... refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support."

• A document written by Hussein (and in his possession at the time of his capture) directed his Baathist Party supporters not to join forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. He believed the latter were only eager for a holy war against the West, which was totally different from the agenda of his Baathist Party to recapture power in Iraq. And Bin Laden had the same opposition to working with Hussein. According to a CIA classified report, several years before 9/11 Al Qaeda leaders had broached the possibility to Bin Laden of working with Iraq, but Bin Laden immediately rejected the proposal.

• Despite the Bush administration's claim of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the Senate Select Committee said that U.S. intelligence had been able to confirm only one single meeting -- in 1995 in Sudan between Bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence officer -- but nothing had come of it.

• As for Zarqawi, the committee found that although he was in Baghdad for seven months in 2002, Hussein was unaware of his presence in the country, and when he later became aware of it, ordered his intelligence services to capture Zarqawi. The committee quoted a classified CIA report that concluded that Iraq "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates." (In Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he mentioned Zarqawi no fewer than twenty times, and said Iraq "today harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by Zarqawi.) Did this Senate report, which came out on September 8, 2006, stop the lies of the Bush administration? Not in the least. Condoleezza Rice, just two days later, said on Fox News that "there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda" before the war.

(Editor's note: A favorite talking point among Bush defenders is the presence of a "terrorist training camp" at Salman Pak, which included the fuselage of a Boing 707, allegedly to train hijackers. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq." The facility was discussed in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress to assert that the facility was a terrorist training camp. A DIA analyst told the Committee, "The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." PBS Frontline - who originally carried many of the allegations of Iraqi defectors - similarly noted that "U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques." In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed. Also, Salman Pak was under constant aeriel surveillance between 1995 and 2000.)

Bush Used Thoroughly Discredited Information on WMD to Make the Case for War

• One of the most notorious instances of the Bush administration using thoroughly discredited information to frighten the American public into war was the famous Niger incident. Briefly, in Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech he declared that "the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," sixteen now infamous words that have come back to haunt the Bush administration. Uranium, once enriched, can be used for nuclear weapons fuel. The country in Africa was alleged to be the former French colony of Niger, a very poor country in northern Africa. One of Niger's resources is uranium. And, indeed, the 2002 NIE said that Baghdad had been vigorously seeking to buy uranium from Niger. The only problem was that the Niger allegation was not true. The Los Angeles Times reported in its December 11, 2005, edition that Alain Chouet, the former chief of the counterintelligence division of France's national spy service (Direction Generale de la securite Exterieure), had told the paper that nearly a year before Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Niger, his group, per the CIA's request, conducted an extensive investigation in Niger, where the uranium mines are owned and operated by French companies, and found that there was absolutely no evidence to support the claim. Chouet said his spy service furnished the CIA with this information, and when the allegation continued to surface, his unit repeatedly warned the CIA that there was no truth to it. A former CIA official confirmed to the Times that the French had, indeed, given the agency this information. The Times reported further that another French government official informed the paper that when Bush said in his 2003 address he was basing his information on a British report, French intelligence viewed the British report as "totally crazy because there was no backup for this." Nevertheless, he said, the French once again conducted an investigation, turning things "upside down" to see if there was any basis for the story, but again, they found nothing.

• The original documents making the claim that the country of Niger had agreed to sell Hussein uranium were crude forgeries. The story first surfaced in Rome, after the documents were taken (along with many other documents and items like a wristwatch, stamps, perfume, etc.) in a purported January 1, 2001, burglary at the Republic of Niger's embassy there. In late September of 2001, the documents came into the hands of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, which in mid-October sent a report on the entire incident to the CIA.

• There were several indications that the documents were forged. For instance, although the main document (dated July 6, 2000) said its contents were "top secret," it was only stamped "confidential." And it bore the signature of a Niger foreign minister who hadn't served in that capacity for several years. Even the representation of Niger's national emblem was incorrect. Also, an accompanying document had the heading of an organization that had ceased to exist five months prior to the date of the document.

• The Niger documents, even though they were thoroughly discredited by U.S. intelligence, were seen by Bush and his people as providing them with the opportunity to frighten and deceive the American public. Condi Rice started the propaganda campaign on September 8, 2002, when she told CNN: "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were apparently quite taken with the mushroom cloud allusion and began using it, or variations of it, in many of their speeches to the country.

• Several days before Bush's speech to the nation in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, in which he alleged that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the country, his National Security Council sent a draft of the proposed speech, which asserted that Hussein "has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa -- an essential ingredient in the [nuclear] enrichment process -- to the CIA. The CIA faxed a reply back telling the White House to delete the uranium reference, but the White House was persistent, sending another draft deleting only the 500 metric ton reference. George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that this time he personally called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley (the current National security adviser) on October 7 and told him that the president "should not be a fact witness on this issue" because the "reporting was weak." The attempt to purchase uranium was removed from the draft, but as noted earlier, Bush still stuck in his speech that night in Cincinnati that Hussein "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." And in subsequent speeches by Bush and his administration, they used the Niger reference.

• The Department of Defense asked the CIA's National Intelligence Council, which oversees all federal agencies that deal with intelligence, to look into the Niger matter. On January 24, 2003, four days before the president's State of the Union address on January 28, the council sent a memo (drafted by national intelligence officer Robert G. Houdek) to the White House stating that "the Niger story is baseless and should be laid to rest."

• So how did the sixteen words get into Bush's address to the nation on January 28? Everyone claims ignorance, including Condoleezza Rice. Rice -- whose very job it was as national security adviser to coordinate all intelligence from the intelligence community and present it, with advice, to the president in a cohesive manner -- while acknowledging that the Niger information was "not credible," claimed, unbelievably, that no one in the White House was aware of this until after Bush gave his address. "No one knew at the time in our circles that there were doubts and suspicions" about the Niger information, she said. "We wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now." [Rice] says she never saw the January 2003 memo and even says, "I don't remember reading [an October 6, 2002] memo" from CIA director George Tenet which she admits was addressed directly to her that said the Niger-uranium claim was without merit. Why didn't she read it? "Because," she said, "when George Tenet says, 'Take it out,' we simply take it out. We don't need a rationale from George Tenet as to why to take it out." But Condoleezza, how would you even know what to take out if you didn't read the memo?

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