FT: Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger

[basso]

This has got to be inconvenient for Joe Wilson...

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373295002&p=1012571727085

--
Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium
By Mark Huband in Rome
Published: June 27 2004

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times.

Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq.

These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George W. Bush, US president, referred to the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.

The claim that the illicit export of uranium was under discussion was widely dismissed when letters referring to the sales - apparently sent by a Nigerien official to a senior official in Saddam Hussein's regime - were proved by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be forgeries. This embarrassed the US and led the administration to reverse its earlier claim.

But European intelligence officials have for the first time confirmed that information provided by human intelligence sources during an operation mounted in Europe and Africa produced sufficient evidence for them to believe that Niger was the centre of a clandestine international trade in uranium.

Officials said the fake documents, which emerged in October 2002 and have been traced to an Italian with a record for extortion and deception, added little to the picture gathered from human intelligence and were only given weight by the Bush administration.

According to a senior counter-proliferation official, meetings between Niger officials and would-be buyers from the five countries were held in several European countries, including Italy. Intelligence officers were convinced that the uranium would be smuggled from abandoned mines in Niger, thereby circumventing official export controls. "The sources were trustworthy. There were several sources, and they were reliable sources," an official involved in the European intelligence gathering operation said.

The UK government used the details in its Iraq weapons dossier, which it used to justify war with Iraq after concluding that it corresponded with other information it possessed, including evidence gathered by GCHQ, the UK eavesdropping centre, of a visit to Niger by an Iraqi official.

However, the European investigation suggested that it was the smugglers who were actively looking for markets, though it was unclear how far the deals had progressed and whether deliveries of uranium were made.

[basso]

a more detailed article, also from FT. how long until the unseemly rush to debunk begins? perhaps Josh will argue the iraq was merely interested in importing goats?

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373295039&p=1012571727085

--
Evidence of Niger uranium trade 'years before war'
By Mark Huband
Published: June 27 2004


When thieves stole a steel watch and two bottles of perfume from Niger's embassy on Via Antonio Baiamonti in Rome at the end of December 2000, they left behind many questions about their intentions.

The identity of the thieves has not been established. But one theory is that they planned to steal headed notepaper and official stamps that would allow the forging of documents for the illicit sale of uranium from Niger's vast mines.

The break-in is one of the murkier elements surrounding the claim - made by the US and UK governments in the lead-up to the Iraq war - that Iraq sought to buy uranium illicitly from Niger.

The British government has said repeatedly it stands by intelligence it gathered and used in its controversial September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes. It still claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

But the US intelligence community, officials and politicians, are publicly sceptical, and the public differences between the two allies on the issue have obscured the evidence that lies behind the UK claim.

Until now, the only evidence of Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger had turned out to be a forgery. In October 2002, documents were handed to the US embassy in Rome that appeared to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials.

When the US State Department later passed the documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, they were found to be fake. US officials have subsequently distanced themselves from the entire notion that Iraq was seeking buy uranium from Niger.

However, European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.

These intelligence officials now say the forged documents appear to have been part of a "scam", and the actual intelligence showing discussion of uranium supply has been ignored.

The fake documents were handed to an Italian journalist working for the Italian magazine Panorama by a businessman in October 2002. According to a senior official with detailed knowledge of the case, this businessman had been dismissed from the Italian armed forces for dishonourable conduct 25 years earlier.

The journalist - Elisabetta Burba - reported in a Panorama article that she suspected the documents were forgeries and handed them to officials at the US embassy in Rome.

The businessman, referred to by a pseudonym in the Panorama article, had previously tried to sell the documents to several intelligence services, according to a western intelligence officer.

It was later established that he had a record of extortion and deception and had been convicted by a Rome court in 1985 and later arrested at least twice. The suspected forger's real name is known to the FT, but cannot be used because of legal constraints. He did not return telephone calls yesterday, and is understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel.

The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

This intelligence provided clues about plans by Libya and Iran to develop their undeclared nuclear programmes. Niger officials were also discussing sales to North Korea and China of uranium ore or the "yellow cake" refined from it: the raw materials that can be progressively enriched to make nuclear bombs.

The raw intelligence on the negotiations included indications that Libya was investing in Niger's uranium industry to prop it up at a time when demand had fallen, and that sales to Iraq were just a part of the clandestine export plan. These secret exports would allow countries with undeclared nuclear programmes to build up uranium stockpiles.

One nuclear counter-proliferation expert told the FT: "If I am going to make a bomb, I am not going to use the uranium that I have declared. I am going to use what I acquire clandestinely, if I am going to keep the programme hidden."

This may have been the method being used by Libya before it agreed last December to abandon its secret nuclear programme. According to the IAEA, there are 2,600 tonnes of refined uranium ore - "yellow cake" - in Libya. However, less than 1,500 tonnes of it is accounted for in Niger records, even though Niger was Libya's main supplier.

Information gathered in 1999-2001 suggested that the uranium sold illicitly would be extracted from mines in Niger that had been abandoned as uneconomic by the two French-owned mining companies - Cominak and Somair, both of which are owned by the mining giant Cogema - operating in Niger.

"Mines can be abandoned by Cogema when they become unproductive. This doesn't mean that people near the mines can't keep on extracting," a senior European counter-proliferation official said.

He added that there was no evidence the companies were aware of the plans for illicit mining.

When the intelligence gathered in 1999-2001 was thrown into the diplomatic maelstrom that preceded the US-led invasion of Iraq, it took on new significance. Several services contributed to the picture.

The Italians, looking for corroboration but lacking the global reach of the CIA or the UK intelligence service MI6, passed information to the US in 2001 and to the UK in 2002.

The UK eavesdropping centre GCHQ had intercepted communications suggesting Iraq was seeking clandestine uranium supplies, as had the French intelligence service.

The Italian intelligence was not incorporated in detail into the assessments of the CIA, which seeks to use such information only when it is gathered from its own sources rather than as a result of liaison with foreign intelligence services. But five months after receiving it, the US sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to assess the credibility of separate US intelligence information that suggested Iraq had approached Niger.

Mr Wilson was critical of the Bush administration's use of secret intelligence, and has since charged that the White House sought to intimidate him by leaking the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.

But Mr Wilson also stated in his account of the visit that Mohamed Sayeed al-Sahaf, Iraq's former information minister, was identified to him by a Niger official as having sought to discuss trade with Niger.

As Niger's other main export is goats, some intelligence officials have surmised uranium was what Mr Sahaf was referring to.

[mc mark]

Well I don't know about goats but...

By the time you read this post you'll likely already know that today's Financial Times makes stunning new claims about alleged sales of uranium from Niger to Iraq.

In brief, the main article in the FT makes two points ...

First, that there is much more information than the forged 'Niger-uranium' documents backing up the claim that Iraq (and other countries) sought to clandestinely purchase 'yellowcake' uranium from Niger.

(I think point two is the real point of the FT story, not point one. But we'll get to that in another post.)

The second assertion requires a touch more explanation.

If you're up on the arcana of the 'Niger-uranium' story you'll remember that they first came to light when a source -- an unnamed Italian businessman and security consultant -- gave copies of them to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba.

(For more on the tick-tock of what Burba did with them and how they eventually got into US hands, see this piece by Sy Hersh from last year in The New Yorker.)

There has been endless speculation about who this mystery man was and who actually did the forging. Was he the forger? And if so, what were his motives? If not, who put them into his hands? And what were their motives?

According to the Financial Times article, that business man is likely himself the forger of the documents and he has a long history of bad acts which, they say, discredit him as a source of information. That last tidbit plays a key part in the FT story because, in their words, the provider of the documents is "understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel."

That's what the FT says.

I hear something different.

In fact, I know something different.

My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today -- specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can't. But, for the moment, I can't.

Let me, however, offer a hypothetical that might help make sense of all this.

