As revealed in a recently declassified State Department memo to the CIA that set forth State’s belief the Niger claims were based on forgeries. It’s all in the most recent story by Jason Leopold for Truthout:

Sixteen days before President Bush’s January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa – an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war – the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a newly declassified State Department memo.

The revelation of the warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored intelligence information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq.

On January 12, 2003, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) “expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries,” the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.

Moreover, the memo says that the State Department’s doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.

Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reasons that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in February 5, 2003, – one week after Bush’s State of the Union address – to try and win support for a possible strike against Iraq.


(Continued below the fold)

The memo does not say that the State Department alerted the White House on January 12, 2003, about the bogus uranium claims.

But the memo’s author, Carl Ford, said in a previous interview that he has no doubt the State Department’s reservations about the Niger intelligence made its way to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

One high-ranking State Department official said that when the department’s analysts briefed Colin Powell about the Niger forgeries Powell met with former Director of the CIA George Tenet and shared that information with him.

Tenet then told Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and her former deputy, Stephen Hadley, that the uranium claims were “dubious,” according to current and former State Department and CIA officials who have direct knowledge of what Tenet discussed with the White House at the time.

The White House has long maintained that they were never briefed about the State Department’s or the CIA’s concerns related to the Niger uranium claims.

Powell briefed Tenet. Tenet briefed Cheney, Rice and Hadley. The only person we can’t find a link to in this is Bush. Either he knew also, or his top advisors deliberately kept this information from him. Maybe Bush had already let them know not to bring him any dissenting views, or maybe he heard the information and simply dismissed it because it came from the State Department. I don’t know which would be worse.

And I have to add, there really is something weird with this administration and the number sixteen. Sixteen words in the State of the Union. Sixteen days before the speech State warns the Niger claims of yellowcake to Iraq are bogus. And most recently, the assertion by a State Department official in Russia that Iran is 16 days away from building nukes. It’s enough to make me want to consult a numerologist.

But really, all I want is one number: Two — the number of officials in the Bush White House against whom impeachment charges are brought by the House of Representatives: Bush and Cheney. How many days is it to the November elections anyway? More than 16, I’m afraid.

As for Jason Leopold’s article, go read the whole thing. Very damning. Senator McCarthy once referred to the press as a pack of jackals (in a diatribe against Edward R. Murrow). Thank god we have a few lions like Leopold, Seymour Hersh and Murray Waas. They seem to be the only members of the 4th estate with any guts these days.