From Time.com on July 13, 2003:
A Question of Trust
The CIA’s Tenet takes the fall for a flawed claim in the State of the Union, but has Bush’s credibility taken an even greater hit?

From Reuters and WashingtonPost.com on July 13, 2003:
Bush Aides Seek to Put Out Credibility Firestorm
Top aides to President Bush insisted on Sunday he did not hype Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction as they sought to put out a political firestorm ignited by a disputed statement he made in his case for war.

But questions about Bush’s credibility persisted, threatening to further erode public support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and create more difficulty at home for U.S. ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

From NYTimes.com on July 13, 2003:
Rumsfeld and Rice Adjust Defense of Iraq-Africa Claim
Senior Bush administration officials adjusted their defense today of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, insisting that the phrasing was accurate even if some of the underlying evidence was unsubstantiated.

From SunTimes.com on July 14, 2003:
Blame Tenet? He’s just trying to please his boss
You almost wonder if you should feel sorry for CIA Director George Tenet, who is taking the blame for President Bush’s little pre-war fib to the American people about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa, theoretically for use in nuclear weapons.

After all, with all the hooey the Bush administration was spreading around in those days, how was Tenet supposed to know that this was the one questionable assertion where somebody would draw the line?

From Alternet.org:
Intelligence Unglued
“I will bring honor to the process and honor to the office I seek. I will remind Al Gore that Americans do not want a White House where there is ‘no controlling legal authority.’ I will repair the broken bonds of trust between Americans and their government.”
� George W. Bush, March 7, 2000

From Time.com:

A Question of Trust

The CIA’s Tenet takes the fall for a flawed claim in the State of the Union, but has Bush’s credibility taken an even greater hit?
By MICHAEL DUFFY AND JAMES CARNEY

Sunday, Jul. 13, 2003
The State of the Union message is one of America’s greatest inventions, conceived by the Founders to force a powerful Chief Executive to report to a public suspicious of kings. Delivered to a joint session of Congress in democracy’s biggest cathedral, it is the most important speech a President gives each year, written and rewritten and then polished again. Yet the address George W. Bush gave on Jan. 28 was more consequential than most because he was making a revolutionary case: why a nation that traditionally didn’t start fights should wage a pre-emptive war. As Bush noted that night, “Every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead.”

Just how aware was Bush of the accuracy of what he was about to say? Deep in his 5,400-word speech was a single sentence that had already been the subject of considerable internal debate for nearly a year. It was a line that had launched a dozen memos, several diplomatic tugs of war and some mysterious, last-minute pencil editing. The line�”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”�wasn’t the Bush team’s strongest evidence for the case that Saddam wanted nuclear weapons. It was just the most controversial, since most government experts familiar with the statement believed it to be unsupportable.

Last week the White House finally admitted that Bush should have jettisoned the claim. Designed to end a long-simmering controversy, the admission instead sparked a bewildering four days of changing explanations and unusually nasty finger pointing by the normally disciplined Bush team. That performance raised its own questions, which went to the core of the Administration’s credibility: Where else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support for the war? If so many doubted the uranium allegations, who inside the government kept putting those allegations on the table? And did the CIA go far enough to keep the bad intelligence out?

To that last question, at least, the answer was: apparently not. In what looked like a command performance of political sacrifice, the head of the agency that expressed some of the strongest doubts about the charge took responsibility for the President’s unsubstantiated claim. “The CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered,” said CIA Director George Tenet in a statement. “I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And … the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.”

Yet the controversy over those 16 words would not have erupted with such force were they not emblematic of larger concerns about Bush’s reasoning for going to war in the first place. Making the case against Saddam last year, Bush claimed that Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) made the country an imminent threat to the region and, eventually, the U.S. He wrapped the evidence in the even more controversial doctrine of pre-emption, saying America could no longer wait for proof of its enemies’ intentions before defending itself overseas�it must sometimes strike first, even without all the evidence in hand. Much of the world was appalled by this logic, but Congress and the American public went along. Four months after the war started, at least one piece of key evidence has turned out to be false, the U.S. has yet to find weapons of mass destruction, and American soldiers keep dying in a country that has not greeted its liberators the way the Administration predicted it would. Now the false assertion and the rising casualties are combining to take a toll on Bush’s standing with the public.

