The
British government has learned
that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities
of uranium from
Africa.
-- President Bush's
justification for killing four
thousand Iraqi civilians: a
fake document | [Images added
by this website] Truthout.Org Monday, July 14, 2003 The
Dubious Suicide of George Tenet
By William Rivers Pitt truthout THINGS have reached a
pretty pass indeed when you apologize for
making a mistake, but nobody believes your
apology. So it is today with CIA Director
George Tenet, and by proxy
George W. Bush and his
administration. On Friday evening, CIA Director Tenet
publicly jumped on the Niger evidence hand
grenade, claiming the use in Bush's State
of the Union Address in January 2003 of
data from known forgeries to support the
Iraq war was completely his fault. He
never told Bush's people that the data was
corrupted, and it was his fault those
"sixteen words" regarding Iraqi attempts
to procure uranium from Niger for a
nuclear program made it into the text of
the speech. Problem solved, right? Condoleezza
Rice and Don Rumsfeld had been
triangulating on Tenet since Thursday,
claiming the CIA had never informed the
White House about the dubious nature of
the Niger evidence. Tenet, like a good
political appointee, fell on his sword and
took responsibility for the error. On
Saturday, White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer told the press corps that
Bush had "moved on" from this
controversy. Not so fast, said the New York
Times editorial board. The paper of
record for the Western world published an
editorial on Saturday entitled "The
Uranium Fiction." The last time the
Times editors used language this
strong was when Bush, in a moment of
seemingly deranged hubris, tried to
nominate master secret-keeper Henry
Kissinger to chair the 9/11
investigation: "It is
clear, however, that much more went
into this affair than the failure of
the C.I.A. to pounce on the offending
16 words in Mr. Bush's speech. A good
deal of information already points to a
willful effort by the war camp in the
administration to pump up an accusation
that seemed shaky from the outset and
that was pretty well discredited long
before Mr. Bush stepped into the well
of the House of Representatives last
January. Doubts about the accusation
were raised in March 2002 by Joseph
Wilson, a former American diplomat,
after he was dispatched to Niger by the
C.I.A. to look into the issue. Mr.
Wilson has said he is confident that
his concerns were circulated not only
within the agency but also at the State
Department and the office of Vice
President Dick Cheney. Mr.
Tenet, in his statement yesterday,
confirmed that the Wilson findings had
been given wide distribution, although
he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney
and other high officials had not been
directly informed about them by the
C.I.A." The sun came up over Washington DC on
Sunday and shined on copies of the
Washington Post which were waiting
patiently to be read. The lead headline
for the Sunday edition read, "CIA Got
Uranium Reference Cut in October." The
meat of the article states: "CIA
Director George J. Tenet successfully
intervened with White House officials
to have a reference to Iraq seeking
uranium from Niger removed from a
presidential speech last October, three
months before a less specific reference
to the same intelligence appeared in
the State of the Union address,
according to senior administration
officials."Tenet argued
personally to White House officials,
including deputy national security
adviser Stephen Hadley, that the
allegation should not be used because
it came from only a single source,
according to one senior official.
Another senior official with knowledge
of the intelligence said the CIA had
doubts about the accuracy of the
documents underlying the allegation,
which months later turned out to be
forged." What do we have here? Here is CIA Director Tenet arguing in
October of 2002 against the use of the
Niger evidence, stating bluntly that it
was useless. He made this pitch directly
to the White House. These concerns were
brushed aside by Bush officials, and the
forged evidence was used despite the
warnings in the State of the Union
address. Now, the administration is trying
to claim they were never told the evidence
was bad. Yet between Tenet's personal
appeals in 2002, and Ambassador Wilson's
assurances that everyone who needed to
know was in the know regarding Niger, it
appears the Bush White House has been
caught red-handed in a series of
incredible
falsehoods.
THERE are two more layers on this onion to
be peeled. The first concerns Secretary of
State Colin Powell. One week after
the Niger evidence was used by Bush in the
State of the Union address, Powell
presented to the United Nations the
administration's case for war. The
Niger evidence was notably absent from
Powell's presentation. According to CBS
News, Powell said, "I didn't use the
uranium at that point because I didn't
think that was sufficiently strong as
evidence to present before the world." What a difference a week makes. The
White House would have us believe they
were blissfully unaware of the forged
nature of their war evidence when Bush
gave his State of the Union address, and
yet somehow the Secretary of State knew
well enough to avoid using it just seven
days later. The moral of the story appears
to be that rotten war evidence is not fit
for international consumption, but is
perfectly suitable for delivery to the
American people.
THE second layer to be peeled deals with
the administration's newest excuse for
using the forged Niger evidence to justify
a war. They are claiming now that they
used it because the British government
told them it was solid. Yet there was the
story published by the Washington
Post on July 11 with the headline,
"CIA Asked Britain to Drop Iraq Claim."
