How could they have not known the Niger report was a fraud?
When it comes to all the things Bush has said about Iraq that aren’t true — whether you consider them lies, mistakes, exaggerations, or whatever — there’s only one the White House is really willing to concede was patently false. If for no other reason, it’s worth pursuing in more detail.
It came earlier this year in the State of the Union address, when Bush was trying to paint Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Bush said. He added, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”
Specifically, Bush was referring to alleged documents purporting to show a transaction between Iraq and Niger to purchase 500 tons of uranium oxide, which as I mentioned this morning, is needed to make a nuclear bomb.
Bush’s claim was completely false. There were documents, but they were found to be poor forgeries. The president was wrong.
(It’s worth noting how bad these forgeries were. The documents used the wrong letterhead, an obviously forged signature, and a letter from a foreign minister who had not been in office for eleven years. The head of the IAEA’s Iraq inspections unit literally debunked the documents with a few Google searches.)
Unlike nearly all of the other falsehoods the administration has offered, the White House does acknowledge that this one was, indeed, incorrect. But, they say, it was due to a forgery. It’s not as if they just made it up. They saw a document, which they believed to be true, but were mistaken. William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, generously defended the president’s error, saying simply that someone “goofed.”
But the question then becomes, what if the White House knew it was a forgery, but used the information as part of propaganda campaign anyway?
Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, denied this possibility, telling Tim Russert on Meet the Press earlier this month, “We did not know at the time [it was a forgery] — no one knew at the time, in our circles — maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course, it was information that was mistaken.”
Despite Rice’s claim, there are increasing reports that demonstrate that she wouldn’t have had to go very far into the “bowels of the agency” to find experts who knew the documents touted by Bush in the State of the Union were bogus.
As Josh Marshall noted yesterday in The Hill, “[J]ust about everyone in the intelligence community — and at least some people on [Rice’s] own National Security Council staff — had known the documents were phonies for almost a year.”
The New Republic has a devastating, must-read report in the current issue that explains that Dick Cheney, upon reviewing the alleged Niger report, originally asked the CIA to investigate the documents’ veracity in 2002 — a full year before Bush used the “evidence” in making his case against Hussein.
As TNR article explains, Cheney asked “a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate.” When the diplomat returned from Niger in February 2002, he “reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador’s report to the vice president’s office.”
Nevertheless, the administration kept using the information.
“They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie,” the former ambassador told The New Republic. The ambassador said administration officials added this lie “to make their case more persuasive.”
Marshall’s column notes that the administration officials initially said the CIA hadn’t reported back to the White House about the authenticity of the Niger documents. This, too, is incorrect, according to multiple federal national security and intelligence officials.
For example, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that CIA officials had notified “both the vice president’s office and National Security Council staff members” that the documents were forgeries.
Moreover, Greg Thielmann, director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in the State Department, said the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had concluded the documents were “garbage” long before Bush was using the information in his speech and has said he is “quite confident” that this conclusion was passed on “all the way to the top of the State Department.”
NPR then learned that intelligence officials saw early drafts of the State of the Union and expressed concerns about the bogus Niger report. One anonymous intelligence official told NPR that “White House officials” concluded, “‘Why don’t we say the British say this?'”
In light of the evidence, it becomes nearly impossible for the administration to dismiss this falsehood by claiming ignorance. Central key figures — including the offices of Secretary of State, the Vice President, and the NSA — were notified that the documents were bogus but Bush continued to use this false information.
If we now know that the White House was lying to the world about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, is it unreasonable to ask what else they’ve been lying about?
And if any of you have the time, could some explain to me why lying about sex in a civil deposition in a baseless lawsuit is an impeachable offense but lying about war in a State of the Union isn’t a big deal?