‘Niger-gate’ kicks into high gear

The Bush administration’s false claim that Saddam Hussein’s government had purchased uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Niger is slowly becoming a full-fledged problem for the White House. The scandal, if you’re prepared to call it one, took a fresh turn over the weekend with the identification of a key player who was heretofore unknown.

Just to review for a moment, Bush said in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had received “significant quantities of uranium” from Africa. Bush was referring to documents, which later proved to be forgeries, purporting to show a transaction between Iraq and Niger to purchase 500 tons of uranium oxide.

Ample evidence has since been found that the administration knew almost a full year before the president made this claim that the documents were bogus. The New Republic spoke to an anonymous former African ambassador sent by the CIA to investigate the veracity of the report tying Niger’s uranium to Iraq. The diplomat quickly realized the “documents were forgeries” and reported his discoveries to the State Department and the CIA. The administration, however, continued to use the false evidence in building its case against Hussein.

On Sunday, we learned who this anonymous diplomat is — Joseph C. Wilson, a veteran foreign service officer and ambassador with experience in Africa and the Middle East, who worked for the first Bush administration and directed Africa policy for the National Security Council under President Clinton.

Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that explained who he is and what he found. In his essay, Wilson explained he has “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 then told the Washington Post, “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?”

It’s important to note, before yesterday, the White House was hedging a bit about whether Bush was stating a falsehood about Niger in the State of the Union. On the one hand, several administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have acknowledged that documents purporting to show transactions between Niger and Iraq were forgeries. On the other hand, the White House said the president’s claim wasn’t entirely wrong because there was “a larger body of evidence suggesting Iraq attempted to purchase uranium in Africa,” beyond the fraudulent documents.

As recently as yesterday morning, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer refused to say Bush was wrong about his claim.

Later in the day, however, the White House had given up on that strategy and admitted, for the first time officially, that Bush’s claim in the State of the Union wasn’t true.

“Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech,” the White House said in a statement. Even this acknowledgement has been carefully worded. Did you notice it avoided use of the words “wrong” and/or “false”?

The question now becomes more specific. The White House has admitted that Bush’s claim wasn’t true. The next step is finding out who in the administration knew it was false before the State of the Union and how forged documents became part of the administration’s case against Iraq in the first place.

We can only hope the press will not take the White House’s admission of a mistake at face value and allow this story to fade away.

As The Left Coaster said, “So, can we start calling it Niger-Gate?”