“With no reason to think they were being lied to, the public was left to believe that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program and was just six months away from having a working atomic bomb. ‘Senior [Bush administration] officials made statements which I can only describe as dishonest,’ said senior State Department intelligence official Gregory Thielmann, who saw much of the intelligence. ‘They were distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous. …I thought there were limits on how much one was willing to do in order to twist things.’ The only thing left was for the national media to give the bogus information its imprimatur. Like clockwork, that happened the next morning, Sunday, September 8 [2002], when The New York Times published a major story under the stark headline, ‘U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.’ ”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Page 323