Posted on 07/14/2003 9:57:21 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War
Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President's claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration's advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace "a world in which states consider themselves subject to law" with "the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States." A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress.
According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee's secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers. The uranium, known as "yellow cake," can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.)
On the same day, in London, Tony Blair's government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret - that Iraq had sought to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from an unnamed African country, "despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it." The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, "african gangs offer route to uranium."
Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.
On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President's Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or "scrubbed." Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. "I don't think anybody here sees that thing," a State Department analyst told me. "You only know what's in the P.D.B. because it echoes - people talk about it."
President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." He commented, "Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."
Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. "The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic," ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, "These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."
The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency's Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.
It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet."
The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's "yellow cake" comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. "Five hundred tons can't be siphoned off without anyone noticing," another I.A.E.A. official told me.
This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. "It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don't know," the official said. "Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted." Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6 - the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations - had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador's return to Rome.
Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, "confronted the United States with the forgery: 'What do you have to say?' They had nothing to say."
ElBaradei's disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei's report, dismissed the subject by saying, "If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved." A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. "It came from other sources," Powell testified. "It was provided in good faith to the inspectors."
The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, "We fell for it."
The Bush Administration's reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program - part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops - was known to a few senior officials in Washington. "I knew that was going on," the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. "We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."
Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips - data known as inactionable intelligence - to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. "It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world," the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. "I knew a bit," one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, "but I was never officially told about it."
None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British - President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech - and that "the Brits placed more stock in them than we did." It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that "something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere."
What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President's State of the Union speech? Was the message - the threat posed by Iraq - more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?
Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President's State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain's MI6. Harlow's statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.
The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren't trustworthy. "It's not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can't be 'sort of' bad, or 'sort of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud - it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, 'Wouldn't it be great if the Secretary of State said this?' The Secretary of State never saw the documents." He added, "He's absolutely apoplectic about it." (A State Department spokesman was unable to comment.) A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.
"Somebody deliberately let something false get in there," the former high-level intelligence official added. "It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up." (The White House declined to comment.)
Washington's case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But George W. Bush's war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world - in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It can't help the President's case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.
On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, "There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and "why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated." A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it. 
Iraqis grapple with post-war radioactivity
Iraq's ministry of health launched a survey Thursday to look for radiation sickness.By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
TUWAITHA, IRAQ - Salaam Kadhim had no idea what he would find last April, when he and three thieving friends breached the walls of Iraq's nuclear facility at Tuwaitha, as the regime of Saddam Hussein collapsed.
What they found were countless barrels full of radioactive uranium powder, known as "yellowcake." They emptied the barrels to use them as water cisterns at home - and then had a taste.
"I thought it was milk powder," Mr. Kadhim recalls in his village on the edge of Tuwaitha, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. "But when we poured it out, it made us dizzy. It tasted very bitter." ...
In an effort to bring back some of the 500 or so yellowcake barrels that disappeared, the US military began a "buy back" program, which paid Iraqis $3 for each barrel handed over. But activists from Greenpeace found that the market price to replace such a barrel is $15, and so estimated that 150 barrels remained in circulation, held by people unwilling to part with their "new" water cistern.
Imagine.
