Late September 2002: Top Republican In House Finds Cheney’s WMD Briefing Unconvincing

Iraqi UAV prototype. [Source: CIA]Vice President Dick Cheney invites House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) to his private office in the Capitol building to discuss the administration’s intelligence on Iraq. Armey has been a silent skeptic of the administration’s case for war, and Cheney wants to win him over. As reporters David Corn and Michael Isikoff note in their book Hubris, Armey is “the number two Republican in the House. If he broke ranks, that would be a problem. So Cheney was dispatched to do the job himself.” But Armey is unconvinced with Cheney’s presentation, which includes pictures of the aluminum tubes, satellite images of alleged weapons sites, sketches of mobile weapons labs, and photos of UAVSs. The pictures could have been of anything, he later recalls. “It wasn’t very convincing. If I’d gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I probably would have said, ‘Ah, bullsh_t.’ But you don’t do that with your own people.” In spite of his doubts, Armey does not challenge Cheney. Nor does he commit to support the resolution in Congress that will authorize the president to take military action against Iraq. [Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 124-125]