Let's say that certain individuals or organizations are responsible for some rather unfortunate misdeeds. And let's further postulate that such hypothetical individuals or organizations find out that some folks are on to them, that a story is in the works -- perhaps more than one -- and that it's coming right at them. Those individuals or organizations -- as shorthand, let's call them 'the bad actors' -- might well start trying to fight back, trying to gin up an alternative storyline to exculpate themselves and inculpate others. If that story made its way into the news, at a minimum, it might help the bad actors muddy the waters for when the real story comes out. You can see how such a regrettable turn of events might come to pass.

This is of course only a hypothetical. But I thought it might provide a clarifying context.

So read the FT article. But also keep your ears open. It is, I'm quite confident, not the last word you'll hear on this story.

-- Josh Marshall

[SamFisher]

Ouch MC, that is quite a response. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

[basso]

hey, if Josh has got a big, airtight scoop, then bully for him, but he essentially ignores the more important point, that forged docs or no, niger sat at the epicenter of an international trade in uranium. did joe wilson just miss this, or was he just dazzeled by the iRaqi info minister's wit when he gave the "all clear?"

[Woofer]

Why have we not invaded Niger? Those guys are proliferating faster than North Korea! Containment is for wussies.

[mc mark]

Indeed! If it's about the war on terror and WMDs. Niger should have been target number one! Go to the source!

[KingCheetah]

Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger

http://www.fiveoclocksoftware.com/images/chimp.jpg

Do the intelligence services of the lesser primates count?

[basso]

looks like the official UK inquiry will back the niger/iraq connection.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373567507

--
Inquiry will back intelligence that Iraq sought uranium
By Mark Huband in London

A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger.

The inquiry by Lord Butler, which was delivered to the printers_on Wednesday_and is expected to be released on July 14, has examined the intelligence that underpinned the UK government's claims about the threat from Iraq.

The report will say the claim that Mr Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes, seized on by UK prime minister Tony Blair to bolster the case for war with Iraq, was inadequately supported by the available intelligence, people familiar with its contents say .

But among Lord Butler's other areas of investigation was the issue of whether Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.

President George W. Bush referred to the Niger claim in his state of the union address last year. But officials were forced into a climbdown when it was revealed that the only primary intelligence material the US possessed were documents later shown to be forgeries.

The Bush administration has since distanced itself from all suggestions that Iraq sought to buy uranium. The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim.

The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part.

Intelligence officials have now confirmed that the results of this operation formed an important part of the conclusions of British intelligence. The same information was passed to the US but US officials did not incorporate it in their assessment.

The 45-minute claim appeared four times in a government dossier on Iraq's WMD issued in September 2002, including in the foreword by Mr Blair.

It became the subject of intense scrutiny when government scientist David Kelly was alleged to have voiced concerns about the claim's accuracy to Andrew Gilligan, then a BBC reporter.

Mr Gilligan's report of his conversation with Mr Kelly unleashed a fierce dispute between the government and the BBC that culminated in Mr Kelly's suicide, an inquiry into the circumstances of his death, and the resignation of the BBC's two most senior officials.

Lord Butler is said to have produced a report that criticises the process of intelligence gathering and assessment on Iraq but refrains from criticising individual officials.

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by basso
Lord Butler is said to have produced a report that criticises the process of intelligence gathering and assessment on Iraq but refrains from criticising individual officials.

This article is interesting. It doesn't claim that Iraq DID try and buy nuke material from Niger, but only that the it was reasonable to suggest that based on intel at the time.

Then Lord Butler goes on to criticize the whole process of intel gathering in reference to Iraq.

[basso]

now the Senate intelligence committe's report backs the claim, and contradicts Joe Wilson. moreover, it says specifically that wilson found evidence of such efforts. hmm, that's not what he said in vanity fair! via the AP.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB62OSSGWD.html

--
Jul 9, 2004
Senate Report Offers Backing for Claim Iraq Sought Uranium in Africa

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Senate report criticizing false CIA claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the same time provides support for an assertion the White House repudiated: that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.

White House officials said last year it was a mistake for President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union message, to refer to British reports that Saddam Hussein's government tried to buy uranium. The White House said the evidence for that claim was too shaky to have been included in such an important speech, and CIA Director George Tenet took the blame for failing to have the reference removed.

A Friday report from the Senate Intelligence Committee offers new details supporting the claim.

French and British intelligence separately told the United States about possible Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger, the report said. The report from France is significant not only because Paris opposed the Iraq war but also because Niger is a former French colony and French companies control uranium production there.

Joseph Wilson, a retired U.S. diplomat the CIA sent to investigate the Niger story, also found evidence of Iraqi contacts with Nigerien officials, the report said.

Wilson told the committee that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki reported meeting with Iraqi officials in 1999. Mayaki said a businessman helped set up the meeting, saying the Iraqis were interested in "expanding commercial relations" with Niger - which Mayaki interpreted as an overture to buy uranium, Wilson said.

Mayaki told Wilson he met with the Iraqis but steered the discussion away from commercial activity because he did not want to deal with a country under United Nations sanctions.

All of that information came to Washington long before an Italian journalist gave U.S. officials copies of documents purporting to show an agreement from Niger to sell uranium to Baghdad. Those documents have been determined to be forgeries.

Even before the forged documents surfaced, U.S. analysts cast doubt on the Niger story, the Senate report said. State Department analysts thought the uranium story was farfetched because such a deal would be detected easily and Iraq already had some 500 tons of lightly processed uranium "yellowcake."

Some CIA analysts shared that view, the report said.

The CIA also made only "halfhearted" attempts to investigate a West African businessman's claim that Nigerien uranium bound for Iraq was being stored in a warehouse in the nearby African nation of Benin, the report said. The CIA never contacted the businessman, even though the U.S. Navy gave the CIA his phone number, the report said.

[basso]

ohhh, and his wife helped him get the gig, countrary to what he said publicly. Josh, what are the talking points on this?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html?referrer%3Demailarticle

--
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said.

The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him.

Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer.

Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name.

The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me."

The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion.

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.

The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has "not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa."

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by basso
Joseph Wilson, a retired U.S. diplomat the CIA sent to investigate the Niger story, also found evidence of Iraqi contacts with Nigerien officials, the report said.


Those contacts have already been discussed by you and others on this very website. Wilson himself said talked about the contacts, and evidence that he found. He then found them to not be credible.

Still trying to use that as evidence only hurts the case.

[rimrocker]

Originally posted by basso
--
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer

...


Response via Josh...
_____________________

I'll dispense with the literary prologue and get right to the point.

Susan Schmidt is known, happily among DC Republicans and not so happily among DC Democrats, as what you might call the "Mikey" (a la Life Cereal fame) of the DC press corps, especially when the cereal is coming from Republican staffers.

This morning she has an article on the Senate intel report and Joe Wilson, specifically focusing on the relevance of Wilson's reporting on Niger (the report says analysts did not see Wilson's findings as weakening claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger) and his wife's role in recommending him for the assignment.

We'll discuss the broader issues of Plame's role in Wilson's assignment and the underlying question of the alleged Iraq-Niger negotiations. A clearer-eyed take on Wilson and report can be found here in this story by Knight Ridder. But for now a few points on Schmidt's treatment.

In her fourth paragraph Schmidt writes that "contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address."

This is one of those cases in which it's helpful to actually read the report rather than just run with what you've got from the majority committee staffer who gave you the spin.

The claim with regards to the back-and-forth was always that the CIA struggled to get the uranium references out of the October 2002 Cincinnati speech and then failed to do so -- though why presicely is less clear -- when the same folks at the White House tried again to get it into the 2003 State of the Union address. And indeed on page 56 the report states that ...

Based on the analyst's comments, the ADDI drafted a memo for the NSC outlining the facts that the CIA believed needed to be changed, and faxed it to the Deputy National Security Advisor and the speech writers. Referring to the sentence on uranium from Africa the CIA said, "remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory."

... Later that day, the NSC staff prepared draft seven of the Cincinnati speech which contained the line, "and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa." Draft seven was sent to CIA for coordination.

