Iraq actively researched and later employed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from 1962 to 1991, when it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs as required by the United Nations Security Council. The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Gulf War, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials; Iraq ceased its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
Lawrence Ari Fleischer is an American media consultant and political aide who served as the 23rd White House Press Secretary, for President George W. Bush, from January 2001 to July 2003.
Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, also known as the September Dossier, was a document published by the British government on 24 September 2002. Parliament was recalled on the same day to discuss the contents of the document. The paper was part of an ongoing investigation by the government into weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, which ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq six months later. It contained a number of allegations according to which Iraq also possessed WMD, including chemical weapons and biological weapons. The dossier even alleged that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons programme.
Valerie Elise Plame is an American writer, spy, novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post. She described this period and the media firestorm that ensued as "mortifying, and I think I was in shock for a couple years".
The 2003 State of the Union Address was given by the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush, on January 28, 2003, at 9:00 p.m. EST, in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives to the 108th United States Congress. It was Bush's second State of the Union Address and his third speech to a joint session of the United States Congress. Presiding over this joint session was the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, accompanied by Dick Cheney, the vice president, in his capacity as the president of the Senate.
Judith Miller is an American journalist and commentator who is known for writing about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, but her writings were later discovered to have been based on fabricated intelligence. She worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times before joining Fox News in 2008.
Joseph Charles Wilson IV was an American diplomat who was best known for his 2002 trip to Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium; his New York Times op-ed piece, "What I Didn't Find in Africa"; and the subsequent leaking by the Bush/Cheney administration of information pertaining to the identity of his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA officer. He also served as the CEO of a consulting firm he founded, JC Wilson International Ventures, and as the vice chairman of Jarch Capital, LLC.
The Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence was the report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concerning the U.S. intelligence community's assessments of Iraq during the time leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The report, which was released on July 9, 2004, identified numerous failures in the intelligence-gathering and -analysis process. The report found that these failures led to the creation of inaccurate materials that misled both government policy makers and the American public.
The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI, which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq by attempting to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction.
Michael John Gerson was an American journalist and speechwriter. He was a neoconservative op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, a Policy Fellow with One Campaign, a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.
The Plame affair erupted in July 2003, when journalist Robert Novak revealed that Valerie Plame worked as covert employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, although the seeds of the scandal had been laid during 2001 and 2002 as the Bush administration investigated allegations that Iraq had purchased Nigerien uranium.
The Plame affair was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003.
Aluminum tubes purchased by the nation of Iraq were intercepted in Jordan in 2001. In September 2002 they were publicly cited by the White House as evidence that Iraq was actively pursuing an atomic weapon. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many questioned the validity of the claim. After the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group determined that the best explanation for the tubes' use was to produce conventional 81-mm rockets; no evidence was found of a program to design or develop an 81-mm aluminum rotor uranium centrifuge.
There are various rationales for the Iraq War that have been used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent hostilities.
A dispute exists over the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The debate centers around the question whether the invasion was an unprovoked assault on an independent country that may have breached international law, or if the United Nations Security Council authorized the invasion. Those arguing for its legitimacy often point to Congressional Joint Resolution 114 and UN Security Council resolutions, such as Resolution 1441 and Resolution 678. Those arguing against its legitimacy also cite some of the same sources, stating they do not actually permit war but instead lay out conditions that must be met before war can be declared. Furthermore, the Security Council may only authorise the use of force against an "aggressor" in the interests of preserving peace, whereas the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not provoked by any aggressive military action.
The Bush–Blair 2003 Iraq memo or Manning memo is a secret memo of a two-hour meeting between American President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that took place on 31 January 2003 at the White House. The memo purportedly shows at that point, the administrations of Bush and Blair had already decided that the invasion of Iraq would take place two months later. The memo was written by Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, who participated in the meeting.
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House is a memoir by Valerie Plame Wilson. Wilson is the former covert CIA officer whose then-classified non-official cover (NOC) identity as "Valerie Plame" was leaked to the press in July 2003, after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV, had criticized the George W. Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq War. The outing made her the center of the American political scandal known as the Plame affair. Her public outing led to her decision to resign from the CIA in December 2005, when she attempted to retire early at the age of 42. Being told that she could not collect her pension until the age of 56, she determined to write this book both as a means of telling her own story in her own words and as a means of earning income to replace her deferred retirement annuity. She encountered resistance from the CIA in the course of chronicling her work with the organization.
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder is a 2008 book by Vincent Bugliosi, a former prosecutor in Los Angeles. He argues that President George W. Bush took the United States into the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and should be tried for murder for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq.
The Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, widely known as the Butler Review after its chairman Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell, was announced on 3 February 2004 by the British Government and published on 14 July 2004. It examined the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which played a key part in the Government's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. A similar Iraq Intelligence Commission was set up in the United States. Despite the apparent certainty of both governments prior to the war that Iraq possessed such weapons, no such illegal weapons or programmes were found by the Iraq Survey Group.
