Posted on 07/17/2004 6:57:37 PM PDT by quidnunc
Were those infamous 16 words correct after all?
It has been a year and a half since President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he suggested in a single sentence that Iraq might have been trying to acquire uranium in Africa for its nuclear weapons program. And it has been a year since the White House and the C.I.A. acknowledged that the evidence behind that assertion was flawed, opening Mr. Bush to a torrent of criticism about the credibility and reliability of the intelligence he used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein.
But now two new reports have reopened the question of whether Mr. Bush was indeed correct when, on Jan. 28, 2003, he told the nation and the world, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
One of the reports was released on Wednesday by a British commission reviewing the intelligence used by Prime Minister Tony Blair in making the case for war. The report stood by the British intelligence assessments that were the foundation for Mr. Bush's statement. Though it did not explain in any detail how or why it judged the intelligence to be sound, the report concluded that the assertions by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium were "well founded."
The other report came from the Senate Intelligence Committee. It generally found extensive problems with the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons programs and in particular documented a long chain of problems in the way the intelligence agencies dealt with suspicions about Iraq's interest in acquiring uranium.
But it also contained some information that tended to bolster the view that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger and possibly one or two other African nations. It cited a statement by a French official to the State Department in late 2002 that France, which was resisting Mr. Bush's efforts to make an urgent case for war, "believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger." Neither report, however, found evidence that Iraq had actually purchased any uranium from Niger.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And they were always true. If the British intelligence was flawed (and it turns out to have been NOT flawed) then that is hardly to be held against W.
Yeah, but the fact that they ran it at all tells me they're worried.
Record low temps in Hell recorded today as the NY Slimes wrote a positive article about President Bush.
What page is it on, A18? We know that is the graveyard for stories the Leftists do not want anyone to see.
Gee I wonder if Roger Ailes has some good dirt on Pinchy? There was a promise of reprisals if they jumped on and pimped that so-called documentary about Fox,and they did a week ago.
Also, the FBI is investigating the forged documents issue. From the Senate report, p. 57:
The documents from teh Italian journalist are those that werre later passed to the IAEA and discovered to have been forged. In March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Rockerfeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate the source of the documents, (..redaction of about half a line..), the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign.I'd like to know what words were redacted...The investigation is still continuing.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Not "flawed." The evidence was SOLID but it was not at that time available to congress because it was supplied to the Executive CiC by the Brits who have an agreement that their intel may not be shown to (an untrustworthy) Senate Committee.
Perhaps the WH thought since the evidence could not be shared then it might have been better to leave it out of the SotU speech.
Notice how they managed to turn an article about how George Bush wasn't lying after all into questions about his leadership?
What's the chance that the visit to Niger was to test certain people at the CIA? The truthof the matter was already known to the WH.
Niger was NEVER specifically mentioned in the SOTU speech. This entire episode is a fabrication of the Marxist Media and Joe Wilson. Time to "frog march" every damn one of 'em in front of a Federal judge on the most severe charges possible.
Joe Wilson had a letter in the Washington Post on Saturday.
He is critical of Novack's recent article about him.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56501-2004Jul16.html
Debunking Distortions About My Trip to Niger
Saturday, July 17, 2004; Page A17
For the second time in a year, your paper has published an article [news
story, July 10] falsely suggesting that my wife, Valerie Plame, was
responsible for the trip I took to Niger on behalf of the U.S. government to
look into allegations that Iraq had sought to purchase several hundred tons
of yellowcake uranium from that West African country. Last July 14, Robert
Novak, claiming two senior sources, exposed Valerie as an "agency operative
[who] suggested sending him to Niger." Novak went ahead with his column
despite the fact that the CIA had urged him not to disclose her identity.
That leak to Novak may well have been a federal crime and is under
investigation.
In the year since the betrayal of Valerie's covert status, it has been
widely understood that she is irrelevant to the unpaid mission I undertook
or the conclusions I reached. But your paper's recent article acted as a
funnel for this scurrilous and extraneous charge, uncritically citing the
Republican-written Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.
The decision to send me to Niger was not made, and could not be made, by
Valerie. At the conclusion of a meeting that she did not attend, I was asked
by CIA officials whether I would be willing to travel to Niger. While a CIA
reports officer and a State Department analyst, both cited in the report,
speculate about what happened, neither of them was in the chain of command
that made the decision to send me. Reams of documents were given over to the
Senate committee, but the only quotation attributed to my wife on this
subject was the anodyne "my husband has good relations with both the PM
(Prime Minister) and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of
French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of
activity." In fact, with 2-year-old twins at home, Valerie did not relish my
absence for a two-week period. But she acquiesced because, in the zeal to be
responsive to the legitimate concerns raised by the vice president,
officials of her agency turned to a known functionary who had previously
checked out uranium-related questions for them.
But that is not the only inaccurate assertion or conclusion in the Senate
report uncritically parroted in the article. Other inaccuracies and
distortions include the suggestion that my findings "bolstered" the case
that Niger was engaged in illegal sales of uranium to Iraq. In fact, the
Senate report is clear that the intelligence community attempted to keep the
claim out of presidential documents because of the weakness of the evidence.
The facts surrounding my trip remain the same. I traveled to Niger and found
it unlikely that Iraq had attempted to purchase several hundred tons of
yellowcake uranium. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush
referred to Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium "from Africa." Between March
2003 and July 2003, the administration refused to acknowledge that it had
known for more than a year that the claim on uranium sales from Niger had
been discredited, until the day after my article in the New York Times. The
next day the White House issued a statement that "the sixteen words did not
rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." Those
facts are amply supported in the Senate report.
-- Joseph C. Wilson IV
Washington
yeah, what's the news on that whole thing? Don't see too much about it...
Ping for you and mark for me.
My Fisking Of Joseph Wilson's Letter Regarding the Senate Intelligence Report, Niger and Uranium
Check the publishing date.
New Reports Again Question Whether Iraq Sought Uranium in Niger
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: July 18, 2004
It's in Sunday's paper. I had my share of errors today too.
Are you sure that this was run in the Saturday edition? Given the time that it was posted, it looks like it's in the Sunday edition, which is their most important paper each week.
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