It inspired me to start googling and I added two more links to the thread that say that is what was believed to be going on back then:
JUNE 10, 2003 : (INTERIM UNMOVIC CHIEF NAMED, WAS THE LEADER OF THE IAEA TEAM WHICH CERTIFIED SOUTH AFRICA'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM DISSOLUTION) U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has appointed UNMOVIC Deputy Executive Chairman Demetrius Perricos to take over as acting head of the commission July 1, when Blix retires. Perricos was the commission's director of planning and operations for three years prior to his appointment in January to the body's number two post. The Greek native joined the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1972 as a safeguards inspector and led the team that certified the dissolution of South Africa's nuclear weapons program.He also worked in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War -"Interim UNMOVIC Chief Named ," U.N. release, June 10
(snip) The 1993-1994 attempted uranium purchase in Sudan During the third day of the trial, February 7, 2001, Al-Fadl testified that he was directly involved in an attempt to purchase uranium for Usama Bin Laden at the end of 1993 or the beginning of 1994. According to his testimony, Al-Fadl was telephoned by a senior Al-Qa’ida official, Abu Fadhl [most probably Fadl or Fazl] al-Makkee, and was instructed to meet with a contact in Khartoum, Sudan, who allegedly possessed uranium. The witness met first with Abu Abd Allah al-Yemeni (aka Abu Dijana) and was given the name of another contact, Moqadem Salah Abd al-Mobruk, a lieutenant colonel in the Sudanese Army who, according to the testimony, had been a former minister during the Numeiri presidency (1969-83).(5)Al-Fadl was charged with evaluating the situation, and after conferring with other associates, including his cousin, he met with al-Mobruk. Al-Mobruk referred Al-Fadl to a man named Basheer, and the two met at an office on Jambouria Street in Khartoum, Sudan. When questioned by Basheer as to whether Al-Qa’ida was serious about acuiring uranium, Al-Fadl claimed, “I know people, they [are] very serious, and they want to buy it.” He noted that l-Qa’ida was concerned primarily with the quality of the material and the country of origin, and secondarily with the cost. The arranged price was $1.5 million, plus additional commissions for Basheer and al-Mobruk. At this point, the main issue concerned the method of testing the uranium.
After reporting back to al-Makkee, Al-Fadl was sent to speak with a new contact, Abu Rida al-Suri. This meeting took place at the Ikhlak Company in the Baraka building in Khartoum. Al-Suri instructed Al-Fadl to return to Basheer and report that the organization had an “electric machine” capable of testing uranium. Again through an intermediary, Al-Fadl arranged a meeting with Basheer and, in a small house in the town of Bait al-Mal, north of Khartoum, Al-Fadl and al-Suri were shown a cylinder approximately 2-3 feet tall with a lot of words engraved on it. The men were given a note that Al-Fadl was told to deliver to another contact, Abu Hajer, and then await further instructions. Al-Fadl did not recollect exactly what was written on the paper, only that it was written in English, said “South Africa” on it, and contained a serial number.
The source is worth a good read : - "WMD TERRORISM AND USAMA BIN LADEN," by Kimberly McCloud and Matthew Osborne , CNS Reports, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/binladen.htm.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:pK36v57kAxAJ:cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/binladen.htm+%22WMD+TERRORISM+AND+USAMA+BIN+LADEN%22+%22+by+Kimberly+McCloud+and+Matthew+Osborne+,+CNS+Reports%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/binladen.htm
The story that seems to have kicked off the firestorm here was one fed to Capitol Hill Blue. (Seymour's article didn't get much traction, evidently.)
The CapHill Blue article was quickly picked up by truthout.org, a web site with connections to the usual suspects seen hanging around rat sites. The truthout.org site in turn sold the story under its name to JapanToday, and the next day it was all over the news, though some sources conveniently deleted the name of the alleged source, T J Wilkinson, supposedly a CIA guy. Now, the same story may have been fed to others but Cap Hill Blue is the one some noticed .
The curious thing about Truthout.org was that it was registered on September 10, 2001 by a "Marc Ash."
Which reminds me, maybe the talking points are all coming from ANSWER's Ramsey Clark.
FEBRUARY 14, 2003 : (SOUTH AFRICA WILL SEND ITS EXPERTS TO IRAQ; IRAQ ACCEPTS) South Africa will send experts in dismantling weapons of mass destruction to Iraq as part of Pretoria's bid to avert war, President Thabo Mbeki said in his state of the nation address today.
The intervention follows a visit to Baghdad by Aziz Pahad, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, and comes ahead of today's crucial report-back by United Nations weapons inspectors to the Security Council in New York.
Addressing a special joint sitting of Parliament, Mbeki said it was hoped the UN report-back "will not serve as a signal to some that the time has come to unleash the fury of war".
"As we speak, a number of our citizens are preparing to travel to Iraq. These are the experts who led our country's programme to destroy our nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, as well as the missiles for the delivery of these weapons in conditions of combat." The work they had done had resulted in South Africa becoming an international example of best practice in disarmament, he said.
South Africa voluntarily disarmed its weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s. Pretoria had proposed to Iraq and to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General that these experts share South Africa's experience with Baghdad, Mbeki said.
