All the President's Men Jude Wanniski August 11, 2003

Memo To: Editors
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: A Washington Post Blockbuster

Now that everyone has become bored with the revelations about how the Niger “yellowcake” was pumped up by the Bush team to justify a war with Iraq, here comes Walter Pincus (w/Barton Gellman) of the Washington Post with a new look at those “aluminum tubes.” One of the great investigative reporters of our time and now in his seasoned seventies, Pincus comes up with a blockbuster worthy of Woodward and Bernstein. There may be a movie here. Pincus finds all the President’s men clustered together in “WHIG,” the “White House Iraq Group,” taking little wisps of intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear intentions and shaking them up into a “mushroom cocktail” to scare the American people into support of the war. It turns out that almost nobody who knew anything about the aluminum tubes agreed with WHIG -- and they are now talking. Deep throats, so far.

I’m one of the least surprised by the Pincus/Gellman revelations because Dr. Gordon Prather has been telling me for the last year that the supposedly incriminating aluminum tubes Iraq was importing were of no use in a program to produce nuke material out of uranium oxide, yellowcake. The article explains how the scientists at the Department of Energy explained all that to the WHIG, but were “outvoted” by the “intelligence” agencies, which were being prompted by the Pentagon neo-cons. Prather has also been pointing out incessantly that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was debunking the Iraqi nuclear threat right up to the Bush decision to go to war.

The reason I direct your attention to this story, editors everywhere, is that I believe the story will have “legs,” simply adding to the mountain of evidence we already have that the war was totally unnecessary. Totally. And as the rest of the story unfolds, the American people will have to confront the fact that President Bush, at best, was duped by his chosen advisors into killing tens of thousands of Iraqis for no good reason. Tens of thousands. Here is the link. It is quite long, 5000 words. You might wish to print it out and read it at your leisure:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html

Here is Gordon Prather’s World Net Daily column of September 14, 2002.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28948


Here is his column from September 21, 2002.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29023


The reason I continue to cite Dr. Prather is that he has been so far ahead of all the intelligence agencies on these questions of weapons of mass destruction that it is laughable. The neo-con cabal barred him for service in the Bush administration because they were fearful of having a credible scientist blow up their manipulations.