Bush's intelligence about any nuclear threat from Iraq was completely discredited weeks before the March 2003 invasion. Rice's assertion otherwise shows, once again, the moral hazard of employing a pathological liar at Stanford University.
In her interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, Condoleezza Rice seems to reject the findings of the President's guy, Charles Duelfer. Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group that investigated WMD in post-invasion Iraq, presented the definitive report on the nuclear threat from Saddam.
Duelfer's report did not equivocate: There was zero evidence of any nuclear weapons program. Period. There never was any "circumstantial evidence" or "unsubstantiated evidence" or "fragmentary evidence" or any other kind of evidence. Just nothing. Bupkis. The Iraq Survey Group all but plagiarized a passage from the report by Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head the International Atomic Energy Agency. Dr. ElBaradei's report, issued days before the invasion of Iraq, said:
"[W]e have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."
Deufler's report said the same thing over and over:
"Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991."
"ISG has uncovered no information to support allegations of Iraqi pursuit of uranium from abroad in the post-Operation Desert Storm era."
"ISG, however, has uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapon research and development activities since 1991".
"ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material."
"So far, ISG has found only one offer of uranium to Baghdad since 1991--an approach Iraq appears to have turned down."
"Regarding specific allegations of uranium pursuits from Niger, Ja'far claims that after 1998 Iraq had only two contacts with Niamey [Niger]--neither of which involved uranium."
And as for that claim that Iraq was noncompliant with inspection ground rules during the 12 years prior to the war:
"Iraq collaborated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to produce a series of Full, Final, and Complete Disclosure (FFCD) statements, including a "final" presented to the IAEA in September 1996, which reported its review findings to the UN Security Council in October 1997." (The IAEA inspectors left in 1998 and returned four years later in 2002.)