This is almost unbelievable

A mailing list I'm a member of has been discussing the Niger uranium situation for the last few days. It's an interesting discussion because you've got people taking different sides, but we're actually talking about it, and not having one of the too-frequently-seen "flamefests" that most multi-partisan discussion seem to devolve into these days.

Anyway, this is a message I posted there earlier this evening about the new revelation that the CIA hadn't even seen the forged documents until after the State of the Union address.

I just have to wonder what the next surprise will be - and yet I'm not sure I want to know...

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The things we're now learning....

Reports from both Newsweek and the Associated Press are saying that, even though the CIA had looked into claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Niger over a year before the SOTU, they didn't actually get to look at the documents that supposedly supported that claim until after the SOTU. Here's the description of what happened from the Newsweek article (this is a much longer quote than I usually like to make, but the information is such that I think the completeness is necessary, and its complicated enough I didn't want to try and paraphrase it and wind up doing so inaccurately):

The disputed documents were first provided to Italian intelligence services in late 2001, and information about them was then passed along to allied intelligence agencies, including Britain's MI6 and the CIA.

But the documents themselves didn't come into the possession of the U.S. government until nearly a year later, in October 2002, sources said, when a foreign individual - described by one source as a journalist - turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The motivations of the foreign journalist are unclear but one U.S. intelligence official says he "may have been looking for money" - either for himself or a source who provided the material to him. (The sources did not disclose the identify of the journalist.)

All sources agree that the U.S. Embassy did not in fact pay for the material. What is most baffling, however, is what happened after that.

The U.S. Embassy quickly passed the documents along to the CIA station chief in Rome - as well as the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research. But the station chief didn't send them along to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., apparently believing they were being sent instead through State Department channels.

In fact, CIA headquarters - including its nuclear-weapons analysts - never got the documents until four months later, in early February 2003 - well after CIA officials and White House aides had already had several discussions about whether the information about Iraqi attempts to buy Niger uranium was reliable enough to be mentioned by the president in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address.

Two sources said, at one point, State Department's INR division - which had long since concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program - offered the documents to the CIA.

But for reasons that are unclear, the CIA never followed up on the offer. One explanation, sources said, is that the CIA had gotten a report from the Italians about the documents, including what agency officials believed was a "verbatim text" and didn't believe it was necessary to have the primary source material themselves.

An agency official acknowledged "there were some discussions" between the State Department and the CIA about turning the material over to the agency, but no follow up took place. "It's unclear" why, the official said.

In any event, the failure has proven in retrospect to be a much bigger, if not catastrophic, bureaucratic foul-up. Throughout the fall and in the weeks prior to the State of the Union address, the CIA had tried to warn the White House that the intelligence reporting about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger was "fragmentary" and not reliable. At one point, CIA director Tenet himself personally advised deputy national-security advisor Steve Hadley to remove a reference to the uranium purchases from a speech Bush was preparing to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002.

But the idea that the documents themselves - which underlay the claims - was based on forged material did not become known until after Feb. 4, 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency asked the U.S. government to back up some of the allegations it was making about Iraq's nuclear program.

At that point, the U.S. mission to the United Nations turned the documents over Jacque Baute, an aide to IAEA executive director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei who was responsible for monitoring Iraq-related nuclear issues.

Once IAEA forensic analysts got them, it became immediately clear that the documents were not genuine. "Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries," said one IAEA source familiar with the material.

The source explained that all the IAEA analysts really had to do was conduct a Google search. The documents purported to be letters between Niger and Iraqi officials in July 2000 and October 2000 that describe an agreement for the delivery of two lots of 500 tons of uranium over two years.

But the correspondence was on obsolete letterhead, including the wrong symbol for the presidency of Niger, and made reference to state bodies that no longer existed at the time that the letters were written. In addition, an Oct. 10, 2000, letter, allegedly signed by the foreign minister of Niger, had the signature of a man who hadn't served in that position since 1989.

This is just bizarre - and I thought the whole mess was pretty weird to begin with. This is important, though, because the CIA's determination that the information was dubious was - we've now learned - not based on the documents being forgeries, but on whether or not the situation the documents described had any potential credibilitiy or not - and they found that it didn't. The forgeries were an entirely separate issue from the basic credibility of the story itself.

