A little over a month later, the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed this allegation as a fraud, based on a crudely forged do-*BAD WORD*-ent which had been sold to the Italian intelligence service and then was passed on to the British and the US. The Bush administration nonetheless stood by the charge for another three months. On Sunday, July 6, former amb!@#$%^&*ador Joseph Wilson IV revealed that he had traveled to Niger in February 2002, at the request of the CIA, to investigate the claim, and had found it had no credibility. Among other things, he discovered that Niger’s uranium reserves were controlled by a four-power consortium. Germany, France and Japan, among others, would have been notified of any Iraqi attempted purchase. Sure, that indicates the intel was bad. However...In the preparation of an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, in which Bush first elaborated to the American public his policy of a war to “disarm Iraq,†Tenet personally intervened with the White House to remove a reference to seeking uranium in Niger from the text. So dubious was the claim that when Secretary of State Powell laid out the US case in his February 5, 2003 speech to the UN Security Council, only a week after the State of the Union speech, he refused to include the Niger allegation, even though he agreed to include several equally specious charges, such as the claims about Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes and the suggestion that Iraq had close links to Al Qaeda. Now, let's do some simple math. Jan 28 - Oct 7 = 3 months, 3 weeks since a speech in which the CIA DIRECTOR (ya know, the intel guy) told Bush not to reference the Niger claim. That's enough time for a kindergardener to learn shapes and colors, much less someone who graduated from Yale to figure out that a "badly forged do-*BAD WORD*-ent" with the signature of a guy who hadn't held said position for 10 years before the signed date probably isn't a good idea to use as it would be lying to the american public. There's no need to even venture into the rest of that SOTU speech, of which most of the claims about Iraq were proven to be, class? FALSE. But sure, blame Clinton's Penis for the 540 dead soldiers. He did it. Bush said in his state of the union that it was Brittish Intel that Iraq had attempted to purchace the uranium. The Brittish STILL stand by this intel. If the do-*BAD WORD*-ent was the only thing the Brits were going on, don't you think they would have changed their stance by now? But do you realize that every major country thought he had a WMD program? There was NO question from ANYONE (at the time) as to weather or not he had it. The only question was if it was worth it to disarm him. Now, it turned out that a single do-*BAD WORD*-ent was a bad peice of intel for his nuke program. That doesn't say anything about the other programs everyone (including the French, Russians and Germans) believed he had. Now, lets do a little recap, shall we? #1. If he didn't have them, why the heck would he risk military force to keep "nothing" hidden? #2 He WAS in violation of the Cease Fire that ended the gulf war. The token missiles he destroyed a few weeks before the invasion removes ANY doubt about that. #3 Did anyone believe that if we left him alone, he WOULDN'T aquire WMDs? I'm not blaming Clinton for any of this terrorism. He had oppurtunites to stop it, but that doesn't mean he is responsible for it. Only the terrorists and those who supported them can be held accountable. Look at that number of dead. 540. Do you know how many Iraqi people Saddam killed a week? Do you know how many American people died in the WTC attack? Put things into perspective. I think that 540 dead soldiers liberating a country that was a clear and present danger to the security of the world is a small price to pay.