"I am pleased to inform the Honourable Members that Iraq has accepted our offer, which we have already discussed with the leadership of the weapons inspectors. "We trust that this intervention will help to ensure the necessary proper co-operation between the United Nations' inspectors and Iraq, so that the issue of weapons of mass destruction is addressed satisfactorily, without resort to war."
Mbeki thanked the Iraqi government for its positive response, as well as its recent decisions to allow U2 and other aerial surveillance flights, to encourage its citizens to co-operate with inspectors without the presence of officials, and to adopt legislation prohibiting the production of weapons of mass destruction. - "SA to send its nuclear experts to Iraq: Mbeki," http://www.sabcnews.com/politics/government/0,1009,52970,00.html., February 14, 2003, 11:15
FEBRUARY 24 +/- , 2003 : (SOUTH AFRICAN "DISARMAMENT EXPERTS" ARRIVE IN IRAQ) A group of South African disarmament experts has arrived in Baghdad to help Iraq destroy any weapons of mass destruction it may have. The team of seven includes nuclear and chemical-biological weapons specialists who helped destroy South African weapons during the 1990s. Both President Thabo Mbeki and his predecessor Nelson Mandela have criticised United States-led plans to attack Iraq. Correspondents say that South Africa is the only country to voluntarily dismantle its programme of weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was involved in South Africa's disarmament. He has praised it as a model of co-operation, and has urged Iraq to adopt it. Iraq's General Hosam Mohamad Amin, head of the National Monitoring Directorate which liaises with the UN inspectors, said he would start his meetings with the South African experts on Monday. "We will exchange technical viewpoints... and they will share with us their expertise in their declarations about their programmes of weapons of mass destruction," he said.
The South Africans are led by Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad. South Africa's nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal was established during the apartheid regime. South Africa's nuclear programme began in the 1970s as a deterrent against neighbouring states opposed to apartheid and against the Cold War instability that was fuelling the war in nearby Angola. Mr Mbeki announced that the team would leave for Iraq in his state of the nation address earlier this month. "Hopefully, what they will do, freely to share their invaluable knowledge and experience, to facilitate the work both of the UN weapons inspectors and the government of Iraq, will bring us back from the brink of war, while helping to ensure that Iraq is truly free of weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Mr Mandela's former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has offered to go to Iraq as a human shield.
- "SA experts start work in Iraq," BBC News, Monday, February 24, 2003
The AP does the heavy lifting for Jacques Baute. Jacques Baute, for those unfamiliar with the name, is France's representative to the IAEA, and he is also, coincidentally, the official who determined that the Niger documents were forgeries. He's now saying that this claim in the SOTU was false:
"'Our intelligence sources tell us that (President Saddam Hussein) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production,' Bush said. "
Why is it false? Spinning cylinders made of aluminum can be used for inferior models of enrichment centrifuges, which separate out bomb uranium. But the Iraqis by 1990 had advanced to a much more productive design using carbon fiber tubes.
Oh I see. We said they are trying to reconstitute their nuclear weapons program, we offer one piece of evidence, and the refutation is that the Iraqis were using a more advanced version. Why do I not see the refutation there? And never mind that gas centrifuge that was dug up in the scientist's backyard, under a rose bush.
Posted by: William McKinley
(a Freeper)
From William McKinley's blog:
The AP does the heavy lifting for Jacques Baute.
Jacques Baute, for those unfamiliar with the name, is France's representative to the IAEA, and he is also, coincidentally, the official who determined that the Niger documents were forgeries. He's now saying that this claim in the SOTU was false:
"'Our intelligence sources tell us that (President Saddam Hussein) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production,' Bush said. "
Why is it false?
Spinning cylinders made of aluminum can be used for inferior models of enrichment centrifuges, which separate out bomb uranium. But the Iraqis by 1990 had advanced to a much more productive design using carbon fiber tubes.
Oh I see. We said they are trying to reconstitute their nuclear weapons program, we offer one piece of evidence, and the refutation is that the Iraqis were using a more advanced version. Why do I not see the refutation there? And never mind that gas centrifuge that was dug up in the scientist's backyard, under a rose bush.
Posted by: William McKinley
(a Freeper)
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