Posted on 07/07/2004 6:05:32 PM PDT by Roscoe Karns
Published: July 7 2004 22:38 | Last Updated: July 8 2004 0:49
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.
Plame's husband is a raving liar.
Thanks for the alert. (Oh, how I hope to seem him carted off in an orange jumpsuit--and Jane Bond, too.)
"He has bertayed us!!!!!" - Algore
The forgeries didn't appear on the scene (and even then, NOT in U.S. hands) until October 2002. Wilson's trip to Niger took place in February 2002 and British intelligence predated that suspect trip. The forgeries most likely were concocted to discredit real evidence.
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.
The old "Sexed-Up Dossier", rolled out right at the time Wilson was whispering that "Bush lied". Personally, I think Kelly DID use the term "sexed-up" when complaining to Gilligan about the report.
"The same information was passed to the US but US officials did not incorporate it in their assessment."
Passed to whom in the US? CIA? Valerie Plame's group?
And they still sent Joe off to Niger to drink sweet mint tea?
And, if they "did not incorporate it in their assessment", how did GWB find out about it for the SOTU?
I am very confused...
I recall something about the CIA not using outside info unless they can confirm it themselves.
Reading Tenet's apologia, he tip toes around this. He can't speak plainly that the CIA, in his opinion, shouldn't have let bush use the sixteen words because it wasn't something the CIA couldn't verify themselves.
Of course the Brits wouldn't turn over the hard info because, probably, they feared leaks from Valerie's section, and maybe that the CIA had been penetrated by certain nations against removing Saddam.
Book came out in April & is at 773 at Amazon.
He sure isn't flacking it on FNC. Don't know about the other networks; I don't watch them.
All these expose books sure flame out fast these days.
I have always heard this, and this is certainly a common practice. But Niger is apparently wide open for uranium smuggling, with mines supposedly abandoned by the official mining company being operated by ostensibly private actors for sale on the black market (that doesn't sound like anything Wilson told us, does it...).
Contraband uranium could be simply trucked over the frontier into Libya, or it could be shipped out through the same port with the legal stuff... if it had papers. Those papers would by definition be bogus. My understanding is that the papers in question were dismissed as forged because information that should have been typed was handwritten, and a national seal was hand drawn. That doesn't sound like a proper forgery, that sounds like someone making up some paperwork he considers good enough.
That kind of bogus paperwork would itself be evidence of precisely the kind of smuggling we're talking about. If it was an intel agency's handiwork, it would be right, and it would even have the right signatures.
At least theoretically. I just think we've been too quick to dismiss this paperwork just because its bogus. Of course its bogus, they're smugglers.
Interesting food for thought....thanks.
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