FOLLOW THE YELLOWCAKE ROAD
How did a story that much of the national-security apparatus regarded as bogus wind up in the most important speech of Bush’s term? The evidence suggests that many in the Bush Administration simply wanted to believe it. The tale begins in the early 1980s, when Iraq made two purchases of uranium oxide from Niger totaling more than 300 tons. Known as “yellowcake,” uranium oxide is a partially refined ore that, when combined with fluorine and then converted into a gas, can eventually be used to create weapons-grade uranium. No one disputes that Iraq had a nuclear-weapons program in the 1980s, but it was dismantled after the first Gulf War. Then, in the mid-1990s, defectors provided evidence that Saddam was trying to restart the program.

Finally, late in 2001, the Italian government came into possession of evidence suggesting that Iraq was again trying to purchase yellowcake from Niger. Rome’s source provided half a dozen letters and other documents alleged to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials negotiating a sale. The Italians’ evidence was shared with both Britain and the U.S.

When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report caught the eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, told TIME that during one of his regular CIA briefings, “the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report.” Cheney’s interest hardly came as a surprise: he has long been known to harbor some of the most hard-line views of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. It was not long before the agency quietly dispatched a veteran U.S. envoy named Joseph Wilson to investigate. Wilson seemed like a wise choice for the mission. He had been a U.S. ambassador to Gabon and had actually been the last American to speak with Saddam before the first Gulf War. Wilson spent eight days sleuthing in Niger, meeting with current and former government officials and businessmen; he came away convinced that the allegations were untrue. Wilson never had access to the Italian documents and never filed a written report, he told TIME. When he returned to Washington in early March, Wilson gave an oral report about his trip to both CIA and State Department officials. On March 9 of last year, the CIA circulated a memo on the yellowcake story that was sent to the White House, summarizing Wilson’s assessment. Wilson was not the only official looking into the matter. Nine days earlier, the State Department’s intelligence arm had sent a memo directly to Secretary of State Colin Powell that also disputed the Italian intelligence. Greg Thielmann, then a high-ranking official at State’s research unit, told TIME that it was not in Niger’s self-interest to sell the Iraqis the destabilizing ore. “A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus,” Thielmann said later. “This wasn’t highly contested. There weren’t strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down.”

Except that it wasn’t. By late summer, at the very moment that the Administration was gearing up to make its case for military mobilization, the yellowcake story took on new life. In September, Tony Blair’s government issued a 50-page dossier detailing the case against Saddam, and while much of the evidence in the paper was old, it made the first public claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. At the White House, Ari Fleischer endorsed the British dossier, saying “We agree with their findings.”

THE DOUBTS THAT DIDN’T GO AWAY
By now, a gap was opening behind the scenes between what U.S. officials were alleging in public about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions and what they were saying in private. After Tenet left a closed hearing on Capitol Hill in September, the nuclear question arose, and a lower-ranking official admitted to the lawmakers that the agency had doubts about the veracity of the evidence. Also in September, the CIA tried to persuade the British government to drop the allegation completely. To this day, London stands by the claim. In October, Tenet personally intervened with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, to remove a line about the African ore in a speech that Bush was giving in Cincinnati, Ohio. Also that month, CIA officials included the Brits’ yellowcake story in their classified 90-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons programs. The CIA said it could neither verify the Niger story nor “confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake” from two other African nations. The agency also included the State Department’s concerns that the allegations of Iraq’s seeking yellowcake were “highly dubious”�though that assessment was printed only as a footnote.

At a time when it was trying to build public support for the war, the Bush Administration did not share these internal doubts about the evidence with the public. In December, for example, the State Department included the Niger claim in its public eight-point rebuttal to the 12,200-page arms declaration that Iraq made to the U.N. two weeks earlier. And a month later, in an op-ed column in the New York Times titled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” top Bush aide Rice appeared to repeat the yellowcake claim, saying, “The declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.” Nor did the U.S. pass on what it knew to international monitors. When the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. group, asked the U.S. for data to back up its claim in December, Washington sat tight and said little for six weeks.

