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.<\/p>\n
It came earlier this year in the State of the Union address<\/a>, when Bush was trying to paint Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Bush’s claim was completely false. There were documents, but they were found to be poor forgeries. The president was wrong.<\/p>\n (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.)<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As Josh Marshall noted yesterday in The Hill<\/a>, “[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.”<\/p>\n