Update: Niger Connection

In my last post I discussed the Times of London's story that disclosed that two staff members of Niger's Italian embassy forged the "yellow cake" documents that were used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.  The Times' story did not mention the fact that the documents were known to be poor forgeries at the time of Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

On the Times' web site, the Blog of reporter Mike Smith makes the opposite assertion.  He says that the Niger documents, at the time that they were used, were accepted as credible:

It has always been astonishing to me that there has been so much controversy over the claim by President George Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that “the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no friend of Bush and the fraudulent way in which he and Tony Blair took us to war. But as I have often said, and I am going to say again, those now infamous “16 words” were probably the only accurate comment on Iraqi WMD that the president made in the run-up to war.

To me, what is astonishing that Mr. Smith can ignore the assessment from multiple sources that the documents were never credible forgeries.  Mr. Smith tries to justify their use because French intelligence was involved, and they backed-up the claims.

In fact, the French had based their initial assessment on a number of pieces of intelligence which included just one of the Martino/Mondini documents the US gave to the IAEA, the genuine document on Zahawi’s 1999 visit to Niger and that initial assessment had since been confirmed by the July 2000 Zahawi letter.

But despite the IAEA announcement that “the documents that pointed towards an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of uranium” were “not authentic”, the controversy did not begin in earnest until several months later as a result of a particularly inept attempt at “news-management” by the White House.

Okay fair enough, but the centerpiece of Iraq's alleged nuclear program were the Niger forgeries.  It doesn't matter when the "controversy" began "in earnest."  The document was, and is, the only thing that the administration pointed to as proof that their claims were true, even though they knew that it was dismissed by US intelligence experts immediately.  The Washington Post, in a story about the efforts to discredit Joe Wilson, says this:

Iraq's alleged uranium shopping had been strongly disputed in the intelligence community from the start. In a closed Senate hearing in late September 2002, shortly before the October NIE was completed, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and his top weapons analyst, Robert Walpole, expressed strong doubts about the uranium story, which had recently been unveiled publicly by the British government. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, likewise, called the claim "highly dubious." For those reasons, the uranium story was relegated to a brief inside passage in the October estimate.

But the White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002 to foster "public education" about Iraq's "grave and gathering danger" to the United States, repeatedly pitched the uranium story. The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most U.S. analysts -- the hard part for Iraq would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller -- but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters. Most nuclear arguments were highly technical, but the public could easily grasp the link between uranium and a bomb.

The documents were obvious fakes, and the only reason they were used was to push Americans and congress into going along with the neo-con invasion agenda.

It doesn't how you spin or whitewash it.  It still stinks.

tags: iraq  lies  

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