The battle between believers and doubters finally came to a head over the State of the Union speech. Weeks of work had gone into the address; speechwriters had produced two dozen drafts. But as the final form was taking shape, the wording of the yellowcake passage went down to the wire. When the time came to decide whether Bush was going to cite the allegation, the CIA objected�and then relented. Two senior Administration officials tell TIME that in a January conversation with a key National Security Council (nsc) official just a few days before the speech, a top cia analyst named Alan Foley objected to including the allegation in the speech. The nsc official in charge of vetting the sections on WMD, Special Assistant to the President Robert Joseph, denied through a spokesman that he said it was O.K. to use the line as long as it was sourced to British intelligence. But another official told TIME, “There was a debate about whether to cite it on our own intelligence. But once the U.K. made it public, we felt comfortable citing what they had learned.” And so the line went in. While some argued last week that the fight should have been kicked upstairs to Rice for adjudication, White House officials claim that it never was.

NUCLEAR FALLOUT
But if it was good enough for bush, it wasn’t good enough for others. Colin Powell omitted any reference to the uranium when he briefed the U.N. Security Council just eight days later; last week he told reporters that the allegation had not stood “the test of time.” Nor did Tenet mention the allegation when he testified before the Senate panel on Feb. 11. “If we were trying to peddle that theory, it would have been in our white paper,” an intelligence official told TIME. “It would have been in lots of places where it wasn’t. A sentence made it into the President’s speech, and it shouldn’t have.”

Did Bush really need to push the WMD case so hard to convince Americans that Saddam should be ousted? In a TIME poll taken four weeks before coalition forces invaded, 83% of Americans thought war was justified on the grounds that “Saddam Hussein is a dictator who has killed many citizens of his Iraq.” That’s one claim that has never been contested. In the same TIME poll, however, 72% of Americans thought war was also justified because it “will help eliminate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

The unseen threat of a Saddam with WMD was an argument that played to Bush’s strengths. As a politician, Bush has always been better at asserting his case than at making it. After 9/11, his sheer certitude�and the faith Americans had in his essential trustworthiness�led Americans to overwhelmingly support him. The yellowcake affair may have already changed that relationship, for as the casualties mount in Iraq, polls suggest that some of that faith is eroding. Which means the next time Bush tells the nation where he wants to go, it may not be so quick to follow.

�With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper and Adam Zagorin/Washington, John F. Dickerson with Bush in Africa, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Andrew Purvis/Vienna

Bush Aides Seek to Put Out Credibility Firestorm

Reuters
Sunday, July 13, 2003; 5:38 PM

By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top aides to President Bush insisted on Sunday he did not hype Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction as they sought to put out a political firestorm ignited by a disputed statement he made in his case for war.

But questions about Bush’s credibility persisted, threatening to further erode public support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and create more difficulty at home for U.S. ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Appearing on Sunday television shows, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated that it was a mistake for Bush to cite in his State of the Union address a British finding, which U.S. intelligence was unable to confirm, that former Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from Africa for Iraq’s nuclear program.

The White House first acknowledged the error last week. CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility, saying his agency should not have signed off on the one-sentence inclusion in the president’s speech last January.

But Rice and Rumsfeld brushed off suggestions Bush had manipulated intelligence in making his case for war.

“The notion that the president of the United States took the country to war because he was concerned with one sentence about whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa is clearly ludicrous,” Rice told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And this has gotten to that proportion.”

“End of story,” Rumsfeld declared on ABC’s “This Week.”

On CNN’s “Late Edition” Rice also said Tenet should not step down. “Absolutely not. The president has confidence in George Tenet,” she said.

Yet, with recent polls showing an erosion of support for the Iraqi operation, there was heavy criticism from Democrats, some of whom hope to replace Bush in the White House in 2004.

“This is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush,” Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democratic presidential hopeful, told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“There was a selective use of intelligence — that is, that information which was consistent with the administration’s policy was given front-row seat,” said Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the intelligence committee, said in a radio interview the panel may call Tenet to answer questions this week. But he criticized Rice for being “dishonorable” in letting Tenet take the blame and said she must have known about the suspect uranium report long before Bush’s State of the Union address.

“The entire intelligence community has been very skeptical about this from the very beginning,” Rockefeller told National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program.

