Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.

[zimv20]

link (http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryN1216NELSON.htm)


U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.

Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.


Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said.


"That's news," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this."

[mactastic]

Kinda hard to vote against a war that you are told is a serious and immediate threat to our national security.

It will be interesting to see if there really was a classified briefing where senators were given a, shall we say, biased view of the intelligence. And how many senators were there if there was. And of course, who gave the briefing and where did the original intel come from.

[Inu]

Sometimes its hard to believe anyone swallowed this.

Geographical: Where is the USA, where is Iraq?
Technical: how long would it take an unmanned drone to get from Point A to Point B, without being noticed and remote controlled? Give or take the fact that Iraq had Technology that was hardly better than 1950...

[wwworry]

and that prague contact with Al Qeada was fake too. Nothing matters because we are good.

[toontra]

British MPs (and the public) were misled also. It turns out that Blair and those high up in the Gov. knew that the 45 minutes to readiness claim for WMD (?!) referred only to battlefield weapons (ie short-range munitions).
However, the way it was publicized made this deliberately unclear meaning the press, and lowly MPs, were always under the impression that long-range strategic WMD could be fired at British troops in Cyprus, etc, within 45 minutes of the signal.
When questioned recently about allowing this misconception to abound, Blair's response was that it was impossible to refute every error of fact reported by the press! This contrasts starkly to the manic attempts to correct a single BBC radio item in July (about the Gov handling of the WMD dossiers) which resulted in a man's death and the Hutton enquiry.