clipped from latimesblogs.latimes.com

Now comes Dick Armey, once House Majority Leader, who described a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president's hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol where he says Vice President Dick Cheney went beyond that into outright deception.

According to a new book on Cheney called "Angler," by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Armey, a Texas Republican, had spoken out against the war. Cheney was trying to change his mind. So the vice president told him the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." In Armey's account, Cheney told him

Iraq's "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel....We now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."