“And she (Rice) has her own director of intelligence, she has her own Iraq and Africa specialists, and it’s just beyond me that she didn’t know about this, and that she has decided to make George Tenet the fall person… I think it’s dishonorable.”

Rice went to lengths to state that the British intelligence was not inaccurate, just unproven by the United States. “We have never said that the British report was wrong,” she said.

Blair arrives in Washington on Thursday for talks with Bush. Both leaders have been criticized for overplaying intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, one of the prime justifications cited in the attack on Iraq. Three months after Saddam’s fall, no such weapons have been found.

Full Legal Notice
� 2003 Reuters

Rumsfeld and Rice Adjust Defense of Iraq-Africa Claim

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, July 13 � Senior Bush administration officials adjusted their defense today of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa, insisting that the phrasing was accurate even if some of the underlying evidence was unsubstantiated.

Condeleeza Rice, the national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in separate appearances on Sunday television talk shows that the disputed sentence in Mr. Bush’s January speech was carefully hedged, enough that it could still be considered accurate today.

While continuing to acknowledge, as the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did last week, that the phrase should not have been uttered, they emphasized today that the British had indeed, as Mr. Bush said, reported Iraq’s interest in acquiring African uranium.

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush, contended that Saddam Hussein was pursuing efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. Among other elements he cited to make his case, he said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Dr. Rice, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” said: “The statement that he made was indeed accurate. The British government did say that.”

And Mr. Rumsfeld said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press”: “It turns out that it’s technically correct what the president said, that the U.K. does � did say that � and still says that. They haven’t changed their mind, the United Kingdom intelligence people.”

On the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Rumsfeld added: “It didn’t rise to the standard of a presidential speech, but it’s not known, for example, that it was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate.”

The legalistic defense of the phrasing seemed to signal a shift in the focus of the White House’s strategy in dealing with the political fallout over Mr. Bush’s public use of evidence that was based in part on fabricated documents and in part on uncorroborated reports from abroad.

It came after a week in which the White House first repudiated the statement and then blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for allowing Mr. Bush to make it. On Friday, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, accepted responsibility, saying, “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.”

But the bout of fingerpointing between the White House and the agency concerning the African uranium only served to intensify the criticism of the administration for its handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Rather than quelling the controversy, the White House stoked it through official statements, providing an opening for Democratic leaders to attack the administration’s handling of the intelligence. So today effort by Dr. Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to be a response by the White House to turn down the flame on a hot story that the White House itself had helped ignite just days earlier.

Some White House officials suggested that the public is less interested in the story’s ins and outs than the news media and the political opposition, and that this is why the administration has chosen this approach.

In the months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his advisers frequently cited classified intelligence reports that they said provided proof that Iraq was both developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Mr. Bush and his advisers said the threat posed by Iraq’s development of those weapons and the possibility that Saddam Hussein might share them with terrorists made it necessary to start a war to overthrow the Iraqi government.

Since American forces occupied the country, however, they have not discovered conclusive evidence of the existence of such weapons in Iraq’s possession, and have also failed to discover conclusive proof that Iraq had forged a terrorist alliance with Al Qaeda.

The failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction has led to intense scrutiny of the administration’s approach before the war. A group of retired C.I.A. officers has conducted an internal review at the agency of the prewar intelligence reports on Iraq, and Congress has also begun to investigate the handling of the evidence.

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Mr. Bush cited several reports in arguing that Mr. Hussein was trying to develop a nuclear bomb.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990’s 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,” Mr. Bush stated. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

Since the speech, the evidence concerning both the uranium purchases and the aluminum tubes has come into question. In March, the I.A.E.A. reported that documents that formed the basis for reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger were forgeries, though the C.I.A. had doubts about the claims of the African uranium shipments long before that. Intelligence officials say the C.I.A. told British officials last fall that they doubted the evidence on the matter, which London was including in a publicly released white paper.

