It’s Britain’s fault. Oh wait, no one’s buying that. It’s the CIA’s fault. No, that doesn’t work. It’s the Democrats’ fault. Scratch that; it doesn’t make any sense. It’s the media’s fault? That doesn’t sound right either.
As of today, it’s Stephen Hadley’s fault.
Hadley, Bush’s deputy national security adviser and #2 at the NSC to Condoleezza Rice, became the latest to accept the role of White House scapegoat yesterday, admitting that the CIA alerted him to the fact that Iraq-Niger claim was false well before the State of the Union but he failed to have the charge removed from the speech.
The White House announced yesterday that the CIA issued reports in October to Hadley, Rice, and White House speechwriter Michael Gerson explaining that the Niger claim was unreliable and shouldn’t be used by the president.
Yesterday’s acknowledgements not only represent a significant change in the White House’s defense strategy over the scandal, but clearly contradict previous claims.
Just last week, for example, the White House claimed that the CIA never really objected to the accuracy of the uranium from Africa charge, but rather took issue with some of the specific details about the story. One administration official said on Friday that the CIA objected to the Niger claim going into a Bush speech in October “because it was single source, not because it was flawed.”
Hadley admitted yesterday this was not the case; the CIA memos explained that the entire claim was unsubstantiated and believed to be false.
Moreover, it completely destroys Condoleezza Rice’s statement from last month that “no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that [the Niger claim] might be a forgery.” No one in our circles? The CIA sent memos to the top two people at the National Security Council, including Rice and her deputy!
Hadley, in particular, got two memos and a direct phone call from CIA Director George Tenet about the Niger claim. Yesterday, Hadley explained that he had forgotten about the CIA warnings when the SOTU was being written for Bush.
“I should have recalled…that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue,” Hadley said yesterday.
If I can summarize, the director of the CIA warned the deputy national security adviser about the primary evidence of Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program and then…he forgot about it. This, in a nutshell, is the new White House line of defense.
So never mind that apology from George Tenet that said he was responsible for this fiasco; it turns out he gave the NSC all the information they needed. Now the dunce cap is firmly on someone who actually works in the White House. The trail, in other words, is slowly moving ever-closer to Bush.
With so many lingering questions and changed stories, how long can Republicans refuse Democratic demands for congressional hearings on this scandal?
For what it’s worth, I think attention could (and should) now shift to Condi Rice. She received the same CIA memo that Hadley did; it was Robert Joseph, another NSC deputy, who “negotiated” with the CIA over how they could make the Niger claim in the SOTU, and it was Rice on national television telling everyone that no one — least of all her — had any doubts about the uranium story. If Rice didn’t know the Niger claim was false, then she is hopelessly incompetent. If Rice did know it was false, she intentionally participated in trying to deceive the public about the Iraqi threat.