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Doug Feith: ‘What We Found In Iraq Was A Serious WMD Threat’

Yesterday, Iraq War architect Douglas Feith spoke to the National Press Club to promote his book, “War and Decision,” and its revisionist description of the Bush administration’s pre-war planning.

At the event, Feith repeated his claim that the faulty intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was an “error,” not a lie. Additionally, he insisted that the U.S. had in fact found “a serious WMD threat” in Iraq:

While the failure to find presumed stockpiles of dangerous weapons “was catastrophic to our credibility,” he said, it was not a result of government deception.

“It was an honest error, not a lie,” he said. “Even if you correct for that error, what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat.

In his book, Feith calls newspaper headlines stating that no weapons were found “fundamentally false,” and insists that the military found clear evidence of Saddam Hussein’s “intention” [his emphasis] to build weapons. A website he created to “disprove” myths about the pre-war planning states, “The Iraq Survey Group found that Saddam Hussein retained both the intention and the capability to revive bio-chemical weapons programs after sanctions were ended.”

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The right wing seems unwilling to give up the belief in Iraq WMDs. In January, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) claimed the weapons were hidden like “Easter eggs” and moved to Jordan before the invasion. He also called it an “overreach” to say that just because we didn’t find them means they didn’t exist.

As late as April 2006, President Bush insisted WMDs existed in Iraq, despite having admitted two years earlier that “Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.”