And in the days before the Mr. Bush’s address, government officials say, a proliferation expert from the C.I.A. discussed the evidence on Niger with a proliferation expert from the National Security Council at the White House. The two men now have different recollections of their conversations on the matter, government officials say. Still, the end result was that the phrase in the speech did not refer specifically to Niger, but rather more generally to African uranium. Now, Dr. Rice and other American officials contend that other information about Iraq’s efforts to buy uranium from African countries has not been discredited, so that Mr. Bush’s statement should be considered accurate.

Dr. Rice sought today both to play down the significance of the reference in the speech and at the same time defend its use.

“It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa,” Dr. Rice said on Fox. “This was part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places.”

But she added that “not only was the statement accurate, there were statements of this kind in the National Intelligence Estimate. And the British themselves stand by that statement to this very day.”

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Blame Tenet? He’s just trying to please his boss

July 14, 2003

BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

You almost wonder if you should feel sorry for CIA Director George Tenet, who is taking the blame for President Bush’s little pre-war fib to the American people about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa, theoretically for use in nuclear weapons.

After all, with all the hooey the Bush administration was spreading around in those days, how was Tenet supposed to know that this was the one questionable assertion where somebody would draw the line?

From what we read, this one wasn’t even Tenet’s fib. He is being blamed because he didn’t red flag it after somebody else wrote it into the president’s State of the Union address, even though he’d blocked its use in another speech three months earlier.

Instead of demanding that the statement be pulled from the State of the Union message, though, the CIA suggested some rewording.

What Bush ended up saying in his address was that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Attributing the information to the British helped get around the fact that our own intelligence had already concluded we had no sound basis for making such a claim ourselves–our experts even going so far as to openly dispute its veracity.

Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration, may have thought he was being the good team player in approving an accusation that, in retrospect, was so artfully weasel-worded that it could have been written by Clinton himself.

It’s a slippery slope for a newspaper columnist sitting back here in the Midwest to pretend to be an expert on such matters when he has no sources other than the same published materials available to you. So I’m no expert, just a concerned citizen trying to make sense of what happens in Washington through the experience of observing other dysfunctional systems.

From that viewpoint, it certainly seems possible to me that Tenet was just another guy trying to please his bosses, as he did again Friday by stepping up and taking responsibility.

The decision to go to war already had been made. The president and his more hawkish advisers were determined to find ways to sell it to the public. Sometimes in a situation like that, a bureaucrat knows better than to step in front of the train, although you hope for more from a director of central intelligence.

Last week’s act of contrition did not exactly require Tenet to fall on his sword. The president made clear over the weekend that the CIA boss still has his complete confidence–and his job. Bush said he considers the matter closed.

I’ll bet he does.

While the British have been beating themselves bloody for weeks in questioning the assumptions that led up to the war, Americans and their elected leaders have been happy to sit back and bask in the glow of the big “victory.”

The war that was sold on the basis of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction hasn’t produced any more evidence of them than did Hans Blix and the merry band of United Nations weapons inspectors that we treated as a national joke.

A key part of the president’s sales job on the weapons of mass destruction was to convince us that Saddam Hussein was trying to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, a particularly frightening threat when coupled with the assertion that his government was linked to the terrorist threat of al-Qaida.

Four months after the start of the war, however, we have yet to see any credible evidence in support of either claim.

Was this allegation about the attempted uranium purchase the piece of information that tilted American public opinion in favor of the war?

No. Obviously not. I’ll bet most people don’t even remember that Bush said it. My only recollection was that I found it noteworthy at the time that he was attributing information to the British.

They might remember the president’s accusations about Iraq’s attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes for use in enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, another piece of intelligence now considered to be dubious.

Or those Scud missiles Iraq had? Never found any.

Strangely enough, the British, who have fessed up to a lot of the baloney that Tony Blair’s government was feeding his people before the war, still say that the attempted uranium purchase is true.

And after leaving Tenet hung out to dry last week, the Bush administration still couldn’t bring itself to admit that the president had misled us, even unintentionally.

“What we have said is it should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech,” Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said. “People cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false.”

I guess that means that unless we can prove that it’s false, it still might be true, even though the people we pay to assess these matters don’t believe it is.

In dismissing the importance of the uranium flap, Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, told CBS’ “Face the Nation”: “The president took the nation to war to depose a bloody tyrant who had defied the world for 12 years, who was building a weapons of mass destruction program and had weapons of mass destruction.”

