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Um...
So far, we've known that the Niger-uranium claim was based on (a) forged documents, (b) an Italian summary of the forged documents, (c) a French analysis of the forged documents, and (d) UK intelligence's conviction that the claim was true. The UK was, in turn, basing its analysis on (a) forged documents, and (b) a mysterious second source. Today, via Laura Rozen the Guardian reports that the second UK source "almost certainly" came from France. Does that mean the second source was really the same forgery passed around again through a different route? Hard to say. It would be nice to hear from UK intelligence why, if Iraq tried to get the yellowcake, it didn't succeed in getting the yellowcake. Assuming the attempt was made, knowing why it failed is pretty crucial to knowing what to think about it.
July 19, 2004 | Permalink
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» More things to make you go hmmm... from Too Many Worlds
Now that there has been a week to approach the Iraq-Africa uranium intelligence through the admittedly fun but not all that enlightening angle of "Joe Wilson is a jackass with ulterior motives! / No, Joe Wilson is still right!", the [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 20, 2004 2:05:56 AM
Comments
According to the FT, the second source was human intel from Niger. Which would agree with JOE WILSON'S claim in his book that Iraqi higher-ups were in Niger seeking Uranium.
Posted by: Alex Knapp | Jul 19, 2004 11:02:58 AM
You'd have to think that the people pulling this thing off knew more than a little about how western intelligence services share classified information. Which is to say that the person behind the forgeries and associated campaign knew more than a little about the CIA.
I have my theories.
Posted by: praktike | Jul 19, 2004 11:14:48 AM
This tectonic stuff is taking way too long. Somebody needs to light a fire under Josh Marshall's butt.
Posted by: JP | Jul 19, 2004 11:30:28 AM
But, having chased this forgery thing around, you have to go back the the "16 words" and admit that Bush DID NOT lie.
Bush...did...not...lie in the state of the union address. Anybody not get that info yet?
But yes, there was some forgery thing going on that post-dated the british intelligence findings over the uranium request.
Well the fact that Bush has been vindicated be featured in a cover story of Newsweek? Doubt it.
Posted by: j.scott barnard | Jul 19, 2004 11:33:18 AM
Of course he wasn't technically lying. That was the whole point of the exercise. Although he ought to have said this to be wholly accurate:
"The British believe, although the CIA does not, that Iraqi recently sought uranium from Africa. There is no evidence that any transaction ever took place, and it wouldn't make sense anyway because Saddam couldn't use it, already had plenty, and would have taken several years to ramp up enrichment. Therefore, there is no rush."
Carry on.
Posted by: praktike | Jul 19, 2004 11:38:38 AM
It's not about the uranium. It's about the Plame indictments.
They're trying to slant the playing field so it was Okay when the White House revealed the name of a CIA agent.
Posted by: alpharetta | Jul 19, 2004 11:55:40 AM
praktike,
It's not and never was true to say that "The CIA" "does not believe" that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. To say that would have been, a LIE.
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 11:59:56 AM
j. scott,
I was under the impression the Goerge Tenet said that those 16 words never should have been allowed in the State of the Union speech. Additionally, we have evidence that the CIA had removed similar evidence from an October speech, which then found its way back into the SOTU speech.
On top of all of that, we had inspectors in Iraq, with access to all of the sites that we had intel on, as well as French proposals to have more intrusive inspections to find these weapons or evidence that Sadaam was trying to create true WMDs, but Bush decided to pull them out, while saying after the fact that Sadaam had not allowed inspections.
Either way you slice it, you have a President who went to war on the premise that Sadaam had WMDs, and there were no WMDs. Bush is either incompetent and/or dishonest about his main selling point as a leader.
I do not understand why you want to defend this truly awful President - he is going to drag your side back into the wilderness if you continue to insist that he has been right all along. Your credibility dictates that you call a spade a spade and say that Republican values are still correct, but GWB was an incompetent administrator and failed to adequately implement conservative policies. History will not look kindly on GWB, and continuing to pimp for him and his miserable failures is 1) going to hurt your side's credibility in the long run, and 2) hurt our country's dialogue on two valid and honest policy views.
Posted by: theCoach | Jul 19, 2004 12:13:34 PM
Blixa, you can read theCoach's comments, but just to address your specific remarks: individual CIA analysts believed. The CIA as a collective entity, represented by its director, did not believe to a level of certainty and therefore did not want the president making references to this claim.
As praktile noted, there was a nice honest way to state what was known at the time; that nice, honest way, like so many nice honest ways to express what was known and presumed about iraqi wmds, didn't fit the war-hyping agenda of the backbone administration, and so they used the misleading way.
Posted by: howard | Jul 19, 2004 12:41:52 PM
alpharetta, you are correct, and it won't work, praise Jeebus.
