I thought I’d wrap up the week with one final example of the Bush White House’s deception about Niger-gate. The final word goes to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
On June 8th, Rice told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that she — and other high-ranking administration officials — did not know that the Niger documents purporting to show uranium transactions with Iraq were forgeries.
“We did not know at the time — 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,” Rice said. “Of course, it was information that was mistaken.”
Fine. Rice didn’t know, the White House senior staff didn’t know. She didn’t have “doubts and suspicions” that the documents were bogus. Got it.
Let’s put aside, for now, the fact that the National Security Council, which Rice heads, was briefed on this issue by the CIA and there’s no way she could have been uninformed on this. Instead, let’s focus exclusively on what she said today.
“[T]he sentence in question comes from the notion the Iraqis were seeking yellow cake [uranium],” Rice told reporters this afternoon. “And, remember, it says, ‘seeking yellow cake in Africa’ is there in the National Intelligence Estimate.”
She added, “That was relied on to, like many other things in the National Intelligence Estimate, relied on to write the President’s speech. The CIA cleared on it. There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared.”
Did you notice that phrase, “there was even some discussion on that specific sentence”? There was? A month ago, you told America that “no one knew at the time…that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.” If no one had doubts about the documents’ authenticity, then why was there “discussion on that specific sentence”?
If the administration believed that the documents were authentic, and that Iraq really was purchasing yellowcake uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, then including the sentence in the State of the Union was a no-brainer. Bush was making the case and laying out his evidence. Of course, doubts about the Niger claim would naturally lead to discussion with the CIA, right?
Either the White House “did not know at the time” about the forgery, as Rice said in June, or the White House did know and had a discussion with the CIA about it, as Rice said today. It can’t be both. One of these statements has to be a lie.
What a tangled web the administration weaves…