... The ADDI told Committee staff he received the new draft on October 6, 2002 and noticed that the uranium information had "not been addressed," so he alerted the DCI. The DCI called the Deputy National Security Advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. On July 16, 2003, the DCI testified before the SSCI that he told the Deputy National Security Advisor that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue," because his analysts had told him the "reporting was weak." The NSC then removed the uranium reference from the draft of the speech.

Although the NSC had already removed the uranium reference from the speech, later on October 6th, 2002 the CIA sent a second fax to the White House which said, "more on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine city by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British."

I find it difficult to square that with Schmidt's claim that the report states that the CIA "did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence."

Then there's a point with regards to Plame's role in selecting Wilson for the mission. The report includes testimony from those involved saying that Plame did suggest Wilson for the mission -- a point we'll return to. Based on this Schmidt says ...

Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer.
...

The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

Again, a conversation with a lawyer may have been more helpful than one with a staffer.

There's no 'challenging the bona fides of a political opponent' exception to the law in question. While Plame's alleged role may have some political traction, it's legally irrelevant. Government officials are not allowed to disclose the identity of covert intelligence agents, whether they feel like they have a good reason or not.

Finally, down toward the end of Schmidt's article she writes that: "According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998."

I read the report's discussion of the whole Niger business. And I didn't see that reference. However, on page 44 there is a reference to Wilson reporting to the CIA that "an Iranian delegation was interested in purchasing 400 tons of yellowcake from Niger in 1998 [but that] no contract was ever signed with Iran." (emphasis added).

Perhaps I missed the reference that Schmidt is noting. But it seems awfully similar to the one the report notes about Iran -- same date, same tonnage. Presumably in this case, Schmidt innocently confused the two neighboring and similar-sounding countries, though it's a goof you'd think an editor would have caught.

-- Josh Marshall

____________

and more...
____________

Several points about the SSCI report on the Niger matter that may not get a lot of attention but are nonetheless important for understanding the larger story ...

You'll note that the footnote at the bottom of page 57 says that in March 2003 Sen. Rockefeller asked the FBI to investigate the source of the forged uranium documents and the motivation of those responsible for them. Because of that investigation, the Committee chose not to examine any questions about the documents themselves, who forged them, where they came from, etc. In fact, the Committee walled its investigation off so that it looked only at what happened with the documents after they appeared in the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002.

Second, in many accounts of this story we hear that multiple intelligence agencies had reports of Iraq's attempts to procure uranium from Niger. But many of those reports or judgments were the fruit of the same poison tree.

On page 69, for instance, the report states that on "March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the INVO" (i.e., the IAEA).

Now, it's a premise of much reporting and in fact a subtext of the committee report that there were these various reports about Niger and that only much later did these documents surface.

That's true with respect to the US, but also misleading.

The French were basing their judgments on documents in question or perhaps a report based on them, as we've seen.

The US, in turn, was basing most, though not all, of its suspicions on these reports it got from this unnamed foreign intelligence agency that provided an initial report to the US shortly after 9/11 and then another with more detail in February 2002, as the SSCI report states. That foreign government was Italy. And the information they provided also stemmed from the same documents.

So France, Italy and the United States each had reports about the alleged Iraq-Niger sales. And each stemmed from the same source -- the forged documents, the origins of which the SSCI chose not to investigate.

The documents weren't peripheral. They were central, though precisely how and why only emerged over time.

Britain is a more complicated case that we'll address later.

-- Josh Marshall

[FranchiseBlade]

Josh - 1 Susan - 0

[basso]

and the brits and the AP, neither of which relied on spin by susan? ...and i find it incredibley hard to believe that andWaPo[/i] reporter is in the pocket of the RNC.

[Sishir Chang]

Basso;

I've been coming to this forum for about six months and you've done a good job pouring out a lot of smoke but almost no fire. While I'll agree that yes there is some interesting stuff out there but I can't think of anything you've posted that has yet to be absolutely proven true or is even very clear. You've posted tons of conjecture, speculation that depending on how the dots are connected could lead to something but not much stuff that would lead most people to an automtic acceptance. These are interesting debate fodder but I'm not sure how well you could win a highschool debate with it let alone justify a war.

Take this as you well but I find your efforts to justify every single argument the Admin laid out to justify the invasion of Iraq, even when many in the Admin itself has now recanted several of those arguments, is begining to remind me of the efforts of the Flat Earth Society.

[basso]

Originally posted by Sishir Chang
Basso;

I've been coming to this forum for about six months and you've done a good job pouring out a lot of smoke but almost no fire. While I'll agree that yes there is some interesting stuff out there but I can't think of anything you've posted that has yet to be absolutely proven true or is even very clear. You've posted tons of conjecture, speculation that depending on how the dots are connected could lead to something but not much stuff that would lead most people to an automtic acceptance. These are interesting debate fodder but I'm not sure how well you could win a highschool debate with it let alone justify a war.

Take this as you well but I find your efforts to justify every single argument the Admin laid out to justify the invasion of Iraq, even when many in the Admin itself has now recanted several of those arguments, is begining to remind me of the efforts of the Flat Earth Society.

well, this is one case where the "Bush Lied" arguement has turned out to be, well, a lie! you can say the CIA got it wrong, and clearly they've got some 'splainin' to do, but if Bush lied, then so did congress, the clinton admin, tony blair, jacques chirac, and most of the world's intelligence agencies.

[andymoon]

Originally posted by basso
well, this is one case where the "Bush Lied" arguement has turned out to be, well, a lie! you can say the CIA got it wrong, and clearly they've got some 'splainin' to do, but if Bush lied, then so did congress, the clinton admin, tony blair, jacques chirac, and most of the world's intelligence agencies.

I can't recall crowing about Bush lying (on this issue), but as I have been claiming, this still shows that Bush used exaggerated, misleading, and faulty intel to make his case for war. Only some of that blame goes to Tenet.

[basso]

Originally posted by andymoon
I can't recall crowing about Bush lying (on this issue), but as I have been claiming, this still shows that Bush used exaggerated, misleading, and faulty intel to make his case for war. Only some of that blame goes to Tenet.

you, and many, some, etc, others here have been accusing bush of lying for the past three years, as has kerry, dean, clark, et al., not to mention mm. has a single instance been proven? it's all innuendo and partisan kant disguised as principled debate. this entire forum is nothing but a venue for posters like yourself to accuse bush of mendacity.

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by basso
well, this is one case where the "Bush Lied" arguement has turned out to be, well, a lie! you can say the CIA got it wrong, and clearly they've got some 'splainin' to do, but if Bush lied, then so did congress, the clinton admin, tony blair, jacques chirac, and most of the world's intelligence agencies.

Is the one case you are talking about the (non)attempt to buy Uranium? Or do you mean WMD in general?

Neither are the same. Tony Blair most likely is lying as well, or perhaps he only believes what he wants. I don't recall the Clinton administration saying that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake, or Chirac.

If you mean WMD's in general, then that's another case. All of the groups you mentioned believed that Saddam had them. This is where wisdom, leadership, values, morals, and principles come into play.

Despite believing that there were WMD's there none of these other leaders except Blair were willing to rely solely on the reports that said they did and rush into starting a war. Other leaders held onto the ideal that war should be a last resort only. They listened to the intel that said Saddam wasn't a threat, and were willing to explore other options in dealing with the dictator.

Only Bush and Blair were willing to abandon the principle that war is a last resort, or wait for further and more concrete proof. They were willing to sacrifice young Americans and Brits as well as sacrifice the moral high ground, the values, and principles of justice, democracy etc.

I don't consider family values being willing to send family members to die when it's not necessary.

[andymoon]

Originally posted by basso
you, and many, some, etc, others here have been accusing bush of lying for the past three years,

No, I supported Bush throughout the action in Afghanistan as that was a war that needed to be fought. The action in Iraq and the subsequent revelations regarding WMDs (or lack thereof) as well as the Plame affair are what turned me against Bush. Bush has lied about a great many things, it has just turned out that he might not have actually LIED about the yellowcake.

Originally posted by basso

as has kerry, dean, clark, et al., not to mention mm. has a single instance been proven? it's all innuendo and partisan kant disguised as principled debate. this entire forum is nothing but a venue for posters like yourself to accuse bush of mendacity.