Posted by: grytpype | Jul 19, 2004 12:53:43 PM
J. Scott, I hope that in your life people treat you the way Bush treated us. So that in every business transaction you make, with your boss, your friends, your family, and every general acquaintance, they all try very, very hard to deceive, but are careful to use vague language so that folks like you can scream 'it's not a lie!'
You'd have a fun life that way. And be forced to think hard about your infantile position.
But what bugs me about the technical wrangling over whether or not the SOTU Niger statements were lies is the bigger picture.
How many of us know exactly what yellowcake uranium is, and what it is used for? Look it up. Even if Bush's statement was transparently true, we'd need a lot more information for it to mean something. Without giant, OakRdige-scale purification plants to turn the 50% of yellowcake that is uranium into U235, this stuff is useless to Saddam. Indeed, Saddam already had tons and tons of yellowcake in Iraq, sitting useless.
It's a rather non-trivial process, turning yellowcake into something weapons grade. Bush (or his advisors) knew damn well that there was zero evidence for any such facilities. Yet they used this kind of crap to scare people anyway.
I'll tell you one thing: if you're a Christian, I guarantee you that at the gates of Heaven St. Pete will be classifying this as a lie. And a pretty damn big one, at that.
Posted by: Timothy Klein | Jul 19, 2004 1:02:17 PM
Timothy, St. Pete's going to be asking at the gate why we encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up in 1991 only to be slaughtered because we refused to intervene. Some who were executed had their children buried...alive. I think that shit's gonna be on St. Pete's mind rather than "16 words."
Posted by: j.scott barnard | Jul 19, 2004 1:20:52 PM
Iraqis killed in 1991--a very bad thing. Innocent Iraqis killed in 2003-2004--collateral damage.
Posted by: Rob | Jul 19, 2004 1:49:28 PM
howard,
just to address your specific remarks: individual CIA analysts believed
Invididual CIA analysts believed that at no recent time had Saddam sought uranium in any significant quantities from anywhere on the continent of Africa? Who, exactly? Name them.
Sound like morons.
In any event I'm not sure why anyone would think Bush would be required to single out such idiotic "beliefs" for special mention in a speech he gives.
The CIA as a collective entity, represented by its director, did not believe to a level of certainty and therefore did not want the president making references to this claim.
Well that's swell for "The CIA as a collective entity" to have that opinion regarding what they want the President to say in a President's speech.
Don't see why the President ought to be required to obey them, exactly. It is the President's speech after all, if he wants to mention a British intel finding, WTF business is it of CIA. If they could actually DEBUNK the British intel finding, that would've been another story I suppose, but as it happens, they did not and could not do it, they just "did not believe to a level of certainty" as you say. Well maybe they should figure out how to be more certain about these things.
As praktile noted, there was a nice honest way to state what was known at the time
The "nice honest way" which praktike mentioned was a LIE. Again it is simply not true that "The CIA" disbelieved in the statement "Saddam sought uranium from Africa".
The CIA's own crack investigator (Joe Wilson) in fact came back with a report bolstering the notion that Saddam sought uranium from Africa.
(You all may still be mentally replacing "sought" with "got" for some reason. Stop that!)
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 2:02:07 PM
Let me rephrase to help Blixa get his panties out of the bunch they're currently in.
"The British believe, although the CIA is skeptical, that Iraqi recently sought uranium from Africa. There is no evidence that any transaction ever took place, and it wouldn't make sense anyway because Saddam couldn't use it, already had plenty, and would have taken several years to ramp up enrichment. Therefore, there is no rush."
Posted by: praktike | Jul 19, 2004 2:08:09 PM
"We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities[ed...in Afghanistan]" Bush, SOTU, 2002
"The White House was forced to retreat from the two-year-old presidential assertion late yesterday after liberal environmental group Greenpeace released a letter from an official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that cast doubt on the claim.
The Wall Street Journal did have the good sense to report the news on its prominent Politics & Policy page (A4) this morning, with reporters Robert Block and Greg Hitt writing (subscription required) that the White House now says the concerns highlighted by Mr. Bush were based not on plant diagrams actually found in Afghanistan -- there were none -- but on a variety of intelligence developed before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.
As a White House spokesman delicately told The Journal, "there's no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found."
....
Yellowcake, conflicting intelligence. Hell. This is definitive, and SOTU 2002 will forever annotated:"No truth to this claim whatsoever. There were no diagrams." Given the undeniable evidence that this WH will lie in the SOTU, we cannot ever give them the benefit of a doubt.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 19, 2004 2:26:19 PM
Don't see why the President ought to be required to obey them, exactly. It is the President's speech after all, if he wants to mention a British intel finding, WTF business is it of CIA.
And we're supposed to take seriously the idea that the US president should use information from a foreign government that the US government cannot confirm or has not seen in order to convince the American people to go to war?
Yeah, that's a winner of an argument. Run with that one, won't you.
