Scandal!

July 11, 2003, 11:00 a.m. Scandal! Bush’s enemies aren't telling the truth about what he said.

The president's critics are lying. Mr. Bush never claimed that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger. It is not true — as USA Today reported on page one Friday morning — that "tainted evidence made it into the President's State of the Union address." For the record, here's what President Bush actually said in his SOTU: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Precisely which part of that statement isn't true? The British government did say that it believed Saddam had sought African uranium. Is it possible that the British government was mistaken? Sure. Is it possible that Her Majesty's government came by that belief based on an erroneous American intelligence report about a transaction between Iraq and Niger? Yes — but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and members of his Cabinet say that's not what happened.

They say, according to Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper, that their claim was based on "extra material, separate and independent from that of the US."

I suppose you can make the case that a British-government claim should not have made its way into the president's SOTU without further verification. But why is that the top of the TV news day after day? Why would even the most dyspeptic Bush-basher see in those 16 accurate words of President's Bush's 5,492-word SOTU an opportunity to persuade Americans that there's a scandal in the White House, another Watergate, grounds for impeachment?

Surely, everyone does know by now that Saddam Hussein did have a nuclear-weapons-development program. That program was set back twice: Once by Israeli bombers in 1981, and then a decade later, at the end of the Gulf War when we learned that Saddam's nuclear program was much further along than our intelligence analysts had believed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

Since Saddam never demonstrated — to the U.S., the U.N., or even to Jacques Chirac — that he had abandoned his nuclear ambitions, one has to conclude that he was still in the market for nuclear materials. And, indeed, many intelligence analysts long believed that he was trying to acquire such material from wherever he could — not just from Niger but also from Gabon, Namibia, Russia, Serbia, and other sources.

Maybe there was no reliable evidence to support the particular intelligence report saying that Saddam had acquired yellowcake (lightly processed uranium ore) from Niger. But the British claim was only that Saddam had sought yellowcake — not that he succeeded in getting a five-pound box Fedexed to his palace on the Tigris.

And is there even one member of the U.S. Congress who would say that it was on the basis of this claim alone that he voted to authorize the president to use military force against Saddam? Is there one such individual anywhere in America?

A big part of the reason this has grown into such a brouhaha is that Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote an op-ed about it in last Sunday's New York Times in which he said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Actually, Wilson has plenty of choices — but no basis for his slanderous allegation. A little background: Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify a U.S. intelligence report about the sale of yellowcake — because Vice President Dick Cheney requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the validity of the intelligence report.

Wilson says he spent eight days in Niger "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" — hardly what a competent spy, detective, or even reporter would call an in-depth investigation. Nevertheless, let's give Wilson the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that he was correct when he reported back to the CIA that he believed it was "highly doubtful that any such transaction ever took place. "

But, again, because it was "doubtful" that Saddam actually acquired yellowcake from Niger, it does not follow that he never sought it there or elsewhere in Africa, which is all the president suggested based on what the British said — and still say.

And how does Wilson leap from there to the conclusion that Vice President Cheney and his boss "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat"? Wilson hasn't the foggiest idea what other intelligence the president and vice president had access to.

It also would have been useful for the New York Times and others seeking Wilson's words of wisdom to have provided a little background on him. For example:

He's an "adjunct scholar" at the Middle East Institute — which advocates for Saudi interests. The March 1, 2002 issue of the Saudi government-weekly Ain-Al Yaqeen lists the MEI as an "Islamic research institutes supported by the Kingdom."

He's a vehement opponent of the Bush administration which, he wrote in the March 3, 2003 edition of the left-wing Nation magazine, has "imperial ambitions." Under President Bush, he added, the world worries that "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness."

He also wrote that "neoconservatives" have "a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party." He said that "the new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world view are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme."

He was recently the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions — and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.

And consider this: Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wilson did believe that Saddam had biological weapons of mass destruction. But he raised that possibility only to argue against toppling Saddam, warning ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat." He added that Saddam also might attempt to take revenge by unleashing "some sort of a biological assault on an American city, not unlike the anthrax, attacks that we had last year."

In other words, Wilson is no disinterested career diplomat — he's a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind. And too many in the media are helping him and allies grind it.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

