Ten days, 10 days, before the invasion of Iraq, it was proven that the documents upon which President Bush's claim about Saddam Hussein trying to obtain uranium was based were forgeries. That was found 10 days before we invaded Iraq. However, President Bush did not disclose that to the American people. By that failure, he betrayed each of us, he betrayed our country, and he betrayed the cause of world peace.

Neither did the vast majority of the news media in this country disclose the forgeries — until it was far too late. It took our local newspapers here in Salt Lake City four months — until after the war was commenced and until after President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over — to report the discovery that the documents were forgeries — and, therefore, that there was no basis for the false claims about Saddam Hussein trying to build up a nuclear capability. By its failure to promptly disclose those forgeries, our news media betrayed us as well.

Had the American people known we were being lied to — had President Bush informed us that the documents were forged and that he had no other basis for his claim — had our nation's media done its job, rather than slavishly repeating to us the lies being fed to it by the Bush administration — our nation very well may not have allowed the commencement of this outrageous, illegal, unjustified war.

Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that high-strength aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," warning "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Undisclosed by President Bush or Condoleezza Rice was the fact that top nuclear scientists had informed the Administration that those tubes were "too narrow, too heavy, too long" to be useful in developing nuclear weapons and could be used for other purposes. Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, agreed.

So, so much for the phony claims of Saddam Hussein building nuclear weapons, which were the primary claims justifying the rush to war, without working with the United Nations, without working with our long-time allies, without giving the weapons inspectors an opportunity to do their job, which if they had that opportunity they would have disclosed what we know now — and that is there were no weapons of mass destruction.

What were we told about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction? These claims were as baseless and fraudulent as the claims about nuclear weapons.

President Bush told us in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. Then, in May of 2003, he made the outlandish statement that, it turns out to be totally false, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."