Cord Byrd: “the article explores how senior administration officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney…”

“the article explores how senior administration officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, ``repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists'' when asserting in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. The article reads: They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments . . . It goes on to say: yet minimized or rejected strong doubts of nuclear experts. The article goes on: Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there have found no evidence of . . . a revived nuclear weapons program. Secretary of State Colin Powell said last Friday he regretted the administration's claims that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in making its case for war. So the gut-wrenching question for the Senator from Maine is--hear me--if we do this intelligence reorganization hurriedly, are we willing to launch our next preemptive war based on the presumption that our handiwork has corrected our intelligence problems? That is a very serious question. I will say it again: The gut-wrenching question for you, Robert C. Byrd, and for every other Member of the Senate, remains: if we do this intelligence reorganization hurriedly, as we are doing, are we willing to launch our next preemptive war based on the presumption that our handiwork has corrected our intelligence problems? Think about it. That should sober one up.…”