I’m sure someday they’ll produce some proof of the latter. But who’s necessarily going to believe it?

Intelligence Unglued

By Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com
July 14, 2003

“I will bring honor to the process and honor to the office I seek. I will remind Al Gore that Americans do not want a White House where there is ‘no controlling legal authority.’ I will repair the broken bonds of trust between Americans and their government.”
� George W. Bush, March 7, 2000 ((taken from Josh Marshall’s Talkingpointsmemo.com weblog))

On a day when it has just been announced that another American soldier died and six were wounded in an ambush near Baghdad, when Secretary of State Rumsfeld is hinting at a future escalation of troop levels in Iraq and the possibility of rising attacks on U.S. forces over the length of the summer, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired intelligence agents, have written a memorandum to President Bush pointing the finger directly at the Vice President in the Niger forgery flap and calling for his resignation. (”Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit. This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.”)

If anyone wants to look for humor in this situation, note the defense raised yesterday on the inside-the-Beltway talk shows by Rice and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Their case seems to be:

a) The President was, technically speaking, accurate in his sixteen-word sentence in the State of the Union speech. According to the Washington Post, “Rumsfeld, appearing on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ said that it was ‘technically correct, what the president said, that the British government did say that and still says that.’ But the defense secretary added that Bush and Tenet now believe ‘referencing another country’s intelligence as opposed to your own’ was probably the wrong thing to do in a speech as important as the State of the Union.” This begins, it seems to me, to put Rumsfeld and his colleagues in the category of people wondering what the definition of “is” is.

b) A single sentence is being blown all out of proportion. “Rice said on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ that ‘it was a mistake about a single sentence, a single data point. And I frankly think it has been overblown.’” This from an administration that took us into Code Orange-land, promoted duct tape for our problems, and turned the pathetically punch-less regime of a brutal local dictator into the equivalent of a superpower enemy. Overblown? Please.

c) The Brits did it. (And with Tony Blair all set to arrive in town later in the week.)

If, by the way, you want one piece to bring you fully up to date on the Niger forgery flap, check out Neil Mackay’s Niger and Iraq: the war’s biggest lie? in the Glasgow Sunday Herald (”One senior western diplomat told the Sunday Herald: ‘There were more than 20 anomalies in the Niger documents � it is staggering any intelligence service could have believed they were genuine for a moment.’”).

Liz Marlantes in the Christian Science Monitor (Political arc of a faulty prewar claim) offers this summary of where we may be heading:

“Democrats are attacking the president’s reliance on flawed evidence � and his subsequent efforts to shift the blame elsewhere � to try to undercut his image as a straight shooter, one of his greatest political strengths. But even if the public largely accepts that the president simply made an honest mistake, the incident may feed an already growing belief that the administration, whether intentionally or not, overestimated the Iraqi weapons threat in the run up to war. Particularly as the instability in Iraq continues, with more and more US troops losing their lives and no weapons of mass destruction yet found, more Americans may begin to question whether the war was worth it � and whether the president led the nation on an appropriate course….”

Of course, in a sense Condi Rice is right. This isn’t really a flap over sixteen words in a presidential speech. Not faintly. It’s about the possible unraveling, under the pressure of unexpected postwar events in Iraq, of a truly audacious and deeply radical policy for global and domestic domination.

I received today the following memorandum to the President from Ray McGovern, one of three members of the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It’s a fascinating statement from that group. McGovern is a 27 year veteran from the analysis ranks of the CIA. Here’s McGovern’s description of VIPS: “This is a group of 30 retired senior intelligence officers formed in January of 2003 to keep watch on the use/abuse of intelligence primarily regarding Iraq. Most of us are from the analytic ranks of the CIA, but we have strong representation from the operations officers as well and we are truly an intelligence community body inasmuch as retired officers from State Department Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, Army Intelligence and the FBI are also members.”

It’s important to keep in mind, as you read this piece and other comments in coming days from retired former members of various branches of American and British intelligence, that people inside the bureaucracy are seldom willing to talk directly for quotation. It’s a job-endangering prospect. So, as with the military, it’s often retired former members of the “community” who hear from and speak for them.

