Blair Bombshell: Intelligence Confirms Iraq Sought Niger Nuke Fuel

NewsMax.com ^ | Wednesday July 9, 2003; 12:59 p.m. EDT | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[Jean S]

While a firestorm erupted Tuesday over President Bush's supposedly false claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for its nuclear weapons program, Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained that the Iraq-Niger nuke connection had indeed been verified by additional intelligence.

Addressing Parliament Blair insisted that the story was not "a fantasy," as some U.S. sources were claiming, and that reports that British intelligence had based its finding solely on documents that later turned out to be counterfeit were not true.

"The evidence that we had that the Iraqi Government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called 'forged' documents, they came from separate intelligence," Blair insisted, according to the BBC.

Had it received any coverage in the U.S., the British leader's bombshell declaration would certainly take the wind out of efforts to discredit Bush based on the presumption that he lied about an Iraq-Niger nuke link in his State of the Union address this year.

Instead, American reporters continued to hint darkly of a Watergate-like scandal, based on the president's single sentence claim to Congress: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The British Prime Minister's revelation also means the White House may have jumped the gun yesterday when it acknowledged that, because the Niger nuke documents were questionable, Bush shouldn't have cited the British intelligence finding during the high profile speech.

[DManA]

So what? Bush was wrong when he said he'd been wrong?

[DManA]

So what? Bush was wrong when he said he'd been wrong?

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[dts32041]

Now if I understand what has happened A career Diplomat said he investigated and new it was false.

Would this bee the first time a career diplomat lied before a committee or to a news paper?

[JohnGalt]

Looks like Blair is none to happy with the Bush team selling him down the river. I suspect we are going to learn shortly where exactly this 'Niger Uranium' 'intelligence' came from.

Could prove to be embarrassing is all I can figure.

[ClearCase_guy]

I recently got email from Nigeria saying that I was heir to a stash of nuclear material. You don't suppose this email also went to MI6?

[Sloth]

BUMP

[syriacus]

Thanks for posting this, JeanS. After reading it I went to Google news to see who else is reporting this.

Excerpt from Reuters:

   Blair, choosing his words carefully, insisted on Tuesday that evidence of a weapons programme would eventually be uncovered and denied his government had pushed Britain's intelligence services into exaggerating the threat from Iraq.

       He also defended the evidence Britain had of Saddam's attempts to buy uranium from the central African country of Niger. ''Insofar as our intelligence services are concerned, they stand by that,'' he told a parliamentary committee.

       U.S. government sources said Italy's intelligence service had circulated reports about the Niger documents -- not the documents themselves -- to other Western intelligence services in early 2002, and that was apparently how the British and U.S. intelligence services learned of them.

       ''I don't know where the Americans got their information from. Our information comes from good, reliable sources -- not British sources, which is why we were never at liberty to pass anything to the Americans,'' a British official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

       He declined to say exactly who had provided the information used by Britain.

       He said Britain continued to believe that intelligence pointing to Iraq's ''intent to obtain uranium from Africa...is valid and accurate.''

       The International Atomic Energy Agency in March dismissed a report about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger as being based on forged documents.

[syriacus]

I forgot to include the link to the Reuters article:

Britain says stands by Iraq-Niger nuclear link

[gaspar]

FYI, during the diplomat's career he spent a tour as aide to Al Gore.

[OXENinFLA]

This is big.

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

I don't see where he sites the Docs that were forged.

[meenie]

I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to get some communication going and try to come up with a story both can agree on? Otherwise both Bush and Blair look foolish.

[Williams]

Probably explains why I heard news report this morning that except for Ted Kennedy, the Dems are NOT jumping on this one. On nukes and WMD in general, wasn't it game over when the Iraqi scientist revealed the nuke docs and devices under his rose bushes, put there by order of Hussein's son so that Iraq could reconstitute a nuclear weapons program after the UN gave up looking????? That does it for me.

[1Old Pro]

I recently got email from Nigeria saying that I was heir to a stash of nuclear material. You don't suppose this email also went to MI6?

Is your e-mail address SHussein@aol.com?

[dead]

It's not Bush and Blair that are getting their stories confused, its the media.

The Bush Administration has said that a document about the Niger connection was a forgery. The Blair government has said the same thing.

The media has taken this information and spun it into "Bush lied about the Niger connection" when Bush has said no such thing.

Neither Bush nor Blair ever claimed that the forged document was the sole basis for their suspicions about the Niger connection.

[bushfamfan]

Amazing how about the same time the Bush administration says it was false, Blair is saying there was more evidence that said it did happen. Go figure. It will make the media look foolish again though. I hope Bush will point out it wasn't false after all then.

[gridlock]

...I recently got email from Nigeria saying that I was heir to a stash of nuclear material...

...And all they need is your bank account number so they know where to send the money when they finally get it out of the country...

[Mr. Silverback]

See this thread, particular posts 9 and 10.

[Cicero]

We'll see how this turns out. One possibility is that fake documents were produced to cover up real ones. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. The Galloway affair involves real documents that the M.P. received payments for Saddam printed by the Telegraph and fake documents that were sold to the Christian Science Monitor, probably in an effort to discredit the real ones.

Similarly, in the Danny Thomas case friends of clinton faked out Drudge and Murdoch with fake documents concerning a DNA match, but in all probability the original story was true.

I suspect George Tenet of being deeply involved in this.