CNN quoting Bush:
"..."Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person, and America is lucky to have her service," Bush said. "Period."..."

Yahoo News quoting Bush:
"...We've got no finer Vice President in our history than Dick Cheney..."

Scoop (NZ) quoting Bush:
"...[Colin Powell] has done a fabulous job..."

"...said, "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], that they were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."..."

Also see: Joseph Curl (Washington Times) via Commondreams and Dwight Meredith (P.L.A.)

"...we believe [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons..." 

Dana Milbank (Washington Post):
"..."We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney, March 16 (aides later said Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein's nuclear programs, not weapons)..."

Dick Cheney on Meet The Press - 9/14/03:
"...I did misspeak. I said repeatedly during the show weapons capability. We never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon..."

Compassiongate: Enough is enough with this game of Cheney or Bush or others going publicly to big crowds and talking about weapons and then aides clarifying they were referring to programs, or vice versa. There is no excuse for playing loose with the facts and misleading the public and taking one's own sweet time to make a public statement that one "misspoke" a lot of compassion here. (Not to mention that even the claim that he had a nuclear program was disputed by the IAEA back then.)

John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman (The New Republic):
"...CIA analysts also generally endorsed the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which concluded that, while serious questions remained about Iraq's nuclear program--many having to do with discrepancies in documentation--its present capabilities were virtually nil. The IAEA possessed no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program and, it seems, neither did U.S. intelligence. In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea. The review said only, "We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear program." This vague determination didn't reflect any new evidence but merely the intelligence community's assumption that the Iraqi dictator remained interested in building nuclear weapons. Greg Thielmann, the former director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), tells The New Republic, "During the time that I was office director, 2000 to 2002, we never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program."..."

Claiming Saddam's Aluminum tubes purchase was for uranium enrichment

Repeated claim even after accuracy was challenged

e.g., 

Bush

"...Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons..."

Bush

"...Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon...."

Rice for Bush

"...[said that] Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes...were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." ..."

Joby Warrick (Washington Post):
"...Bush cited the aluminum tubes in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly and in documents presented to U.N. leaders. Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both repeated the claim, with Rice describing the tubes as "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." ...
After weeks of investigation, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq are increasingly confident that the aluminum tubes were never meant for enriching uranium, according to officials familiar with the inspection process. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.-chartered nuclear watchdog, reported in a Jan. 8 preliminary assessment that the tubes were "not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment but were "consistent" with making ordinary artillery rockets -- a finding that meshed with Iraq's official explanation for the tubes. New evidence supporting that conclusion has been gathered in recent weeks and will be presented to the U.N. Security Council in a report due to be released on Monday, the officials said. ..
in Britain, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a Sept. 24 white paper that there was "no definitive intelligence" that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program. .."

Peter Beinart (The New Republic):
"...the IAEA contradicted Bush once again, arguing that the 81-millimeter aluminum tubes were "not directly suitable" for enriching uranium and were more likely meant for conventional artillery rockets. As David Albright, a physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector currently at the Institute for Science and International Security has explained, the 81-millimeter tubes, with their small diameter and thick walls, were poorly designed to enrich uranium. Indeed, he notes, "No one has ever ... produced significant amounts of uranium in a cascade of such machines." In fact, when Iraq was enriching uranium in the late '80s, it used tubes of an entirely different kind...
...gas-centrifuge specialists at the Department of Energy (DOE) were skeptical. "I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," one DOE expert told The Guardian on October 9, 2002...
And on February 5, Powell repeated the claim once again. In particular, he noted that the tubes Iraq tried to buy were "anodized"--they contained a thin, anti-corrosive film supposedly necessary for use in nuclear centrifuges. But the anodization actually undermines Powell's case. Since "bare aluminum without any coating is resistant to corrosion by uranium hexafluoride, the process gas in a centrifuge," Albright wrote in a March 10 report, "a well-known unclassified fact is that anodization is not necessary for a centrifuge." By contrast, the conventional rockets Iraq purchased from Italy in the '80s had corroded in storage, which helps explain why Baghdad wanted to purchase anodized tubes when it tried to build more such rockets in 2000. Last Friday, ElBaradei delivered the final blow. The IAEA had discovered blueprints, invoices, and notes showing that, in its quest to build better artillery rockets, Iraq had for 14 years sought noncorrosive tubes of exactly the type Powell cited..."

