Bush's State of the Union speech redeemed

Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined ''President Bush Deceives The American People"?

Yawn. What's new? But last summer the Bush Lie Of The Week was all to do with Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger. CNN and Co. replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the president's 2003 State of the Union Address:

''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Sixteen words that could break a presidency! Bush ''misled every one of us,'' huffed Sen. John Kerry. ''It's beginning to sound like Watergate,'' said Howard Dean. Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for the New York Times titled ''What I didn't find in Africa.''

Can you guess what he didn't find, dear reader? That's right, he didn't find a big package of uranium bearing the address label ''S. Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Centre for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad.'' Ambassador Wilson said relax, he'd been to Niger, spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people,'' and there's nothing going on.

Well, on Wednesday in London, Lord Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which rested Britain's case for going to war with Iraq. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair's claims, supportive of others. And, among the latter, he says that the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence. In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my in-box back then, ''BUSH LIED!!!!!!" So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie?

Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think Butler's report will be? Do you think Terry McAuliffe and John Kerry and Howard Dean will be eating humble yellowcake?

In July last year, I wrote about the Bush Lie Of The Week in this space. The CIA had disowned the Niger story, and I pointed out that these were the same fellows who'd botched the Sudanese aspirin factory business, failed to spot 9/11 coming, etc., etc.

"So," I wrote, "if you're the president and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there's nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, 'Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day'? Or, given what you've learnt about the state of your humint (human intelligence), is it likely they've got much of a clue about what's going on in French Africa? Isn't this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French (Niger's uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission) are more plugged in?"

And so it's proved. The fact is almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn't think so were the CIA.

Let's weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one continental intelligence agency had had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years. In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think-tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. He didn't even bother filing a written report, and the ''Bush spurned my advice!'' column he wrote for the Times reads like a bad travelogue: ''Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river.'' After that, the great narcissist somehow managed to make himself the center of the story -- But hey, enough about Saddam's nuclear ambitions; let's talk about me.

A few weeks before 9/11, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of U.S. counter-terrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy. Among Gerecht's many memorable quotes was this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency grown used to desk-bound life in Virginia: ''Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen.'' That's Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhea Central. Who'd want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world's e-mail in an air-conditioned office?

But Niger is a 99.5 percent Sunni Muslim country with the world's second highest birth rate and a load of uranium. It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on. And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

That's the issue here: The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness. This spring, the ever-complacent George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the clandestine service. So three years after 9/11 the CIA says it needs another five years. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor. In 1942, he'd have told the president not to worry, he'd have it up and running by 1950.

Bush didn't LIE!!!! He was right, and the CIA were wrong. That doesn't mean they LIED!!!! either. Intelligence is never 100 percent. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world's hyperpower was wrong. That should be a cause of great concern -- for all Americans.

National security shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat thing. But it's become one because, for too many Americans, when it's a choice between Bush and anybody else, they'll take anybody else. So, in ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' if it's a choice between Bush and Saddam, Michael Moore comes down on the side of the genocidal whacko and shows us lyrical slo-mo shots of kiddies flying kites in a Baathist utopia. In the Afghan war, if it's a choice between Bush and the women-enslaving gay-executing Taliban, Susan Sarandon and Co. side with the Taliban. And in the most exquisite reductio of this now universal rule, if it's a choice between Bush and the CIA, the left sides with the CIA.

There's one for the peace marches: Hey, hey, CIA/How many Bush lies did you expose today?

The media is already re-spinning this report in their favor. One story stated that this didn't vindicate Bush because Bush's "only" source for Yellow Cake was the fake Italian document...which the UN descredited. Unfortunately, the author of that piece...just as our media did, ignored that Bush's SOTU Address specifically mentions "British Intelligence" as the source.

Another story published just yesterday said Bush backtracked from his original statement because he knew the source was not credible. This again was another lie, as some in the administration simply said that the "16 words" shouldn't have been in SOTU since the source was British Intel and our own intel agencies weren't privy to the original source because of specific non-sharing agreements. That still didn't make the 16 words any less valid...as the media beat Bush over the head for weeks on end.

What's missing in these stories is the huge irony...especially with the release of our Senate's own Intel report. The media and the Democrats all called Bush a liar for ignoring this sole source that Saddam may not have had WMDs. They all relied heavily on Joe Wilson's report to discredit Bush.

It was July 2003 when Wilson claimed he had proof that the administration ignored his anti-WMD information... because he had gone to Niger for the CIA and reported back that there was no evidence Iraq had obtained uranium there. Even worse, according to Wilson...the White House knew of his mission.

For those who haven't read the Senate report, they have determined unquestioningly that Dick Cheney never heard about Wilson's trip, therefore, it was actually Wilson who was the liar. There's somthing disturbing about the idea that Bush was to believe this one man and his investigation...above all other evidence, when it has now been shown through British Intelligence and their investigation, that Wilson was the one who was wrong. And these people are sill spinning it as if they were right all along. Please.