And for posters like yourself to defend him at every turn, seeming to stick your head in the sand even when people in the administration commit felonies.

[SamFisher]

Originally posted by basso
this entire forum is nothing but a venue for posters like yourself to accuse bush of mendacity.

Please basso, you walk around with a large satchel full of monkey dung, no better or worse than the rest of us, gleefully hurling away, starting thread after thread, with the same singular bent. Your high horse is made of simian feces.

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by basso
you, and many, some, etc, others here have been accusing bush of lying for the past three years, as has kerry, dean, clark, et al., not to mention mm. has a single instance been proven? it's all innuendo and partisan kant disguised as principled debate. this entire forum is nothing but a venue for posters like yourself to accuse bush of mendacity.

Basso, Bush has lied. Members of his administration have lied. Rumsfeld claimed that he knew where the IRaqi WMD were and pointed it out on a map.

Condi Rice said that the aluminum tubes IRaq bought really could only be used for ONE PURPOSE. She claimed the purpose was nukes, but it turns out not to be true. That's a lie

Bush claimed that Iraq was withing in 6 mo. of a nuke and cited an IAEA report that didn't exist. When questioned on it, he claimed that he got the reports mixed up and cited another report. Guess what? That report didn't exist either. On his third attempt to explain they claimed it was a third report. The third report did in fact exist, but it didn't exist until after the President had made his initial claim.

Even if the President was only mistaken, and the initial statement wasn't a lie, then the followup attempts to cover this misktake/lie were definitely lies.

Dick Cheny just recently was shown on the Daily show of all places claiming to not have a made a statement pertaining to IRaq. immediately after that statement, they showed Cheney saying word for word what he claimed he never said.

They have LIED.

I don't use this forum to gleefully label someone a liar. I post that he lied, because his lies are matter of record. They are out there for all to see. I remember you or someone when talking Bush's IAEA report lie, that there was a report out there that made the same claim. Yet in Bush's cover up attempts they never mentioned the report that was being refereneced. There were three attempts to cover it up and not one of them listed a possible defense.

Again he either lied from the get-go, the coverup attempts, or all of them.

Nobody has been able to defend against Condi's lies, or Dick Cheney's.

Maybe Rumsfeld was just horribly wrong about knowing where the WMD were, but is it better to have someone so incompetent making those kinds of mistakes when our country's good name, and soldier's lives are the line?

So again, calling someone out on a lie when there is evidence to back it up, isn't being meanspirited, or getting personal, it's pointing out the facts, and it's straight talk. Nothing more.

[basso]

Originally posted by FranchiseBlade
Basso, Bush has lied. Members of his administration have lied.

the only liars here are joe wilson, and the lying liars who keep trying to turn this story into a leftish cause celebre.

[SamFisher]

Originally posted by basso
the only liars here are joe wilson, and the lying liars who keep trying to turn this story into a leftish cause celebre.

You mean the Justice Department and its ongoing Grand Jury Investigation of the crimes committed by the Bush Administration w/respect to Wilson? Are they the lying liars?

Muddle, divert, ignore..

It's getting boring basso. You should just give up trying to salvage this sunken ship.

[basso]

Originally posted by SamFisher
You mean the Justice Department and its ongoing Grand Jury Investigation of the crimes committed by the Bush Administration w/respect to Wilson? Are they the lying liars?

Muddle, divert, ignore..

It's getting boring basso. You should just give up trying to salvage this sunken ship.

more on this later, but it's highly questionable whether any crime was committed, since the "exposer" would have to a) know she was undercover, and b) the government was taking "affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. it seems quite clear, in light of wilson's own PR campaign that the latter standard won't be met. no, wilson is the liar, and so are you to the extent that you, rim, josh, et alia continue to try and prop this up.

[B-Bob]

Originally posted by basso
the only liars here are joe wilson, and the lying liars who keep trying to turn this story into a leftish cause celebre.
That's just a claim. FranchiseBlade gave you details, and most of them are pretty convincing. Care to respond to them?

If you say those instances were no outright lies, then your only recourse is to claim MASSIVE incompetance, e.g. Bush doesn't know an IAEA report from the sports section.

[Mulder]

You keep forgetting that Bush doesn't read the paper. :D

[B-Bob]

Originally posted by Mulder
You keep forgetting that Bush doesn't read the paper. :D
d'oh! Okay, then...

... he doesn't know the IAEA report from a bag of pretzels? :confused: That's even worse, because they're made of different materials and have very different shapes. :(

[SamFisher]

Originally posted by basso
more on this later, but it's highly questionable whether any crime was committed, since the "exposer" would have to a) know she was undercover, and b) the government was taking "affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. it seems quite clear, in light of wilson's own PR campaign that the latter standard won't be met. no, wilson is the liar, and so are you to the extent that you, rim, josh, et alia continue to try and prop this up.

Your armchair speculation is at glaring odds to the length and depth of the investigation.

[Woofer]

Looks like a large percentage of every thing we saw pre-war in the press was the result of a plant by Chalabi and friends, and the subsequent spread of memes as gospel without any backing proof.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp

.
.
.
INTO THE ECHO CHAMBER
Qanbar’s comment raises the issue of just how pervasive the ICP’s influence was before the war. By implication his statement denies that the INC was connected to a second defector — code-named Curveball — provided to German intelligence, who was a prime source for Powell’s mobile-labs statement at the UN. But intelligence sources have repeatedly asserted that they believe Curveball to be the brother of an INC official, something the group continues to deny. In a front-page story for the Los Angeles Times last month, Bob Drogin reported that intelligence sources he spoke with now suspect that the INC fed defectors to at least eight foreign intelligence agencies to create an echo effect among Western governments. Whether that proves true or not, there is no doubt that the INC achieved something similar in the Western media. In addition to writing the articles appearing on the list, reporters frequently went on talk shows to talk up their stories. Rose, for example, made at least two appearances on the Today show, to discuss the more alarming aspects of his pieces. Even Mark Bowden, whose Atlantic article had little to do with WMD, jumped into speculation about Saddam Hussein’s terrorist training camps while being interviewed on NPR — though his story contained no information about such camps.

.
.
.

[IROC it]

Originally posted by Mulder
You keep forgetting that Bush doesn't read the paper. :D

And Kerry has "no time" for the terrorism briefings.

If your the President... that's pretty much part of "the paper" in your life.

[andymoon]

Originally posted by basso
more on this later, but it's highly questionable whether any crime was committed, since the "exposer" would have to a) know she was undercover, and b) the government was taking "affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. it seems quite clear, in light of wilson's own PR campaign that the latter standard won't be met. no, wilson is the liar, and so are you to the extent that you, rim, josh, et alia continue to try and prop this up.

IIRC, Wilson didn't start his "PR campaign" until AFTER the administration officials committed a crime by outing an undercover CIA operative.

The lying liars are clearly the people covering for the criminals in the WH, your unfounded speculation doesn't change that.

[basso]

Lord Butler's report further supports the iRaq/Niger connection, and underscores what a partisan, lying hypocrite wilson and anyone else is who continues to try and defend this nonsense. the tragedy here is that the kontinuing kerfluffle over whether the admin "outed" valerie plame obscures what should be a major story about saddam's confirmed attempts to purchase uranium from niger. shouldn't that be news?

The Butler report (http://www.butlerreview.org.uk/report/)

--
45. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it. (Paragraph 503)

--

there's also this info on WMD. knowing this, would you feel safer had we just left him alone?

--
a. Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted.

b. In support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities, to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities.

c. Was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions; but did not have significant - if any - stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them. (Paragraph 474).

[Woofer]

We invade Iraq because they allegedly visited Niger for inferior nuke materials and that's why we leave Iran and North Korea with nuke production facilities alone?