Tom

July 14, 2003

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Intelligence Unglued

The glue that holds the Intelligence Community together is melting under the hot lights of an awakened press. If you do not act quickly, your intelligence capability will fall apart � with grave consequences for the nation.

The Forgery Flap

By now you are all too familiar with the play-by-play. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery is a microcosm of a mischievous nexus of overarching problems. Instead of addressing these problems, your senior staff is alternately covering up for one another and gently stabbing one another in the back. CIA Director George Tenet’s extracted, unapologetic apology on July 11 was classic � I confess; she did it.

It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign affairs sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not Tenet, is responsible for the forged information getting into the speech. But the disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003 about former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s mission to Niger in February 2002, when he determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson’s findings were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she somehow missed that report, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff on May 6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson’s mission, and the story remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.

Rice’s denials are reminiscent of her claim in spring 2002 that there was no reporting suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack planes and slam them into buildings. In September, the joint congressional committee on 9/11 came up with a dozen such reports.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s credibility, too, has taken serious hits as continued non-discoveries of weapons in Iraq heap doubt on his confident assertions to the UN. Although he was undoubtedly trying to be helpful in trying to contain the Iraq-Niger forgery affair, his recent description of your state-of-the-union words as “not totally outrageous” was faint praise indeed. And his explanations as to why he made a point to avoid using the forgery in the way you did was equally unhelpful.

Whatever Rice’s or Powell’s credibility, it is yours that matters. And, in our view, the credibility of the intelligence community is an inseparably close second. Attempts to dismiss or cover up the cynical use to which the known forgery was put have been � well, incredible. The British have a word for it: “dodgy.” You need to put a quick end to the dodginess, if the country is to have a functioning intelligence community.

The Vice President’s Role

Attempts at cover up could easily be seen as comical, were the issue not so serious. Highly revealing were Ari Fleisher’s remarks early last week, which set the tone for what followed. When asked about the forgery, he noted tellingly � as if drawing on well memorized talking points � that the Vice President was not guilty of anything. The disingenuousness was capped on Friday, when George Tenet did his awkward best to absolve the Vice President from responsibility.

To those of us who experienced Watergate, these comments had an eerie ring. That affair and others since have proven that cover-up can assume proportions overshadowing the crime itself. All the more reason to take early action to get the truth up and out.

There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney’s office, and that Wilson’s findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well.

Equally important, it was Cheney who launched (in a major speech on August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to persuade Congress and the American people that Saddam Hussein was about to get his hands on nuclear weapons � a campaign that mushroomed, literally, in early October with you and your senior advisers raising the specter of a “mushroom cloud” being the first “smoking gun” we might observe.

That this campaign was based largely on information known to be forged and that the campaign was used successfully to frighten our elected representatives in Congress into voting for war is clear from the bitter protestations of Rep. Henry Waxman and others. The politically aware recognize that the same information was used, also successfully, in the campaign leading up to the mid-term elections � a reality that breeds a cynicism highly corrosive to our political process.

The fact that the forgery also crept into your state-of-the-union address pales in significance in comparison with how it was used to deceive Congress into voting on October 11 to authorize you to make war on Iraq.

It was a deep insult to the integrity of the intelligence process that, after the Vice President declared on August 26, 2002 that “we know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced during the critical month of September featured a fraudulent conclusion that “most analysts” agreed with Cheney’s assertion. This may help explain the anomaly of Cheney’s unprecedented “multiple visits” to CIA headquarters at the time, as well as the many reports that CIA and other intelligence analysts were feeling extraordinarily great pressure, accompanied by all manner of intimidation tactics, to concur in that conclusion. As a coda to his nuclear argument, Cheney told NBC’s Meet the Press three days before US/UK forces invaded Iraq: “we believe he (Saddam Hussein) has reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Russert: …the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program; we disagree?

Vice President Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you’ll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of the intelligence community disagree…we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei (Director of the IAEA) frankly is wrong.

Contrary to what Cheney and the NIE said, the most knowledgeable analysts � those who know Iraq and nuclear weapons � judged that the evidence did not support that conclusion. They now have been proven right.

