its actions, but not to the MERIA journal. Conclusions The failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq caused considerable controversy, particularly in the United States. US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair defended their decision to go to war, alleging that many nations, even those opposed to war, believed that the Saddam Hussein government was actively developing weapons of mass destructions. Critics such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean charged that the Bush and Blair administrations deliberately falsified evidence to build a case for war. These criticisms were strengthened with the 2005 release of the so-called Downing Street memo, written in July 2002, in which the former head of British Military Intelligence wrote that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein from power. While the Downing Street memo and the yellowcake uranium scandal lent credence to claims that intelligence was manipulated, two bipartisan investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the other by a specially-appointed Iraq Intelligence Commission chaired by Charles Robb and Laurence Silberman, found no evidence of political pressure applied to intelligence analysts. An independent assessment by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that Bush administration officials did misuse intelligence in their public communications. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney's September 2002 statement on Meet the Press that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon", was inconsistent with the views of the intelligence community at the time. A study coauthored by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the two years after September 11, 2001, the president and top administration officials had made 935 false statements, in an orchestrated public relations campaign to galvanize public opinion for the war, and that the press was largely complicit in its uncritical coverage of the reasons adduced for going to war. PBS commentator Bill Moyers had made similar points throughout the lead-up to the Iraq War, and prior to a national press conference on the Iraq War Moyers correctly predicted "at least a dozen times during this press conference he [the President] will invoke 9/11 and al-Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will