A more intriguing discussion of this matter, which covers a lot more ground:

GLOBAL VIEW
By GEORGE MELLOAN
Spooks Know at Least One Thing,
How to Shift Blame
July 6, 2004; Page A23

Presidents have always handled intelligence agencies with care, knowing full well their skills at the black art of clandestine politics. Maybe the Bush administration hasn't been careful enough. Judging from the headlines, the spooks are no longer bothering to conceal their political views from broad public view. And their new boldness is mainly directed at discrediting the commander in chief.

But all these factious revelations about administration "errors" reveal something more disturbing than the possibility that the Central Intelligence Agency et al have gone out of control. They suggest that these new public figures aren't any better at getting their facts right now than they were when the president was depending on them for intelligence critical to national security.

First came the estimable Richard Clarke, who emerged some months ago from 10 years of anonymity in the bowels of the White House to claim his 15 minutes of fame. His theme, that the president didn't heed the Clarke warnings before 9/11 and should not have invaded Iraq, made a big hit with the antiwar crowd, immediately elevating Mr. Clarke to celebrity status.

But his complaints raised some questions. Mr. Clarke's was chief of counterterrorism in the National Security Council long before 9/11, so his job record includes whatever advice he was offering when President Clinton was brushing off attacks on American embassies and an American warship in the 1990s. More to the point, Mr. Clarke admitted to the 9/11 Commission that even if Mr. Bush had taken his advice, it wouldn't have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Then came the case of the estimable Valerie Plame, wife of an ardent Bush-basher, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The White House is taking a lot of heat because someone, somewhere, leaked to columnist Robert Novak last July that Ms. Plame is some kind of secret agent at the CIA. Outing a secret agent is a criminal offense.

Mr. Wilson claims some "punk" leaked this tidbit to pay him back for his report throwing cold water on the president's claim, based mainly on British intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Aside from the merits of leaking the occupation of the top-secret Ms. Plame, the White House might have had good reason to be miffed at the CIA's decision to send the hostile Mr. Wilson to check out the Niger story.

And it still has reason to be miffed, because Mr. Wilson quite possibly got it wrong. Although intelligence agencies were apparently victims of a forged document related to the alleged uranium sale, an article in the Financial Times last week revealed that European agencies are sticking by their story of an Iraqi interest in illegally purchasing uranium from Niger. According to the FT, three European intelligence agencies had information going as far back as 1999 that Niger officials had discussed sales of uranium "yellow cake" with five countries, including Iraq.

So were Mr. Wilson and the CIA doing an amateur-hour exercise on the Niger question? It might be nice to know, considering the grief the president has suffered from the flawed intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Finally, in the most bizarre case so far of intelligence effrontery, we have the estimable "Mr. Anonymous." His book, "Imperial Hubris," coming soon to bookstores everywhere, is yet another attack on the president's Iraq policy. It is a surefire media sensation not only for that reason but because "Mr. Anonymous" is an active spook, a 22-year veteran of the CIA. He says the CIA allowed him to publish his assault on the commander in chief, but wouldn't allow him to use his name.

Unlike the sequestered and secluded Ms. Plame, however, Mr. Anonymous and his colleagues at Langley don't appear terribly concerned about keeping his identity secret. For one thing, Mr. Anonymous presumably will want his real name on the royalty checks from his publisher. Jason Vest wrote in the Boston Phoenix last Thursday that he had confirmed with "nearly a dozen intelligence community sources" that Mr. Anonymous is in fact CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. According to Mr. Vest, the author doesn't want to be anonymous at all, but is "being compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience."

How's that again? The CIA might feel "inconvenienced" by one of its civil servants attacking the boss man in that big white house across the river? Most of us don't see evidence of iron discipline in this organization that is regarded as America's first line of defense in the war against terrorism. Military officers are loath to publicly criticize the president in wartime, for fear it might be construed as gross insubordination. But CIA guys apparently aren't guided by the same constraints.

CIA analysts are of course expected to give their bosses honest opinions, and if an analyst thinks the administration policy is all wrong he has an obligation to say so. But even civil servants in less sensitive positions are under legal constraints, in return for their low risk of being fired, to stay clear of politics -- or at least that's the theory. Mr. Scheuer, if that's the right name, surely must be a bright enough analyst to know that his book will be prime fodder for Mr. Bush's opponents come election time.

A House Intelligence Committee report on the CIA said the agency has been ignoring its "core mission." Could that be because its employees are too busy hatching plots against the president? The report also said that the CIA was on its way to being "a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success."

The committee's chairman, whose name headed this damning report, is Porter Goss (R., Fla.) a former CIA man himself. He is one of the candidates for appointment to CIA director when George Tenet steps down in a few days.

It is said that Mr. Tenet was very unhappy with the criticism directed at his agency and indirectly at him. But then President Bush has good reason to be unhappy as well, and maybe the loose cannons banging around the intelligence agencies will soon learn that he is still the boss.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108906743781955534,00.html

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