The article states: "The CIA
tried unsuccessfully in early September
2002 to persuade the British government
to drop from an official intelligence
paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to
buy uranium in Africa that President
Bush included in his State of the Union
address four months later, senior Bush
administration officials said
yesterday. 'We consulted about the
paper and recommended against using
that material,' a senior administration
official familiar with the intelligence
program said." We are supposed to believe that the
Bush administration was completely unaware
that their Niger evidence was fake. We are
supposed to believe George Tenet dropped
the ball. Yet the CIA actively intervened
with the British government in September
of 2002, telling them the evidence was
worthless. The CIA Director personally got
the evidence stricken from a Bush speech
in October of 2002. Intelligence insiders
like Joseph Wilson and Greg
Thielmann have stated repeatedly that
everyone who needed to know the evidence
was bad had been fully and completely
informed almost a year before the data was
used in the State of the Union
address. In an interesting twist, the profoundly
questionable nature of Tenet's confession
has reached all the way around the planet
to Australia. I spoke on Sunday to
Andrew Wilkie, a former senior
intelligence analyst for the Office of
National Assessments, the senior
Australian intelligence agency which
provides intelligence assessments to the
Australian prime minister. Mr. Wilkie
notes the following: "In the last week in
Australia, the Defense Intelligence
Organization has admitted they had the
information on the Niger forgeries and
says they didn't tell the Defense
Minister. The Australian Department of
Foreign Affairs has admitted they had
the information on the Niger forgeries
and didn't tell the Foreign Minister.
The place I used to work, the Office of
National Assessments, has admitted
publicly that they knew the Niger
evidence was fake and didn't tell the
Prime Minister about it."You've got three intelligence
organizations in Australia, the
intelligence organizations in the US,
and every one is saying they knew this
was bad information, but not one
political leader reckons they were
told. All three organizations have said
they didn't give this information to
their political leaders. It is
unbelievable to the point of
fantasy." I also spoke on Sunday with Ray
McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA
who was interviewed by truthout on
these matters on June 26, 2003. Mr.
McGovern is not buying what the White
House is trying to sell. "Tenet's confession is
designed to take the heat off," says
McGovern, "to assign some
responsibility somewhere. It's not
going to work. There's too much
deception here. For example,
Condoleezza Rice insisted that she only
learned on June 8 about Former
Ambassador Wilson's mission to Niger
back in February 2002. That means that
neither she nor her staff reads the New
York Times, because Nick Kristof
on May 6 had a very detailed
explication of Wilson's mission to
Niger. In my view, it is inconceivable
that her remark this week - that she
didn't know about Joe Wilson's mission
to Niger until she was asked on a talk
show on June 8 - that is stretching the
truth beyond the breaking point." Andrew Wilkie crystallized the issue at
hand by stating, "Remember that the
sourcing of uranium from Niger was the
only remaining pillar of the argument that
Iraq was trying to reconstitute its
nuclear program. By this stage, the
aluminum tubes story about Iraq's nuclear
program had been laughed out of the room.
That had been laughable since 2001,
leaving the sourcing of uranium as the
last key piece of evidence about Iraq
reconstituting a nuclear program. It's not
just sixteen words. "It is just downright
mischievous to hear Condoleezza Rice on
CNN this morning saying it was just
sixteen words. It was worth a hell of a
lot more than sixteen words. I can
remember that October speech by Bush
where he talked about "mushroom clouds"
from Iraq. The nuclear story was always
played up as the most emotive and
persuasive theme. It wasn't just
sixteen words." A page on the White House's own website
describes the Bush administration's
central argument for war in Iraq. The
Niger evidence is featured prominently,
along with claims that Iraq was in
possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax,
38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons
of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents,
almost 30,000 munitions capable of
delivering chemical agents, and several
mobile biological weapons labs. The Niger
evidence has been destroyed, and the
'mobile weapons labs' have been shown to
be weather balloon launching platforms.
The vast quantities of anthrax, botulinum
toxin, sarin, mustard gas and VX, along
with the munitions to deliver them, have
completely failed to show up. Many people quail at the idea that the
President and his people could have lied
so egregiously. What was in it for them?
Besides the incredible amounts of money to
be made from the war by oil and defense
corporations like Halliburton and United
Defense, two companies with umbilical ties
to the administration, there was an
"ancillary benefit to all this," according
to Ray McGovern. "Not only did the President
get an authorization to make war, but
there was an election that next month,
the November midterms. The elections
turned out surprisingly well for the
Bush administration because they were
able to use charges of being 'soft on
Saddam' against those Democratic
candidates who voted against the war." As Andrew Wilkie says, this issue is
not about sixteen words in a speech. It is
about lies and American credibility. "All
of this breaking news is actually
distracting us from the core issue," says
Wilkie. "The core issue is the credibility
gap. We were sold this war on the promise
that Iraq had this massive WMD arsenal. Of
course that hasn't been found, and
whatever might be found now is not going
to satisfy in any way that description of
the 'massive' arsenal, the 'imminent
threat,' and all those great words used in
Britain and Australia and Washington.
We've got to be careful that, in debating
the details on the issue of Tenet and
Niger, we are not distracted from that
core issue which is still left to be
resolved." . William
Rivers Pitt is the Managing
Editor of truthout.org. He is a New
York Times best-selling author of two
books - "War On Iraq" available now
from Context Books, and "The Greatest
Sedition is Silence," now available
from Pluto Press at
www.SilenceIsSedition.com. ©
Copyright 2003 by
TruthOut.org -
Pat Buchanan: Naked Forgery
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Patrick
Buchanan: Whose War?, in The
American Conservative. March 24,
2003
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