Democracy Now - Lies, Lies, and more Lies

Intelligence agents from the U.S. and Australia and a top U.K. researcher outline the falsehoods that led to the invasion of Iraq

Bush's position is at odds with those of his own aides, who acknowledged over the weekend that the CIA raised doubts about the claim more than four months before the speech.

Meanwhile the White House had been blaming the CIA for failing to remove the statement from drafts of the speech. On Friday CIA Director George Tenet took blame for the statement in an unusual public apology.

Yet according to the Washington Post, Tenet had personally argued the language not be included in Bush’s October address in Cincinnati.

Defending the broader decision to go to war yesterday, Bush said the decision was made after he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

This contradicts the events leading up to war when Saddam Hussein admitted the inspectors into Iraq and Bush subsequently opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the U.S. had no new evidence that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction prior to the attack in March. He insisted the invasion was still justified.

Departing press secretary, Ari Fleischer, used a briefing yesterday to castigate the press for a "media feeding frenzy that misinterprets why America went to war."

Meanwhile in Britain, responding to the controversy over the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw cited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear bomb. He failed to mention the evidence was 12 years old.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today program, Straw referred to Mahdi Obeidi, an Iraqi scientist, who has handed parts and documents needed to build a gas centrifuge system that enriches uranium to American officials. What Straw did not say was that Obeidi had buried the evidence in his garden as long ago as 1991.