So at this point, it's looking like we - somehow - found out about the allegations that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger - apparently through the Brits, who learned about it from the Italians. Without seen the documents that were the source of this allegation, we started checking out. In early 2002, a 4-Star General with the United States European Command (which also handles much of Africa) named Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. went to Niger to check out the allegations. He found there was no basis for them, and reported back - a report that made it to the Join Cheifs of Staff. A few weeks later, Cheney's office asked the CIA to check it out, so the CIA sent retired ambassador Joseph Wilson to check it out, and he, too, found no reason to believe the reports were at all credible.

In October of 2002, when Bush was getting ready to give his speech in Cincinnati, the CIA felt the information was too dubious to be used in the speech and intervened with Condoleeza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to get the information pulled. This was ALL before they OR the State Department had ever seen the documents themselves. In spite of the CIA insistence that the information be removed from the Cincinnati speech, the President still used it that same week when he met with Senators and Representatives in order to persuade them to vote to authorize him to go to war against Iraq. (I should also note in here that right about this same time - 12 days before the authorization vote, in fact - Bush learned that the North Koreans had announced their success in restarting their nuclear program - but the information was deliberately withheld from all but a few key Republicans until after the vote was taken, in order to prevent the North Korean situation from overshadowing Bush's desired authorization to go to war with Iraq)

Four months later, when it came time for the State of the Union address, the CIA still didn't want the info in, but agreed to the "Britian has learned" language. By that time, if I'm reading the above article correctly, the State Department (Powell's division) had a copy of the actual documents, but the CIA themselves still had not seen them. One thing this revelation does explain, though, is why it took 6 weeks for the US to turn copies of the documents over to the IAEA when they requested them in late-December/early-January (we didn't hand them over until mid-February - AFTER Powell's speech at the UN).

This really stirs the pot up quite a bit more. I find it incredible that the CIA official in Rome never passed the documents up the ladder, and that the CIA didn't seem to be doing more to get the actual documents while looking into the story. I suppose it's good that they came to the correct conclusion - that the information was bogus - even without the documents, but I suspect if they'd gotten their hands on those forgeries before the SOTU, the uranium claim would never have been made. I also have a lot of questions about why the State Department, since they apparently DID have copies of the documents, didn't pass them on to anyone else, even though they had to have known that the President was using the claim those documents purportedly supported as one of the main pieces of his case for claiming that Saddam had nuclear aims.

I still, however, find it very difficult to believe that President Bush wasn't aware of the dispute surrounding the claims, regardless of when the CIA got their hands on the documents. The very phrasing of the statement in the SOTU, in my opinion, makes it clear he had to know. Wouldn't he have wondered why he was making a claim in his speech - and not just any speech, but one that is actually a Constitutionally required report on the condition of the country and his actions on the people's behalf that must be delivered to the representatives of the American people - and sourcing it to the British and *not* to our own intelligence services? Especially if he'd previously used that information in trying to persuade Congressmen to vote for his war. To the best of my knowledge, when he spoke to the various Congressmen, he didn't caveat the information about Saddam trying to get uranium by saying it was information from the British, but now in the SOTU, that's how the line was being presented. I just can't imagine that he wouldn't have wondered why the change had been made - and given that Tenet, Rice, Powell and Cheney* pretty much had to have known by then that the information was at least questionable, I can't imagine that no one would have answered his question.

But like I said, this is just getting really, really weird.

[* Tenet was obviously aware that it was dubious as far back as October, so we know he knew. We also know that Rice's deputy, Hadley, knew because he was the person Tenet debated with about it in October. Since part of the National Security Council's job is to help vet the SOTU, Rice would have been involved in that, and I can't imagine that she wouldn't have talked to Hadley about it at all. Plus, Tenet's "mea cupla" from last week pretty strongly indicated that it was the NSC who wanted the info in the speech, and that it was from negotiating with the NSC that they ended up agreeing to the "Britian learned" phrasing. It was Cheney's initial request back in February of 2002 that had prompted the CIA to send Wilson to Niger, and he would have gotten a response. As for Powell, the State Department had the documents themselves, and Powell refused to include the information in his own speech 8 days later, even though, to date, there's been no mention of anything happening between the SOTU and the UN speech that would have caused him to form a different opinion. Since that has been an oft-asked question why he left it out when the President had used it such a short time before, I'd think if there was any such explaination it would have been proffered by now. So, logically, Powell had to have known at the time of the SOTU that the info was dubious.]

Posted by thorswitch at July 17, 2003 01:19 AM | TrackBack