Also see this CBS News interview with Greg Thielmann

Uranium from Africa

State Dept. for Bush

"...said [Iraq's] declaration "ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger."..."

Bush

"...the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa..."

Rumsfeld for Bush

"...[Saddam Hussein's] regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa..."

Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker):
"...On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said. One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.” The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office. It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake (our emphasis)...The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.” The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me..."

Also see: Peter Beinart (The New Republic), Chris Smith (Mother Jones), Joby Warrick (Washington Post), Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank (Washington Post, MSNBC), BuzzFlash, Chris Smith (Mother Jones), FT

(for the Niger statement only; the rest is covered in the post-invasion summary below)

"...stated that in 1998, "information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue."..."

Cheney for Bush

"...we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past..."

The following quote is provided to show that the Bush administration had great confidence in the defector Hussein Kamel since his quote is presented on the right

Bush admin
"...Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.”..."

John Barry (Newsweek):
"...Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them. KAMEL WAS SADDAM Hussein’s son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs. Kamel told his Western interrogators that he hoped his revelations would trigger Saddam’s overthrow. But after six months in exile in Jordan, Kamel realized the United States would not support his dream of becoming Iraq’s ruler after Saddam’s demise. He chose to return to Iraq—where he was promptly killed. Kamel’s revelations about the destruction of Iraq’s WMD stocks were hushed up by the U.N. inspectors, sources say, for two reasons. Saddam did not know how much Kamel had revealed, and the inspectors hoped to bluff Saddam into disclosing still more. And Iraq has never shown the documentation to support Kamel’s story. Still, the defector’s tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.
        Kamel said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions. The stocks had been destroyed to hide the programs from the U.N. inspectors, but Iraq had retained the design and engineering details of these weapons..."

John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman (The New Republic):
"...Cheney was correct that the IAEA had failed to uncover Iraq's covert uranium-enrichment program prior to the Gulf war. But, before the war, the IAEA was not charged with playing the role of a nuclear Interpol. Rather, until the passage of Resolution 687 in 1991, the IAEA was merely supposed to review the disclosures of member states in the field of nuclear development to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [CG emphasis] By contrast, in the '90s, the IAEA mounted more than 1,000 inspections in Iraq, mostly without advance warning; sealed, expropriated, or destroyed tons of nuclear material; and destroyed thousands of square feet of nuclear facilities. In fact, its activities formed the baseline for virtually every intelligence assessment regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons program [CG emphasis]..."

Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker):
"...The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections [CG emphasis]. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” [CG emphasis] When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”
[CG emphasis] Kamel also cast doubt on the testimony of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. Hamza settled in the United States with the help of the I.N.C. and has been a highly vocal witness concerning Iraq’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told the U.N. interviewers, however, that Hamza was “a professional liar.” [CG emphasis] He went on, “He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. . . . He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go.”..."

(1 for compassion on Hamza (year and credibility) plus 1 for compassion on the effectiveness of UN inspections on detecting Saddam's nuclear weapons)

"..."We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law." ..."

"...said that in the early 1990s Iraq "had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb."..."

"..."Why is Iraq still trying to procure [...] the special equipment needed to transform [uranium] into material for nuclear weapons?"...Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors. [...] there is no doubt in my mind. These illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program"..."

Powell for Bush

"...said "intelligence from multiple sources" reported Iraq was trying to buy magnets and a production line for magnets of "the same weight" as those used in uranium centrifuges..."

Charles J. Hanley (Associated Press):
"...The U.N. nuclear agency traced a dozen types of imported magnets to their Iraqi end users, and none was usable for centrifuges, ElBaradei told the council March 7. "Weight is not enough; you don't have a centrifuge magnet because it's 20 grams," ElBaradei deputy Jacques Baute told AP on July 11..."

said "...Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' -- his nuclear holy warriors..."

Powell for Bush

"...Thanks to intelligence they were provided, the inspectors recently found dramatic confirmation of these reports. When they searched the homes of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents. You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in UN hands. Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program...."

Powell for Bush

"...We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program..."

CBS News:
"...U.N. inspectors found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build weapons, the atomic agency chief said in a confidential report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei reiterated that his experts uncovered no signs of a nuclear weapons program before they withdrew from Iraq just before the war began in March.
"In the areas of uranium acquisition, concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities," ElBaradei said in the report, made available to the AP by a diplomat.
"No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq," he said..."

Defense Department for Bush

"...Al Qaim Phosphate Plant and Uranium Extraction Line...Currently active"