"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (09.19.02)

"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency. . . . It has developed weapons of mass death" President Bush (10.02.02)
"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is." President Bush (10.02.03)

"There are many dangers in the world; the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. President Bush (10.07.02)

in his address to the nation Bush said the intelligence “leaves no doubt that . . . Iraq . . . continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Vice President Cheney also was part of the chorus and declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

BUSH: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. [Bush on Polish TV, 5/29/03]

POWELL: We have already discovered mobile biological factories of the kind that I described to the Security Council on the 5th of February. We have now found them. There is no question in our mind that that’s what their purpose was. Nobody has come up with an alternate purpose that makes sense. [Powell, 6/2/03]

WOLFOWITZ: We — as the whole world knows — have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail. [Wolfowitz, 6/3/03]

RICE: But let’s remember what we’ve already found. Secretary Powell on February 5th talked about a mobile, biological weapons capability. That has now been found and this is a weapons laboratory trailers capable of making a lot of agent that–dry agent, dry biological agent that can kill a lot of people. So we are finding these pieces that were described. … This was a program that was built for deceit and concealment. [CNBC, 6/3/03]

BUSH: We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents. [Bush, 6/5/03]

CHENEY: We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack. [Meet the Press, 9/14/03]
(Center for American Progress)