When asked for comment on this unprecedented and apparently unprovoked attack, President Bush stated, “I don’t want the surprise to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
When further pressed on why he thought Monaco posed a threat, the exasperated President blurted, “Nine-eleven.”
A Bush administration official, who requested anonymity because the issue involved partly classified documents, would not say whether President Bush had seen a State Department memo from Jan. 28, 2006, stating that it was unlikely that flattening Monaco would finally bring the insurgency in Iraq to a close.
Another high ranking White House official, also requesting anonymity, said, “that memo wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. State sent this guy over there to check it out. But all he did was sun himself on the beach and gamble. The guy has a drinking problem and I think his wife is frigid.”
Reached for comment, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson said, “I see a pattern developing.”
Okay. That was a parody. This is not:
Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department’s intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send “25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers” filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts’ doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, relied on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech. Two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the supposed Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.
But the intelligence assessment itself – including the analysts’ full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim – was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.
The White House declined to discuss details of the declassified memo, saying the Niger question had already been explored at length since the president’s State of the Union address.
“This matter was examined fully by the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission, and the president acted on their broad recommendations to reform our intelligence apparatus,” said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Chris Farrell, the director of investigations at Judicial Watch and a former military intelligence officer, said he found the State Department’s analysis to be “a very strong, well-thought-out argument that looks at the whole playing field in Niger, and it makes a compelling case for why the uranium sale was so unlikely.”
The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
RICE: Wolf, let me just start by saying, it is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue.
The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa. He took the American people and American forces to war because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community, who had weapons of mass destruction, who had used them in the past, who was threatening his neighbors, and who threatened our efforts to make the Middle East a place in which you would have stability and therefore not people with ideologies of hatred driving airplanes into the World Trade Center. That’s why we went to war.
This 16 words came into the State of the Union from a whole host of sources. We used unclassified sources, like the British [white] paper. There were references to this in the National Intelligence Estimate. And the State of the Union was constructed on the basis of several different documents, all of which talked about efforts to acquire uranium in Africa.
Also from July 14, 2003:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson told me.”
* Ari Fleischer holds his final press briefing as White House Press Secretary. The Niger trip is raised in questions.
* Wilson calls Novak for a clarification about his article’s sources as it cited not a CIA source, as Novak had indicated in the phone call four days earlier, but rather two senior administration sources. Novak asks if Wilson was very displeased with the article. Wilson replies that he did not see what the mention of his wife had added to it but that the reason for his call was to question his sources. Novak replies “I misspoke the first time we talked.”
Bastards.