[basso]

from lord butler's report and the senate intelligence (isn't that an oxymoron?) committee report:

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108985293686064360,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Fcommentaries

--
Saddam, Uranium and Africa
July 15, 2004

From the "Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction" chaired by Lord Butler, published yesterday by the British House of Commons (a related editorial appears nearby):

493. In early 1999, Iraqi officials visited a number of African countries, including Niger. The visit was detected by intelligence, and some details were subsequently confirmed by Iraq. . . .

494. There was further and separate intelligence that in 1999 the Iraqi regime had also made inquiries about the purchase of uranium ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo. . . .

497. In preparing the dossier, the U.K. consulted the U.S. The CIA advised caution about any suggestion that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring uranium from Africa, but agreed that here was evidence that it had been sought.

498. The range of evidence described above underlay the relevant passage in the Prime Minister's statement in the House of Commons on 24 September 2002 that: "In addition, we know that Saddam has been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa, although we do not know whether he has been successful."

499. We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was well-founded.

500. We also note that, because the intelligence evidence was inconclusive, neither the Government's dossier nor the Prime Minister went on to say that a deal between the Governments of Iraq and Niger for the supply of uranium had been signed, or uranium shipped.

501. We have been told that it was not until early 2003 that the British Government became aware that the U.S. (and other states) had received from a journalistic source a number of documents alleged to cover the Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger. Those documents were passed to the IAEA, which in its update report to the United Nations Security Council in March 2003 determined that the papers were forgeries. . . .

503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.

d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.

From page 46 of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report published last Friday:

The CIA's DO [Directorate of Operations] gave the former ambassador's [Joe Wilson's] information a grade of "good". . . because the information responded to at least some of the outstanding questions in the Intelligence Community, but did not provide substantial new information. He [the reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that Nigerien officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had travelled there in 1999, and that the Nigerien Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting. . . .

DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denial that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger for what he believed was to discuss uranium sales.

[basso]

and the WSJ's lead editorial today:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005354

--
The Yellowcake Con
The Wilson-Plame "scandal" was political pulp fiction.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

So now the British government has published its own inquiry into the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq, with equally devastating implications for the credibility of the Bush-Blair "lied" crowd. Like last week's 511-page document from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the exhaustive British study found some flawed intelligence but no evidence of "deliberate distortion." Inquiry leader Lord Butler told reporters that Prime Minister Tony Blair had "acted in good faith."

What's more, Lord Butler was not ready to dismiss Saddam Hussein as a threat merely because no large "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction have been found. The report concludes that Saddam probably intended to pursue his banned programs, including the nuclear one, if and when U.N. sanctions were lifted; that research, development and procurement continued so WMD capabilities could be sustained; and that he was pursuing the development of WMD delivery systems--missiles--of longer range than the U.N. permitted.

But the part that may prove most salient in the U.S. is that, like the Senate Intelligence findings, the Butler report vindicates President Bush on the allegedly misleading "16 words" regarding uranium from Africa: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded." (Click here for more excerpts.)

We're awaiting apologies from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and all those who championed him, after his July 2003 New York Times op-ed alleging that Mr. Bush had "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The news is also relevant to the question of whether any crime was committed when a still unknown Administration official told columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee and that's why he had been recommended for a sensitive mission to Niger. A Justice Department special prosecutor is investigating the case, with especially paralyzing effect on the office of the Vice President.

In that New York Times piece, readers will recall, Mr. Wilson outed himself as the person who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq might have been seeking yellowcake ore for its weapons program. Vice President Dick Cheney had asked for the CIA's opinion on the issue after reading a Defense intelligence report.

Mr. Wilson wrote that "It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." He claimed he informed the CIA of his findings upon his return, was certain reports of his debrief had circulated through appropriate channels, and that the Administration had chosen to ignore his debunking of the story.

After the Novak column appeared, Mr. Wilson charged that his wife was outed solely as punishment for his daring dissent from White House policy. To that end, he has repeatedly denied that his wife played a role in his selection for the mission. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his book "The Politics of Truth." "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." A huge political uproar ensued.

But very little of what Mr. Wilson has said has turned out to be true. For starters, his wife did recommend him for that trip. The Senate report quotes from a February 12, 2002, memo from Ms. Plame: "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

This matters a lot. There's a big difference both legally and ethically between revealing an agent's identity for the revenge purpose of ruining her career, and citing nepotism (truthfully!) to explain to a puzzled reporter why an undistinguished and obviously partisan former ambassador had been sent to investigate this "crazy report" (his wife's words to the Senate). We'd argue that once her husband broke his own cover to become a partisan actor, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political.

Mr. Wilson also seems to have dissembled about how he concluded that there was nothing to the Iraq-Niger uranium story, serving for example as the anonymous source for a June 12, 2003, Washington Post story saying "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " There were some forged documents related to an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. Trouble was, such documents had not even come to the intelligence community (never mind to Mr. Wilson's attention) by the time of his trip, and obviously hadn't been the basis of the report he'd been sent to investigate. He told the Senate he may have "mispoken"--at some length we guess--on this issue.

The Senate Intelligence Committee found, finally, that far from debunking the Iraq-Niger story, Mr. Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing "some confirmation of foreign government service reporting" that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. Why? Because he'd reported that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki had told him of a 1999 visit by the Iraqis to discuss "commercial relations," which the leader of the one-industry country logically interpreted as interest in uranium.

Remember that Messrs. Bush and Blair only said that Iraq had "sought" or was "trying to buy" uranium, not that it had succeeded. It now appears that both leaders have been far more scrupulous in discussing this and related issues than much of the media in either of their countries, which would embarrass the journalistic profession, if that were possible.

All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a "liar," regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.

[basso]

Novak speaks!

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20040715.shtml

--
Errant former ambassador
Robert Novak
July 15, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark, the most remarkable aspect of last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report is what its Democratic members did not say. They did not dissent from the committee's findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger. They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary.

Wilson's activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous agreement. Peculiarly, the Democrats accepted the evidence building up to the Wilson conclusions but not the conclusions themselves. According to committee sources, Roberts felt Wilson had been such a "cause celebre" for Democrats that they could not face the facts about him.

For a year, Democrats have been belaboring President Bush about 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address in which he reported Saddam Hussein's attempt to buy uranium from Africa, based on official British information. Wilson has been lionized in liberal circles for allegedly contradicting this information on a CIA mission and then being punished as a truth-teller. Now, for Intelligence Committee Democrats, it is as though the Niger question and Joe Wilson have vanished from the earth.

Because a U.S. Justice Department special prosecutor is investigating whether any crime was committed when my column first identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee, on advice of counsel I have not written on the subject since last October. However, I feel constrained to describe how the Intelligence Committee report treats the Niger-Wilson affair because it has received scant coverage except in The Washington Post, Knight-Ridder newspapers, briefly and belatedly in The New York Times and few other media outlets.

The unanimously approved report said, "interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD (CIA counterproliferation division) employee, suggested his name for the trip." That's what I reported, and what Wilson flatly denied and still does.

Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying that "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was "apparently convened by [Wilson's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."

The unanimous Intelligence Committee found that the CIA report, based on Wilson's mission, differed considerably from the former ambassador's description to the committee of his findings. That report "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium." As far as his statement to The Washington Post about "forged documents" involved in the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium, Wilson told the committee he may have "misspoken." In fact, the intelligence community agreed that "Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa."

"While there was no dispute with the underlying facts," Chairman Roberts wrote separately, "my Democrat colleagues refused to allow" two conclusions in the report. The first conclusion merely said that Wilson was sent to Niger at his wife's suggestion. The second conclusion is devastating:

"Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."

The normally mild Pat Roberts is harsh in his condemnation: "Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true." Roberts called it "important" for the Intelligence Committee to declare much of what Wilson said "had no basis in fact." In response, Democrats were silent

[gifford1967]

Originally posted by basso
and the WSJ's lead editorial today:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005354

But very little of what Mr. Wilson has said has turned out to be true. For starters, his wife did recommend him for that trip. The Senate report quotes from a February 12, 2002, memo from Ms. Plame: "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

This matters a lot. There's a big difference both legally and ethically between revealing an agent's identity for the revenge purpose of ruining her career, and citing nepotism (truthfully!) to explain to a puzzled reporter why an undistinguished and obviously partisan former ambassador had been sent to investigate this "crazy report" (his wife's words to the Senate). We'd argue that once her husband broke his own cover to become a partisan actor, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political.




