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Posted on 07/07/2003 10:51:46 PM PDT by Romulus
WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.
The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.
The acknowledgment came after a day of questions — and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials — about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.
"There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa," the statement said. "However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made."
In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't prove it, and it might in fact be wrong."
Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an unidentifed senior administration official as declaring that "knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." Some administration officials have expressed similar sentiments in interviews in the past two weeks.
Asked about the statement early today, before President Bush departed for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said, "There is zero, nada, nothing new here." He said that "we've long acknowledged" that information on the attempted purchases from Niger "did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect."
But in public, administration officials have defended the president's statement in the State of Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving the account the credibility of coming from a non-American intelligence service, Britain itself relied in part on information provided by the C.I.A., American and British officials have said.
But today a report from a parliamentary committee that conducted an investigation into the British assertions also questioned the credibility of what the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had published.
The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair's government had asserted it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to procure uranium. But eight months later the government still had not told Parliament what that other information was.
While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was apparently primarily based on American intelligence — a classified "National Intelligence Estimate" published in October of last year that also identified two other countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had sought the material, in addition to Niger.
But many analysts did not believe those reports at the time, and were shocked to hear the president make such a flat, declarative statement. Asked about the accuracy of the president's statement this morning, Mr. Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would dissuade us from the president's broader statement." But when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later today.
Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement.
How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate.
That document contained a footnote — in a separate section of the report, on another subject — noting that State Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.
If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed statements by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and could build one in a year or less if he obtained enough nuclear material.
In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium reports about Niger, noting that they were based on forged documents.
In an interview late last month, a senior administration official said that the news of the fraud was not brought to the attention of the White House until after Mr. Bush had spoken.
But even then, White House officials made no effort to correct the president's remarks. Indeed, as recently as a few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush had quite deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he had spoken more generally about efforts to obtain "yellowcake," the substance from which uranium is extracted, from African nations.
Tonight's statement, though, calls even those reports into question. In interviews in recent days, a number of administration officials have conceded that Mr. Bush never should have made the claims, given the weakness of the case. One senior official said that the uranium purchases were "only one small part" of a broader effort to reconstitute the nuclear program, and that Mr. Bush probably should have dwelled on others.
White House officials would not say, however, how the statement was approved. They have suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency approved the wording, though the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had reviewed it. Other key members of the administration said the information was discounted early on, and that by the time the president delivered the State of the Union address, there were widespread questions about the quality of the intelligence.
"We only found that out later," said one official involved in the speech.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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"And Hoo boy, are our faces ever red! Whoops; plane's leaving. Gotta go!"
Move along, citizens.
The Dog Ate My Homework -- hey, it worked for the Clintons.
The other is to put it down about the middle of the second paragraph thinking, "What is this jihad the media is on? It just gets thicker every day. Next they'll be telling us that we've deposed a perfectly fine fellow who was busy helping the poor until we went over there and screwed it up." Has anybody seen a poll that could tell us whether the media is shooting Bush or themselves with this crap? I know what I think, but I'm a wingnut. |
What truth could there be here? Is anyone alleging that some CIA guy in the field made this up out of whole cloth? I don't hear that. Is anyone alleging that somebody in the White House made it up? I don't hear anyone claiming that either.
All I hear is that some guy in the CIA heard that Saddam might be acquiring nuclear material in Africa. This got put in some memo, which flew around for awhile, and some speechwriter got his hands on it and thought it would make a good line in a speech.
OK, who here has never received a memo with something in it that turned out not to be so? Stuff like this happens every day, all over the world, in any place with more than 20 people in it.
We send these guys out to places like Africa to go spy on people and see what they can find out. What do we think, that they were invited to attend the meeting where this deal was arranged (or not arranged)? They find out what they can. They report what they hear. Who knows how much of it is true? They don't know themselves. All they know is that if it is true, somebody in Washington would rather know about it than not.
People act like, "Aha! They lied!" Oh, spare me. Trying to find out what a frigging dictator might be doing in one of his most top secret weapons programs is not an exact science. Let's not pretend it should have been, because it can't be and it never will be.
Only the New York Times, recent employer of Jayson Blair, would have nerve to call somebody else a liar for repeating something they were told by a presumably reputable employee. This story sucks.
As ever, your reply have nailed it ... perfectly, I might add.
President Bush, in his latest State of the Union address this Spring, 2003said this, EXCERPTED:
"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?"
==
The bottom line excerpt from President Bush's speech aboard The USS Abraham Lincoln:
"Our war against terror is proceeding according to principles that I have made clear to all:
*Any person* involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.
Any person*, *organization*, or *government* that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and equally guilty of terrorist crimes.
Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups and SEEKS or possesses weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilized world -- and will be confronted.
It came from the British not US Intel so if anyone is not telling the truth it was the Brits not the US who had flawed intel.
We share Intel with 80 plus countries and they lay them out like a jigsaw puzzle and some pieces look like they fit but when you get to the end of the puzzle they don't go where you thought they would go but the picture of the puzzle ends up looking like you thought when you only had half the puzzle done.
Intel is a best educated guess and not 100% fact !
I will allege something. The uranium procurement allegation was based on forged documents. Someone forged said forged documents. What possible motive could drive anyone to randomly forge documentation of Iraqi uranium procurements?
The DUmmies are having a virtual orgy over this. They've already started shreiking "IMPEACHMENT! IMPEACHMENT!"
What sad, sad people they are...
So it seems. I found what almost looks like a bunch of Freepers -- they actually go research things and pool what they find out. Since their analysis of this mystery quotes liberally [sic] from "investigative reporter Seymour Hersh," it's safe to assume that these guys have no love lost for Bush.
They don't know who forged the documents. Suspects include "a con artist" who was out to make a buck selling manufactured secrets to the CIA; the British; the ever-mysterious Neoconservative hawks, AKA "The Jooz"; Iraqi exiles; the Israelis; a mysterious "someone inside," and so on. In other words, nobody knows, and even the guys who are trying their best to find a conspiracy in all this are coming up empty.
I guess on this one we're all free to pick our spot, somewhere between the guy who thinks OJ really was innocent, and Oliver Stone. It doesn't look like we're ever going to know. My rule on these is not to attribute to malice anything that can be explained by incompetence.
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It seems to me there are two ways to react to this story. One is to lap up every word while chortling "Hah! They got him! Bush The Crook! He'll be in handcuffs any minute!"