Posted by: The Eradicator! | Jul 19, 2004 2:29:01 PM
praktike,
You're SO SURE from behind your monitor that Saddam "couldn't use it". Um, if Saddam couldn't use it, why did he seek it? Saddam appears to have disagreed with your expert opinion on what he could and couldn't use. Take it up with him, go explain to him kindly and patiently how dumb he was to be seeking uranium (literally throwing away money and risking US wrath) which he had absolutely no use for according to your findings. Remember: you're the expert on what Saddam could use!
You wanted Bush to say "there's no rush" re:uranium/nukes. But Bush wasn't saying there was a "rush" re:uranium/nukes in the first place. He never said that.
First, the Niger-uranium statement was not Bush's entire Case For War(tm) (or even all that important to it, frankly - he already had War Powers remember?). So even if there was no "rush" based on Niger-uranium by itself (which I certainly agree there wasn't), he may have thought - and evidently did - there was more of a "rush" based on the 99.9% of the other rationale which constituted his C.F.W. Saying We could have delayed war because Niger-uranium by itself didn't force us to "rush" is kind of like saying a quarterback doesn't need to get rid of the ball because defensive player #11 is 30 yards away from him. What about defensive players #1-10, some of whom are about to tackle the quarterback as we speak? You've chosen to ignore them and focus on player #11 in isolation for some reason.
Second, you seem to have misinterpreted the meaning of saying Saddam sought uranium. It wasn't that He's going to make a nuke SOON so therefore (based entirely on the nuclear issue and nothing else) we need to Rush to war against him. It was merely about intent: that He has the intent of rebuilding a nuke program which if true means he is not "deterred" in any meaningful sense - that "deterrence" is NOT going to prevent him from becoming a nuclear power. No there was not a "rush" in that regard; as I'm sure you know all our intel estimates were that he would get nukes on the scale of years rather than months. Bush's argument was: why wait?
Now, I'm sure you're going to come back with some variation of You don't care that he sought uranium, and You disagree with "why wait?", you indeed wanted us to wait. Guess what, I don't care that you don't care. I couldn't give less of a rat's ass about that if I tried. I know this is a difficult concept for some, but whether or not you Care about claim X made in a speech has no bearing whatsoever on whether claim X is true.
Which it was, in this case, as you concede.
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 2:30:31 PM
Eradicator,
And we're supposed to take seriously the idea that the US president should use information from a foreign government that the US government cannot confirm or has not seen in order to convince the American people to go to war?
He felt like mentioning it and he mentioned it. He credited British intelligence explicitly so that the listener can form his own judgment. Based on that, you have every right to poo-poo the claim or give as little weight to the British intelligence source as you want. That's perfectly acceptable and to a large extent highly understandable. Indeed I think the reaction of most people should have been to take that sentence with huge grains of salt. That's all ok.
What's not ok with me is to call it a "lie" for no good reason.
I don't know why this distinction is SO DIFFICULT for so many people, but
(1) "I don't find Claim X persuasive and I think it should be given very little weight, especially since it comes from an unverified foreign intel agency"
and
(2) "Claim X is false - a LIE"
are not the same thing.
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 2:37:36 PM
How about "Claimer X is a proven liar"? Isn't that the point?
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 19, 2004 2:39:31 PM
I get tired of the left running in circles on Wilson and Yellowcake, when the diagram story has never even been questioned or defended by the right. There either was or was not a piece of paper. There was not.
Bush is a liar. Proven. History for a thousand years. Bush lied in the SOTU 2002.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 19, 2004 2:44:09 PM
How about "Claimer X is a proven liar"? Isn't that the point?
It may be "the point" for you. In fact, I suspect it probably is. I humbly suggest you save your time and effort by simply repeatedly posting "Bush is a proven liar" instead of all these longer, extraneous, ill supported arguments. Easier on us all.
The problem is that even if Claimer X is a "proven liar", that doesn't mean 2+2=4 is a Lie if Claimer X says so.
What I could never figure out is why the left suddenly decided that Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was such a dubious, implausible notion. Heck, I'd have just assumed it to be true lacking pretty strong evidence to the contrary..... yet you all decided it was like Bush was claiming he saw a ghost... I dunno, just bizarre.
Don't get me wrong; you guys just keep on hitching your wagon to the idea that "Saddam sought uranium from Africa" is an implausible and unbelievable statement. I really do love it. :-)
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 2:51:08 PM
Matt,
When Wilson revealed that Iraq had attempted to buy goods from Niger, but that he was not told what they were because of sanctions, do you think Iraq was trying to buy which of Niger's only exports:
A)Onions
b)Livestock
c)cowpeas
d)cotton
e)uranium
Posted by: Dave | Jul 19, 2004 2:52:48 PM
Blixa just admitted that Bush is a liar, and lied about a matter of fact in the State of the Union address.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jul 19, 2004 2:54:00 PM
WTF are you talking about bob. you are hallucinating.
Posted by: Blixa | Jul 19, 2004 2:56:46 PM
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