This is a totally bogus rationale for revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. If the Administration had a problem with Wilson's statements they should have rebutted what he said. In stead, they demonstrated a remarkable disregard for national security by revealing her identity, whether it was for revenge or to bolster their case against Wilson.

George Tenet said the uranium statement never should have been in Bush's speech. He said the CIA did not have strong enough evidence to support this claim. That's why Bush cited British intelligence.

If the British claims weren't based on the forged documents, what were they based on and why didn't the CIA have confidence in their evidence?

[basso]

Originally posted by gifford1967
This is a totally bogus rationale for revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. If the Administration had a problem with Wilson's statements they should have rebutted what he said. In stead, they demonstrated a remarkable disregard for national security by revealing her identity, whether it was for revenge or to bolster their case against Wilson.

George Tenet said the uranium statement never should have been in Bush's speech. He said the CIA did not have strong enough evidence to support this claim. That's why Bush cited British intelligence.

If the British claims weren't based on the forged documents, what were they based on and why didn't the CIA have confidence in their evidence?

you obviously haven't read the butler report cited above. the forgeries post-date the the british intelligence. the butler report concludes that the 16 words were "well founded." are you suggesting that butler, and the entire senate intelligence committee lied in the reports? i can't believe you're still clinging to this crap.

the facts:

First, Valerie Plame recommended (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/14/politics/14nige.html) her husband Joe Wilson for the mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium there.

Second, Joe Wilson lied (http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/in_re_wilson.html) about that, and about other things as well.

Third, Saddam did try to buy uranium (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L14508601.htm) from niger.

Fourth, President Bush did not lie about Saddam's attempt to purchase uranium and the intelligence he was provided by the CIA showed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

that you continue to insist otherwise boggles the mind. this story always was a fake, cocked up by anti-bush partisans to try and embarrass the president, while troops are in harms way, for partisan political gain. it's been exposed as such, not by fox news or random right-wing bloggers, but by the bi-partisan senate intelligence committee report and the report of an independent british intelligence commission.

[Trader_Jorge]

I read the story in the WSJ today as well. Makes the liberals look even worse, doesn't it? Yet another malicious liberal propaganda campaign snuffed out. When will they end? All those posts from rimrocker, SamFisher, MacBeth, Batman, et al, have been wrong. The question is whether they have the guts to stand up and admit it. Doubtful. Very doubtful.

[basso]

gotta wonder if the kerry campaign still believes joe wilson is restoring honesty. (http://www.johnkerry.com/honesty/) heee-cheney-larious!

EDIT: so the kerry campaign, wilson, and the nytimes, as well as sam, macbeth, rim, and all the other supporters of this story, are willing to lie for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator's pursuit of weapons grade uranium. think about that the next time you have a discussion about whether john kerry is serious about the war or terror.

[gifford1967]

Originally posted by basso
you obviously haven't read the butler report cited above. the forgeries post-date the the british intelligence. the butler report concludes that the 16 words were "well founded." are you suggesting that butler, and the entire senate intelligence committee lied in the reports? i can't believe you're still clinging to this crap.

the facts:

First, Valerie Plame recommended (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/14/politics/14nige.html) her husband Joe Wilson for the mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium there.

Second, Joe Wilson lied (http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/in_re_wilson.html) about that, and about other things as well.

Third, Saddam did try to buy uranium (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L14508601.htm) from niger.

Fourth, President Bush did not lie about Saddam's attempt to purchase uranium and the intelligence he was provided by the CIA showed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

that you continue to insist otherwise boggles the mind. this story always was a fake, cocked up by anti-bush partisans to try and embarrass the president, while troops are in harms way, for partisan political gain. it's been exposed as such, not by fox news or random right-wing bloggers, but by the bi-partisan senate intelligence committee report and the report of an independent british intelligence commission.


Fifth- None of this addresses my post.

Again-

George Tenet said the uranium statement never should have been in Bush's speech. He said the CIA did not have strong enough evidence to support this claim. That's why Bush cited British intelligence.

Is this accurate?




If the British claims weren't based on the forged documents, what were they based on and why didn't the CIA have confidence in their evidence?


I didn't say the British claims were based on the forged documents. I asked what their claims were based on and why the CIA didn't have confidence in their evidence.

[Chump]

Senate report: Powell lied to UN


Flaws Cited in Powell's U.N. Speech on Iraq
State Department analysts saw errors in early drafts, prompting revisions, report says.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.

Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials, the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among State Department experts.

Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council was crafted by the CIA at the behest of the White House. Intended to be the Bush administration's most compelling case by one of its most credible spokesmen that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein was necessary, the speech has become a central moment in the lead-up to war.

The speech also has become a point of reference in the failure of U.S. intelligence. Although Powell has said he struggled to ensure that all of his arguments were sound and backed by intelligence from several sources, it nonetheless became a key example of how the administration advanced false claims to justify war.

Powell has expressed disappointment that, after working to remove dubious claims, the intelligence backing the remaining points of his U.N. speech has turned out to be flawed.

"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading, and for that I am disappointed and I regret it," Powell said in May. A State Department spokesman said late Wednesday, however, that the United States made the right decision "to go into Iraq, and the world today is safer because we did."

Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from the draft or altered, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.

The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.

The documents underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble the case for war. But the origin and full scope of some errors remain unclear because Senate investigators were denied access to a number of relevant documents, according to aides involved in the probe.

The CIA rejected requests for initial versions of what became the Powell presentation on the grounds that they were internal working documents and not finished products. And the Republican-controlled committee did not seek access to a 40-plus-page document that was prepared by Vice President Dick Cheney's office and submitted to State Department speechwriters detailing the case the administration wanted Powell to make.

According to the Senate report, the idea for the speech originated in December 2002, when the National Security Council instructed the CIA to prepare a public response to Iraq's widely criticized 12,000-page declaration claiming that it had no banned weapons. It wasn't until late January 2003 that intelligence officials learned their work would form the basis for a speech Powell would give to the United Nations.

Powell and several of his aides then spent several days at CIA headquarters working on drafts of the speech, in what participants have described as sessions marked by heated arguments over what to include.

When Powell appeared before the U.N., he made a series of sweeping assertions that have crumbled under postwar scrutiny — including claims that Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, was pursuing nuclear weapons and that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."

But the documents in the Senate report show that earlier drafts of the speech contained dozens of additional, disputed claims; they provide the most detailed glimpse to date into the last-minute scramble to strike those claims from the text.

Several of the dubious statements in the early drafts had to do with alleged Iraqi efforts to thwart weapons inspections that had been restarted by the U.N.

One allegation was that Iraq was trying to keep incriminating weapons files from falling into the hands of inspectors by having operatives carry the sensitive documents around in cars. The State Department reviewers called the claim "highly questionable" and warned that it would invite scorn from critics and U.N. inspection officials.

Another claim was that Iraq was having members of its intelligence services pose as weapons scientists to dupe U.N. inspectors. But the State Department noted that such a ruse was "not credible" because of the level of sophistication it would require.

"Interviews typically involve such topics as nuclear physics, microbiology, rocket science and the like," the State Department reviewers wrote, indicating that even a well-rehearsed intelligence operative would be hard-pressed to pull off such a charade.

In their critique, State Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations.

In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.

"We caution," State Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives."

The presence of a water truck "is common in such an event," they concluded.

The experts labeled as "weak" a claim that a photograph of an Iraqi with "marks on his arm" was evidence that Baghdad was conducting biological experiments on humans. The language was struck from the speech, although Powell told the Security Council that Iraq had been conducting such experiments since the 1980s.

State Department analysts also made it clear that they disagreed with CIA and other analysts on the allegation that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were for use in a nuclear weapons program. "We will work with our [intelligence community] colleagues to fix some of the more egregious errors in the tubes discussion," the memo said.

