Really? Help a fella out and point me at 1 that states the British "had
already denounced the document as a
forgery" prior to the SOTUS.

snip

Posted on Sun, Jul. 13, 2003

Was 'Nigerian uranium' story known to be false more than a year before the
State of the Union?
By Robert Scheer

They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible
for the Iraq war.

Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam
Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Cheney's office.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the Gabonese Republic Joseph C. Wilson publicly
revealed last weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under
pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document - now known to be
a crude forgery - that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched
uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for
the story, and nobody else has, either.

What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State
Department, the National Security Council, and the vice president's office were
all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of
command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program
was a hoax.

Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported the facts to Cheney and the U.S.
security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the
fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing
the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."

What the President did not say was that the British were relying on their
intelligence white paper, which was based on the same false information that
Wilson and the U.S. ambassador to Niger had already debunked. "That information
was erroneous, and they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the
British white paper and the President's State of the Union address," Wilson
said July 6 on Meet the Press.

Although a British Parliament report released Monday exonerated the Blair
government of deliberate distortion to justify invading Iraq, it urged the
foreign secretary to come clean as to when British officials were first told
that the Iraq-Niger allegation was based on forged documents. The report found
it "odd indeed" that the British government never came up with evidence to
support the contention.

And now, half a year after the State of the Union, the Bush administration has
said the allegation "should not have been included" in the speech.

But that administration has not told its public why it ignored the disclaimers
from its own intelligence sources. To believe that our President was not lying
to us, we must believe that this information did not find its way through
Cheney's office to the Oval Office.

In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that
pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency
had determined there wasn't one. "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," Wilson wrote in acolumn in the July 6 New York
Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false
pretenses."

In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, "It really comes down to the
administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental
justification for going to war. It begs the question: What else are they lying
about?"

Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the
top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by former President Bush for
his role as the last American to confront Saddam face-to-face after the
dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the President told Wilson:
"What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is
truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight."

As Wilson observed wryly, "I guess he didn't realize that one of these days I
would carry that fight against his son's administration."

And that fight remains the good fight. This is not some minor dispute over a
footnote to history but rather raises the possibility of one of the most
egregious misrepresentations by a U.S. administration. What could be more
cynical and impeachable than fabricating a threat of rogue nations or
terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and using that to sell a war?

''There is no greater threat that we face as a nation," Wilson told NBC, "than
the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of nonstate actors or
international terrorists. And if we've prosecuted a war for reasons other than
that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we've
done a great disservice to the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat."

The world is outraged at this pattern of lies used to justify the Iraq
invasion, but the U.S. public still seems numb to the dangers of government by
deceit.

Indeed, in his column this week, William Safire, a speechwriter for Richard
Nixon, channeled the voice of his former boss to reassure Republicans that the
public easily could be conned through the next election.

Far be it for me to lecture either Safire or a reincarnated Nixon as to the
ease of deceiving the electorate, but as we learned from the Nixon disgrace,
lies have a way of unraveling, and the truth will out, even if it's after the
next election.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Robert Scheer is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

email this | print this










Shopping & Services


Find a Job, a Car,
an Apartment,
a Home, and more...























Help | Contact Us | Archives | Place an Ad | Newspaper Subscriptions
About Philly.com | About Realcities Network | Terms of Use & Privacy Statement
| About Knight Ridder | Copyright