The White House has admitted that the president’s claims about Iraq’s uranium from Niger were false, but that hasn’t made the scandal go away. In fact, the admission only confirmed widespread concerns and raised additional questions.
I think the admission that Bush was wrong was so startling because this White House never admits a mistake. Every problem, screw-up, failure, and/or error that happens on their watch is someone else’s fault, usually Clinton’s. Monday’s acknowledgement, therefore, seemed startling.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, however, reminds us — correctly — not to take our eye off the ball. The White House admission isn’t quite as impressive as it seems.
“In essence, they’re saying that the Niger documents were forgeries,” Marshall said. “But then, we already knew that. Indeed, the White House has conceded this for months. Sometimes publicly; sometimes privately…. But, of course, the real issue is that there is at least very strong circumstantial evidence that knowing what they knew then, the Uranium hocum never should have been put into the speech either. This is a classic case of trying to jump out ahead of a story by conceding a point that no one is actually disputing in the first place.”
Good point. The admission, after all, didn’t even say the president was wrong or mistaken, only that the alleged tie between Iraq and uranium from Niger “should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.” Well of course it shouldn’t have been included, it was a bogus claim. What we need to know is what the administration knew and when they knew it.
The fact that the documents the White House relied on were known forgeries — almost a full year before the State of the Union — indicates a serious problem. If information were to come to light indicating that White House officials knew that the Niger claim was false but used the information anyway to exaggerate an Iraqi threat, the president’s credibility will be permanently ruined. It becomes impossible to claim this was a “mistake” if they knew it was false before they claimed it was true.
Bits and pieces of information continue to surface indicating just that.
The BBC is reporting, for example, that the CIA knew that the administration’s claims about the Iraqi nuclear program were false and warned the White House not to use the forged Nigerian documents as proof in March 2002 — 10 months before the State of the Union.
In addition, the New York Times published a report today explaining that the State Department told a congressional committee that just seven days after the State of the Union, “American diplomats warned the International Atomic Energy Agency that the United States could not confirm the reports.”
Just a week after the speech? Either startling new evidence appeared in the days immediately following the State of the Union, which no one claims happened, or the State Department already knew Bush’s claim was false when Bush made it.
So, with all these important questions lingering, and key still information needed, wouldn’t it make sense to begin an investigation as to exactly what happened? Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail certainly think so.
At its core, this situation has two possibilities, neither of them good for the administration: Either the White House knew the information was wrong and used it anyway as part of an effort to deceive the world or the White House’s intelligence network suffers from so many fatal flaws that the entire national security apparatus can know a claim is false while the president and his senior staff remain clueless. It’s one or the other.
The staff at the National Security Council knew the claim was false, so did the CIA, and so did the State Department. Is the White House prepared to use “widespread ignorance” as their only means of explanation?