In the speech, Powell acknowledged disagreement among analysts on the tubes, but included the claim. The Senate report concluded last week that the tubes were for conventional rockets.

In a section on nuclear weapons, the analysts argued against using a communications intercept they described as "taken out of context" and "highly misleading." There is no more information on what was in the intercept, but Powell in his speech referred to intercepted communications that he said showed that "Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors."

Aside from the two memos, the Senate report refers to other language that was deleted from drafts of Powell's speech, although it is not clear who urged the items to be struck.

In one case, Powell was to say that the aluminum tubes were so unsuitable for use in conventional rockets that if he were to roll one on a table, "the mere pressure of my hand would deform it." Department of Energy engineers said that statement was incorrect.

For all their skepticism, State Department analysts did not challenge some of the fundamental allegations in the Powell speech that have since been proved unfounded. Chief among them is the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories, an accusation based largely on information from an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball."

What the State Department didn't know at the time was that a CIA representative who had met with Curveball found him to have a drinking problem and to be highly unreliable. The CIA representative's red flags were not relayed to Powell until recently, a State Department official said, when then-CIA Director George J. Tenet contacted Powell to tell him that problems with Curveball would be detailed in the Senate report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-powell15jul15,1,7897981.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[FranchiseBlade]

Well after reading the Butler report, and he believes the claims were well founded, that changes what?

For the Republicans the best it does is give one intel agency saying that the claims were credible. Meanwhile the U.S. intel agencies and the administration themselves have since admitted they weren't really credible.

Furthermore, nothing in that changes the fact that someone with top security clearance in our current president's administration has committed at least one felony related to damaging our national security.

Gifford already pointed out that the administration could have maintained the accuracy of their claim and shown proof that it was accurate. Instead they backed down, and someone committed a felony and exposed the identity of an intel agent, while we have troops in the field on the war on terror.

Butler's report changes little. It does show that Butler examined some evidence and believes it was a legit claim. The Bush administration didn't stick to their story, and someone felt that a forged paper was needed to bolster the claim.

[basso]

Originally posted by basso
think about that the next time you have a discussion about whether john kerry is serious about the war or terror.

http://www.allahpundit.com/KE.jpg

[gifford1967]

Joseph Wilson responds to the Republican Senator's critique in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, including the charges that he lied about his wife's role in his trip to Niger.



The Senate's bad intelligence
Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson demands that Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee set the record straight.

- - - - - - - - - - - -




July 16, 2004 | Editor's note: Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the U.S. intelligence community's prewar assessments on Iraq. An appendix discusses the role taken by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in determining whether Iraq had obtained uranium from Niger. The following is Wilson's letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee pointing to errors in the Republican senators' additional comments to the report and demanding corrections.

- - - - - - - - - - - -


July 15, 2004

The Hon. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

The Hon. Jay Rockefeller, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Dear Sen. Roberts and Sen. Rockefeller,

I read with great surprise and consternation the Niger portion of Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch's additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq. I am taking this opportunity to clarify some of the issues raised in these comments.

First conclusion: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee."

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife, sent to her superiors that says, "My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] reports officer stated that "the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name'" (page 39) and a State Department intelligence and research officer stated that the "meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she [Valerie] departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium-related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the reports officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the "additional comments." I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA's position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July 2003. They reported on July 22 that:

"A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked 'alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. 'They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,' he said. 'There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,' he said. 'I can't figure out what it could be.' 'We paid his [Wilson's] airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there,' the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses." (Newsday article "Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover," dated July 22, 2003).

In fact, on July 13 of this year, David Ensor, the CNN correspondent, did call the CIA for a statement of its position and reported that a senior CIA official confirmed my account that Valerie did not propose me for the trip:

"'She did not propose me,' he [Wilson] said -- others at the CIA did so. A senior CIA official said that is his understanding too."

Second conclusion: "Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."

This conclusion states that I told the committee staff that I "may have become confused about my own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the names and dates on the documents were not correct." At the time that I was asked that question, I was not afforded the opportunity to review the articles to which the staff was referring. I have now done so.

On March 7, 2003, the director general of the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents that had been given to him were "not authentic." His deputy, Jacques Baute, was even more direct, pointing out that the forgeries were so obvious that a quick Google search would have exposed their flaws. A State Department spokesman was quoted the next day as saying about the forgeries, "We fell for it." From that time on the details surrounding the documents became public knowledge and were widely reported. I was not the source of information regarding the forensic analysis of the documents in question; the IAEA was.

The first time I spoke publicly about the Niger issue was in response to the State Department's disclaimer. On CNN a few days later, in response to a question, I replied that I believed the U.S. government knew more about the issue than the State Department spokesman had let on and that he had misspoken. I did not speak of my trip.

My first public statement was in my article of July 6 published in the New York Times, written only after it became apparent that the administration was not going to deal with the Niger question unless it was forced to. I wrote the article because I believed then, and I believe now, that it was important to correct the record on the statement in the president's State of the Union address which lent credence to the charge that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. I believed that the record should reflect the facts as the U.S. government had known them for over a year. The contents of my article do not appear in the body of the report and it is not quoted in the "additional comments." In that article, I state clearly that "as for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors -- they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government -- and were probably forged. (And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)"

The first time I actually saw what were represented as the documents was when Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent, handed them to me in an interview on July 21. I was not wearing my glasses and could not read them. I have to this day not read them. I would have absolutely no reason to claim to have done so. My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus.

The text of the "additional comments" also asserts that "during Mr. Wilson's media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa."

My article in the New York Times makes clear that I attributed to myself "a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs." After it became public that there were then-Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick's report and the report from a four-star Marine Corps general, Carleton Fulford, in the files of the U.S. government, I went to great lengths to point out that mine was but one of three reports on the subject. I never claimed to have "debunked" the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. I claimed only that the transaction described in the documents that turned out to be forgeries could not have occurred and did not occur. I did not speak out on the subject until several months after it became evident that what underpinned the assertion in the State of the Union address were those documents, reports of which had sparked Vice President Cheney's original question that led to my trip. The White House must have agreed. The day after my article appeared in the Times a spokesman for the president told the Washington Post that "the sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union."

I have been very careful to say that while I believe that the use of the 16 words in the State of the Union address was a deliberate attempt to deceive the Congress of the United States, I do not know what role the president may have had other than he has accepted responsibility for the words he spoke. I have also said on many occasions that I believe the president has proven to be far more protective of his senior staff than they have been to him.

The "additional comments" also assert: "The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal." In fact, the body of the Senate report suggests the exact opposite:

In August 2002, a CIA NESA [Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis] report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities did not include the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium information. (page 48)

In September 2002, during coordination of a speech with an NSC staff member, the CIA analyst suggested the reference to Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa be removed. The CIA analyst said the NSC staff member said that would leave the British "flapping in the wind." (page 50)

The uranium text was included in the body of the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] but not in the key judgments. When someone suggested that the uranium information be included as another sign of reconstitution, the INR [State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] Iraq nuclear analyst spoke up and said the he did not agree with the uranium reporting and that INR would be including text indicating their disagreement in their footnote on nuclear reconstitution. The NIO [national intelligence officer] said he did not recall anyone really supporting including the uranium issue as part of the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, so he suggested that the uranium information did not need to be part of the key judgments. He told committee staff that he suggested, "We'll leave it in the paper for completeness. Nobody can say we didn't connect the dots. But we don't have to put that dot in the key judgments." (page 53)

On Oct. 2, 2002, the Deputy DCI [director of central intelligence] testified before the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]. Sen. Jon Kyl asked the Deputy DCI whether he had read the British White Paper and whether he disagreed with anything in the report. The Deputy DCI testified that "the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations." (page 54)

On Oct. 4, 2002, the NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs testified that "there is some information on attempts ... there's a question about those attempts because of the control of the material in those countries ... For us it's more the concern that they [Iraq] have uranium in-country now." (page 54)