Adding insult to injury, those chairing the NIE succumbed to the pressure to adduce the known forgery as evidence to support the Cheney line, and relegated the strong dissent of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (and the nuclear engineers in the Department of Energy) to an inconspicuous footnote.

It is a curious turn of events. The drafters of the offending sentence on the forgery in president’s state-of-the-union speech say they were working from the NIE. In ordinary circumstances an NIE would be the preeminently authoritative source to rely upon; but in this case the NIE itself had already been cooked to the recipe of high policy.

Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at Cheney’s request, enjoys wide respect (including, like several VIPS members, warm encomia from your father). He is the consummate diplomat. So highly disturbed is he, however, at the chicanery he has witnessed that he allowed himself a very undiplomatic comment to a reporter last week, wondering aloud “what else they are lying about.” Clearly, Wilson has concluded that the time for diplomatic language has passed. It is clear that lies were told. Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit.

This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.

Recommendation #1

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney “not guilty.” His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation.

The Games Congress Plays

The unedifying dance by the various oversight committees of the Congress over recent weeks offers proof, if further proof were needed, that reliance on Congress to investigate in a non-partisan way is pie in the sky. One need only to recall that Sen. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to agree to ask the FBI to investigate the known forgery. Despite repeated attempts by others on his committee to get him to bring in the FBI, Roberts has branded such a move “inappropriate,” without spelling out why.

Rep. Porter Goss, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is a CIA alumnus and a passionate Republican and agency partisan. Goss was largely responsible for the failure of the joint congressional committee on 9/11, which he co-chaired last year. An unusually clear indication of where Goss’ loyalties lie can be seen is his admission that after a leak to the press last spring he bowed to Cheney’s insistence that the FBI be sent to the Hill to investigate members and staff of the joint committee � an unprecedented move reflecting blithe disregard for the separation of powers and a blatant attempt at intimidation. (Congress has its own capability to investigate such leaks.)

Henry Waxman’s recent proposal to create yet another congressional investigatory committee, patterned on the latest commission looking into 9/11, likewise holds little promise. To state the obvious about Congress, politics is the nature of the beast. We have seen enough congressional inquiries into the performance of intelligence to conclude that they are usually as feckless as they are prolonged. And time cannot wait.

As you are aware, Gen. Brent Scowcroft performed yeoman’s service as National Security Adviser to your father and enjoys very wide respect. There are few, if any, with his breadth of experience with the issues and the institutions involved. In addition, he has avoided blind parroting of the positions of your administration and thus would be seen as relatively nonpartisan, even though serving at your pleasure. It seems a stroke of good luck that he now chairs your President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Recommendation #2

We repeat, with an additional sense of urgency, the recommendation in our last memorandum to you (May 1) that you appoint Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to head up an independent investigation into the use/abuse of intelligence on Iraq.

UN Inspectors

Your refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq has left the international community befuddled. Worse, it has fed suspicions that the US does not want UN inspectors in country lest they impede efforts to “plant” some “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, should efforts to find them continue to fall short. The conventional wisdom is less conspiratorial but equally unsatisfying. The cognoscenti in Washington think tanks, for example, attribute your attitude to “pique.”

We find neither the conspiracy nor the “pique” rationale persuasive. As we have admitted before, we are at a loss to explain the barring of UN inspectors. Barring the very people with the international mandate, the unique experience, and the credibility to undertake a serious search for such weapons defies logic. UN inspectors know Iraq, know the weaponry in question, know the Iraqi scientists/engineers who have been involved, know how the necessary materials are procured and processed; in short, have precisely the expertise required. The challenge is as daunting as it is immediate; and, clearly, the US needs all the help it can get.

The lead Wall Street Journal article of April 8 had it right: “If the US doesn’t make any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to war.” As the events of last week show, that skepticism has now mushroomed here at home as well.

Recommendation #3

We recommend that you immediately invite the UN inspectors back into Iraq. This would go a long way toward refurbishing your credibility. Equally important, it would help sort out the lessons learned for the intelligence community and be an invaluable help to an investigation of the kind we have suggested you direct Gen. Scowcroft to lead.

If Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity can be of any further help to you in the days ahead, you need only ask.

/s/

Ray Close, Princeton, NJ
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA

Steering Committee
Veteran Intelligence Professionals forSanity