For Immediate Release
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
(Pretoria, South Africa)
July 9, 2003
PRESS GAGGLE WITH ARI FLEISCHER TO THE TRAVEL POOL
Union House
Pretoria, South Africa
[Excerpts on discredited Iraq/Niger/uranium link]
[...]
Q: What's the final language, Ari, your final position on the State of the Union speech and the uranium -- I know they were working on stuff last night, but I never got a chance to read it.
Q: Is this on the record?
MR. FLEISCHER: Yes, we're back on the record. After the speech, information was learned about the forged documents. 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 was reporting, although it wasn't very specific, about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa. It's a classic issue of how hindsight is 20-20. The process was followed that led to the information going into the State of the Union; information about the yellow cake was only brought to the White House's attention later.
But there's a bigger picture here, and this is what's fundamental -- the case for war against Iraq was based on the threat that Saddam Hussein posed because of his possession of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological, and his efforts to reconstitute a nuclear program. In 1991, everybody in the world underestimated how close he was to getting a nuclear weapon. The case for going to war against Saddam is as just today as it was the day the President gave that speech.
Q: Ambassador Wilson said he made a case months before that there was no basis to the belief --
MR. FLEISCHER: No, he reported that Niger denied the allegation. That's what Ambassador Wilson reported.
Q: Was that report weighed against other --
MR. FLEISCHER: And of course they would deny the allegation. That doesn't make it untrue. It was only later -- you can ask Ambassador Wilson if he reported that the yellow cake documents were forged. He did not. His report did not address whether the documents were forged or not. His report stated that Niger denied the accusation. He spent eight days in Niger and concluded that Niger denied the allegation. Well, typically, nations don't admit to going around nuclear nonproliferation.
Q: But he said there was a basis to believe their denials.
MR. FLEISCHER: That's different from what he reported. The issue here is whether the documents on yellow cake were forged. He didn't address that issue. That's the information that subsequently came to light, not prior to the speech.
Q: Walk us through how much, if any of this --
MR. FLEISCHER: It was based on the national intelligence estimate; it was based on contemporaneous reporting leading up to the speech, which with the advantage of hindsight we now know that the yellow cake ties to Niger were not accurate. But again, in 1991, the world underestimated how close Iraq was to obtaining nuclear weapons. There is a bigger picture here that is just as valid today as it was the day of the speech.
Q: Are we going the other way now in overestimating their ability to reconstitute --
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, obviously the regime is gone, they're not reconstituting anything anymore.
Q: But that really wasn't the question. Did we overestimate his capacity for doing this before the regime was --
MR. FLEISCHER: It remains clear from the United Nations and others that Saddam had biological weapons, chemical weapons that he had not accounted for. Those are weapons of mass destruction. We continue to learn about the Iraqi nuclear program, information such as the scientist who had buried material in his garden for the purpose of bringing it out after the sanctions were imposed. The concerns are valid. The yellow cake report may have turned out to be inaccurate, but the broader concerns remain valid.
So it's important to get this in context. It's important to understand whether one specific sentence based on yellow cake was wrong, that does not change the fundamental case from being right.
Q: Does this increase the onus or the need to come up with significant discoveries of WMD that so far haven't been found?
MR. FLEISCHER: I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are. We know he had them in the '90s, he used them. So just because they haven't yet been found doesn't mean they didn't exist. The burden is on the critics to explain where the weapons of mass destruction are. If they think they were destroyed, the burden is on them to explain when he destroyed them and where he destroyed them.
Q: What's the estimate on how long it will take, and what more access, if any, they need --
MR. FLEISCHER: It will take as long as it takes until they're discovered. The world is safer.
Q: Ari, back on the State of the Union, is there anything that the White House, that the administration is going to do differently to prevent something like that from happening, like how a piece of information that does not rise to the level that should be included in a speech, that ends up being inaccurate --
MR. FLEISCHER: There's always a thorough vetting process. We'll continue to follow the vetting process. But it is the nature of events that information can later be discovered after a speech -- and when that happens, as is in this case, it's important to be forthright, which is what this administration has done -- to discuss it openly, and that's what this administration has done.
Q: When you talked about the contemporaneous reporting right before the speech, what exactly do you mean?
MR. FLEISCHER: There was the national intelligence estimate, intelligence community.
Q: So you had other reports about Niger and about the yellow cake from Niger.
MR. FLEISCHER: -- part of the intelligence community's reporting leading up to the speech --
Q: There wasn't a lot --
Q: Some British --
MR. FLEISCHER: -- which subsequently -- no, the President in the State of the Union cited the British report. But there had been an independent American report which in the instance of yellow cake, subsequently turned out not to be valid. But keep in mind, again, we've said that about the yellow cake for an extended period of time. This administration has been forthright.
[...]
Q: Is there anything else to link Saddam Hussein's attempt to acquire weapons to Africa, now that this yellow case -- Niger thing has been discussed?
MR. FLEISCHER: Yes, there was other reporting. But as I said, it didn't rise to the level of sufficient specificity. But there was other reports, yes.
Q: Is the President still concerned about Africa being a source -- potential source for these weapons?
MR. FLEISCHER: No, because the regime is gone. The regime is gone. You know, just because something didn't make it to the level where it should have been included in a presidential speech, in hindsight, doesn't mean the information was necessarily inaccurate. It means it should not have risen to his level.
This is the nature of some intelligence information. But, again, this is why I go right back to the bigger point, why did we go to war. We went to war because of chemical weapons, biological weapons. And as you know, in the case of nuclear, there are other issues that go into nuclear, not just yellow cake. So, again, that's why I urge you all to just keep this in perspective about what this one sentence means. And we have been honest about discussing the one sentence -- and I think that it's a case to be fair to the administration.
[...]

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