On Oct. 5, 2002, the ADDI [associate deputy director for intelligence] said an Iraqi nuclear analyst -- he could not remember who -- raised concerns about the sourcing and some of the facts of the Niger reporting, specifically that the control of the mines in Niger would have made it very difficult to get yellowcake to Iraq. (page 55)

Based on the analyst's comments, the ADDI faxed a memo to the deputy national security advisor that said, "Remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from this source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the DCI called the deputy national security advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. The DCI testified to the SSCI on July 16, 2003, that he told the deputy national security advisor that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue," because his analysts had told him the "reporting was weak." (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House that said, "More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British." (page 56)

On March 8, 2003, the intelligence report on my trip was disseminated within the U.S. government, according to the Senate report (page 43). Further, the Senate report states that "in early March, the Vice President asked his morning briefer for an update on the Niger uranium issue." That update from the CIA "also noted that the CIA would be debriefing a source who may have information related to the alleged sale on March 5." The report then states the "DO officials also said they alerted WINPAC [Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control] analysts when the report was being disseminated because they knew the high priority of the issue." The report notes that the CIA briefer did not brief the vice president on the report. (page 46)

It is clear from the body of the Senate report that the intelligence community, including the DCI himself, made several attempts to ensure that the president did not become a "fact witness" on an allegation that was so weak. A thorough reading of the report substantiates the claim made in my opinion piece in the New York Times and in subsequent interviews I have given on the subject. The 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address, as the White House now acknowledges.

I undertook this mission at the request of my government in response to a legitimate concern that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. This was a national security issue that has concerned me since I was the deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq before and during the first Gulf War.

At the time of my trip I was in private business and had not offered my views publicly on the policy we should adopt toward Iraq. Indeed, throughout the debate in the run-up to the war, I took the position that the U.S. be firm with Saddam Hussein on the question of weapons of mass destruction programs, including backing tough diplomacy with the credible threat of force. In that debate I never mentioned my trip to Niger. I did not share the details of my trip until May 2003, after the war was over, and then only when it became clear that the administration was not going to address the issue of the State of the Union statement.

It is essential that the errors and distortions in the additional comments be corrected for the public record. Nothing could be more important for the American people than to have an accurate picture of the events that led to the decision to bring the United States into war in Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee has an obligation to present to the American people the factual basis of that process. I hope that this letter is helpful in that effort. I look forward to your further "additional comments."

Sincerely,

Joseph C. Wilson IV, Washington, D.C.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/07/16/wilson_letter/print.html

[SamFisher]

More...

looks like josh was right about the 400 tons

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/16/wilson/print.html
Joseph Wilson vs. the right-wing conspiracy
Gleeful conservatives insist the Senate Intelligence Committee report impeached the former ambassador's claims about Iraq and uranium. But Wilson is firing back.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mary Jacoby



July 16, 2004 | WASHINGTON -- Choreographed editorials and Op-Ed pieces on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and National Review and by conservative columnist Robert Novak signaled the revving up of a Republican campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his claims that President Bush trumpeted flimsy intelligence in the drive to invade Iraq.

The opinion pieces came on the heels of a July 10 report in the Washington Post that said Wilson lied when he claimed in public statements that his wife, a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer, had not recommended him for a fact-finding mission to Niger in 2002.

It was on this CIA-sponsored trip more than two years ago that Wilson concluded there was no truth to a British intelligence report, highly prized by the White House, that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons from the African nation. When Bush repeated the questionable claim in a January 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson wrote publicly about his trip and his findings in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, setting off a political firestorm. The first chapter in the drama appeared to end when the White House admitted that Bush should not have said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

But the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of a report last week on prewar intelligence failures has resurrected the Niger controversy. The report, amplified by Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt and right-wing opinion writers, prompted the retired diplomat on Thursday to send a six-page rebuttal to the panel's chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. An aide to Rockefeller did not return phone calls, while a Republican intelligence committee staffer who was asked to comment on Wilson's letter said, "Our report speaks for itself."

The new questions about Wilson and his motives come as polls show Bush approval ratings floundering amid falling support for the war in Iraq. The campaign of presumed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts has sharply questioned Bush's candor and credibility, and a special prosecutor is wrapping up an investigation into which senior administration official leaked Plame's name to columnist Novak. Wilson has said the apparently illegal disclosure of his wife's identify (she was a covert CIA officer) was made in retaliation for his speaking out about the lack of evidence in Niger.

The dispute over the committee report centers on its interpretation of two facts. One is that Wilson told his CIA debriefers that during his Niger trip, he spoke to the country's former prime minister, who told him that members of an Iraqi delegation in the late 1990s expressed interest in expanded commercial contacts with Niger. The former prime minister told Wilson that he interpreted the comment to mean that Iraq was interested in buying uranium, although the word "uranium" was not mentioned in the Iraqis' conversation, he said. The prime minister, fearful of United Nations sanctions that prevented trade with Iraq at the time, dropped the subject, Wilson reported.

But because the ex-minister believed the Iraqis were seeking uranium, the Senate report concluded that whether Iraq sought uranium in Africa remains an open question -- a conclusion Wilson disputes. It further reported that far from debunking the notion that Iraq was seeking uranium for weapons, Wilson's trip to Niger actually bolstered the story, at least in the view of some intelligence analysts, who found the news that the former prime minister believed the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium convincing. But no sale of uranium ever took place, Wilson reported, and that conclusion is not in dispute. Wilson did report that Iraq's neighbor, Iran, had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from Niger in 1998.

The report also quotes an internal CIA memo written by Wilson's wife, Plame, stating: "my husband has good relations with both the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Based on Plame's internal memo and other evidence, three Republicans -- Roberts and Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Kit Bond of Missouri -- wrote additional views appended to the report, concluding that "the plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested" by Plame. The three GOP senators criticized their Democratic counterparts on the panel for refusing to endorse this conclusion.

In his letter to the committee, Wilson disputed the Republican senators' characterization. "There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip," he wrote. A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment. In an interview, Wilson said that his wife was stating facts about his background, not pushing that he go to Niger.

The Washington Post story, meanwhile, took the disputed Senate report conclusions even further. It stated in its lead that Wilson was "specifically recommended for the mission by his wife ... contrary to what he has said publicly." In the interview, Wilson argued that the Post story failed to make clear that only the intelligence panel's Republicans, and not its Democrats, came to that conclusion. He said he has written a letter of protest to the Post.

The Post article also contained one acknowledged error: In trying to build a case that Wilson's Niger trip had actually bolstered the administration's claims, Schmidt wrote that Wilson had told the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that Wilson said had tried to make the purchase, as the Senate report states. The Post ran a correction.


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[basso]

amazing that wilson, supported by salon, could write such extensive "clarifications", and make further accusations against republicans on the senate intel committee, and yet never mention lord butler's report.

NON-DENIAL DENIAL

[basso]

also, Salon never mentions that mary jacoby was Wesley Clark's press secretary (http://www.nationalreview.com/geraghty/geraghty200309230830.asp) . don't you think salon should've mentioned her connection to the democratic party before she got on her "choreographed editorials" high horse?

[SamFisher]

Originally posted by basso
also, Salon never mentions that mary jacoby was Wesley Clark's press secretary (http://www.nationalreview.com/geraghty/geraghty200309230830.asp) . don't you think salon should've mentioned her connection to the democratic party before she got on her "choreographed editorials" high horse?

Salon is a left leaning publication. Were you not aware of this?

Or are you just resentful that the right wing press is so transparent in following its marching orders? Whoopi for you.


Originally posted by basso
amazing that wilson, supported by salon, could write such extensive "clarifications", and make further accusations against republicans on the senate intel committee, and yet never mention lord butler's report.


His letter is dated yesterday, the Butler report, I believe, was made public yesterday. Not really that amazing, but whatever floats your boat.

[FranchiseBlade]

Originally posted by basso
amazing that wilson, supported by salon, could write such extensive "clarifications", and make further accusations against republicans on the senate intel committee, and yet never mention lord butler's report.

NON-DENIAL DENIAL

I hope he does address the Butler report. Even if he does it I would like the CIA to address it since they don't give it much credibility either.