“Appearing [on September 7, 2002] at Camp David with the British prime minister, Tony Blair, he [President Bush] told the press that ‘when the inspectors first went into Iraq’ and were denied access, the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] of the UN had concluded ‘that they were six months away’ from producing a [nuclear] weapon. ‘I don’t know what more evidence we need,’ Bush said. NBC News, which took the trouble of actually contacting the IAEA to check this out, discovered that Bush was citing a report issued in 1998 about Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, UN weapons inspectors had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear weapons sites. Both an IAEA spokesman and unnamed American officials told NBC that ‘there is no conclusive proof that Iraq has restarted its nuclear weapons program.’ ”
– Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Page 65