July 22, 2004

Second Verse, Same As The First                               (It don’t get better, it just gets . . .)

by H. L. Rucks

Neither the shameful partisan attempt to smear Ambassador Joe Wilson nor the contrived side show of Sandy Berger impersonating Inspector Clouseau should take our eyes off the truth of what the Bush Bunch would have us forget:  In the run up to war, the Bush administration chose at every point to seize upon any and all intelligence, flawed, flaky, or fraudulent, to herd the country into a war in Iraq.  If any fact has come out of Washington in the last three years, that’s it—the Bush administration wanted a war in Iraq and didn’t much care what they had to say to get it. We don’t have to rely on Joe Wilson to confirm this. A story posted on CBS.com dated July 21, 2004 says it all:

• “. . . when the National Security Council drafted a speech for Bush in October 2002 the CIA recommended the address not include the Niger allegation because it was ‘debatable’ whether the yellowcake could be obtained from Niger. In a follow-up fax to the NSC, the CIA said ‘the evidence is weak’ and ‘the procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory.’ Still, in late January 2003 -- after the INR's Iraq analyst had concluded that papers recently obtained by U.S. intelligence related to the supposed Iraqi-Niger uranium deal were ‘clearly a forgery’ -- Bush went ahead and accused Iraq of seeking uranium in Africa.”
• (Read story by David Corn in The Nation)

These were only some of the warnings the administration received about the shakiness of the Niger yellowcake story. Three months before the State of the Union speech, as the president prepared to make a speech in Cincinnati on October 12, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet personally intervened to keep the African uranium claims out of the speech.  Never-the-less, the administration clearly saw the nuclear allegation as the Holy Grail of its Attack Iraq campaign.  The work-around was to attribute the reports to British Intelligence. On January 13, 2003, George W. Bush electrified and spooked the nation with his now infamous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

It would be altogether too tedious to recount the entire series of events that gradually eroded the credibility of this statement.  For a crystal-clear view of them I refer you to the excellent timeline on ABCNews.com.  What’s important to remember is that the claim was massively and entirely discredited to the point that Secretary of State Colin Powell declined to repeat it to the UN and admitted he had serious doubts about its accuracy, saying that he didn’t see, “enough substantiation of it that would meet the tests that we were applying."  Finally, as criticism mounted, on July 9, 2003 White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said of the 16 words, "With the advantage of hindsight, it's known now what was not known by the White House prior to the speech. This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech." There followed a frenzied round of damage control, during which the actual inserter of the 16 words in the president’s speech could not be determined, but both George Tenet and Condoleeza Rice fell on rubber swords in public by declaring they should have protected the innocent, unwitting president by striking the statement from the speech. Thus the claim that Saddam was actively pursuing ingredients to cook up nuclear bombs to use on us—the claim that more than any other swept away our reluctance to go to war without further attempts at containment and against the wishes of many of our long-time allies—this claim was nothing but an unfortunate editorial mistake.

But not anymore. William Safire, writing in the Times on July 20, 2004, now deduces that Bush “16 words” have been vindicated by both the US Senate Intelligence Committee report and Lord Butler’s report on pre-war British intelligence just released in Britain on July 14. In the case of the Senate report, Safire is just wrong—or as he accuses Joseph Wilson—Safire himself is “having trouble with the truth”. What Safire refers to as the “Senate report” are in fact additional comments on the report filed by administration hatchet-men, Senators Pat Roberts, Kit Bond, and Orrin Hatch. These “additional comments” have no more validity, vis-a-vis the actual report, than do any other partisan Republican comments determined to toe the Bush line at all costs. As for Lord Butler’s report (which some MP’s have called another “whitewash”), Safire is right. Lord Butler stated that the British intelligence claiming Iraqis had tried to obtain uranium in Niger was based on credible sources.  He even goes so far as to say, "We conclude that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded." How tidy.  And how propitious for Bush. But who cares? The fact is, the CIA did not believe these reports and made this known to the president, as established above.  Technically, if you want to go to the “depends on the meaning of ‘is’” standard of sophistry, George Bush would have been right had he said “British Intelligence has uncovered reports”, or “British Intelligence claims” , but instead he said, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”  Quicker than you can say “slam dunk”, the country was off to war.  But as we now know, this interpretation of the facts was more than a slight stretch—it was a highly dubious supposition, and everybody in the administration knew it at the time.

In his article, Safire bemoans the administration’s admission of fault (such as it was) as “premature”. In light of George Tenet’s, Colin Powell’s, Joe Wilson’s, and finally the full-strength version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s revelations, this is just wishful thinking.  Those who would spin the Senate report and all the other weighty body of evidence on this matter, those who would have us believe that all this happened in an atmosphere of cool objectivity and not in a pressure cooker of presidential obsession with Iraq, are spinning a tale told by an idiot. Safire proves with this piece, once and for all, that he is merely another conservative apologist who truly believes himself to be the only one-eyed man in the land of the blind.