While we are waiting for the jury to come to its verdict in the Scooter Libby trial, I thought I would do a little run down of what this trial is really all about. And, no, it is not all about whether Scooter Libby lied to the FBI and grand jury, even though that is what the jury must decide.
The Iraq War started on March 20, 2003. But the case for war started to unravel long before that. It a March 18, 2003 article that was largely overlooked in all the anticipation for shock and awe, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus discussed the collapsing evidence. The headline? Bush Clings To Dubious Allegations About Iraq. The entire article is blistering, but this part touched directly on Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.
In his appearance Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the vice president argued that “we believe [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But Cheney contradicted that assertion moments later, saying it was “only a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.” Both assertions were contradicted earlier by Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who reported that “there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities.”
ElBaradei also contradicted Bush and other officials who argued that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. The IAEA determined that Iraq did not plan to use imported aluminum tubes for enriching uranium and generating nuclear weapons. ElBaradei argued that the tubes were for conventional weapons and “it was highly unlikely” that the tubes could have been used to produce nuclear material.
Cheney on Sunday said ElBaradei was “wrong” about Iraq’s nuclear program and questioned the IAEA’s credibility.
Earlier this month, ElBaradei said information about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium were based on fabricated documents. Further investigation has found that top CIA officials had significant doubts about the veracity of the evidence, linking Iraq to efforts to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger, but the information ended up as fact in Bush’s State of the Union address.
So, even before the first missile fell on Baghdad the Bush administration’s case for war was being questioned by the CIA, the IAEA, and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Relations between the Vice-President and Walter Pincus did not improve on March 31st, when Pincus teamed up with Glenn Kessler to pen Advisers Split as War Unfolds; One Faction Hopes Bush Notes ‘Bum Advice’ (LexisNexis).
The first 11 days of the war have brought back with a vengeance the deep splits that have long existed within the Bush administration and the Republican Party over policy toward Iraq.
Already there is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Republican government officials and party leaders to convince President Bush that the advice he has received from Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz — a powerful triumvirate frequently at odds with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — has been wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests.
Citing past public statements by Cheney and others about the prospective ease with which the Iraq war could be won and the warm welcome U.S. forces would receive from the Iraqi people, one former GOP appointee said he and his allies were looking at “whether this president has learned something from this bum advice he has been getting.”
March turned into April and then into May, but we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction. The President landed on an aircraft carrier on May 2nd and announced that major combat operations were over. But they were not over. They are still not over four years later. Pressure on the administration began to build.
On May 6th, Nicholas Kristof penned an editorial in the New York Times called Missing in Iraq: Truth. He pointed the finger for no WMD directly into the Vice-President’s office.
I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. “It’s disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,” one insider said.
There were some momentous errors in the Kristof column and they led inextricably to the whole Valerie Plame affair. To understand this we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Vice-President. As early as October 2001 the Italian intelligence agency (SISMI) had reported a potential effort by Iraq to procure uranium from Niger. Dick Cheney was interested in this report even though the intelligence community was dismissive. Cheney become more interested in the Niger angle on February 13, 2002 when the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report based on documents in SISMI’s possession. He asked his CIA briefer, Craig Schmall, to find out what the CIA knew about the issue. But it was a day earlier, February 12th, when Valerie Wilson wrote a recommendation for her husband justifying his selection to go to Niger to investigate whether uranium might have been transferred to Iraq. In other words, it was somewhat inaccurate to say that ‘the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.’ It appears that Joe Wilson would have been sent to Niger even absent any interest on the Vice-President’s office. There was interest coming from the Pentagon and State Department as well as the office of the Vice-President (OVP).
There were two more errors in Kristof’s story.
The first was contained in this sentence: ‘[the] envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.’
Wilson did not report that the information was ‘unequivocally wrong’. And he didn’t report that the documents were forged. He reported that it was quite possible that Iraq had sought uranium but there was almost no chance in hell that they had succeeded. As for the forgeries, the Italians had not yet forwarded the documents on to the Americans when Wilson made his trip. Neither he, nor anyone at Langley, had seen the documents. And that makes the following Kristof sentence inaccurate as well.
‘The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.’
Wilson didn’t know about this until after Mohammed El-Baradei of the IAEA reported on it in March 2003. So, all these errors in the Kristof piece gave the Vice-President a false sense of security that he could discredit the basic allegations. But the basic allegetions were true. The OVP had cherry-picked intelligence and hyped the case for war.
On May 29, 2003 Pincus struck again. He teamed up with Karen DeYoung to write a piece called U.S. Hedges on Finding Iraqi Weapons; Officials Cite the Possibility of Long or Fruitless Search for Banned Arms. Here’s a money quote:
Beginning with Vice President Cheney last August, administration officials delivered a series of speeches expressing absolute certainty the Iraqi weapons existed. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said in an Aug. 26 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Pincus was really starting to get under the Vice-President’s skin. After reading this column Scooter Libby pulled aside Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and asked him what he knew about the anonymous ambassador that had been mentioned in Kristof’s column. Grossman knew nothing and was quite embarrassed to have to admit this to Libby. He went and asked Richard Armitage but Armitage didn’t know anything either. And that point Grossman went to Carl Ford, the head the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Ford drew up a report on Wilson’s trip that included the information that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and claimed she was responsible for his trip.
But before Grossman (and Libby) received this report Walter Pincus contacted the OVP and told them we was looking into the uranium allegations in the State of the Union speech. Libby made a note on June 3rd that he needed to talk to Cheney about the Pincus article. The story was getting out of control even though Joe Wilson had not yet gone public. On June 8th, Condi Rice went on Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulus and tried to refute the allegations in Kristof’s article from over a month before.
At that point Wilson became agitated and started making rumblings about going public. By June 9th Scooter Libby was in full damage control mode. On the 9th and 10th he received memos from the CIA and State Department (Grossman) about Wilson’s trip. On the 11th Libby pulled Robert Grenier out of a meeting with DCI George Tenet to ask him about Joe Wilson’s trip and learned (again) that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and may have had a role in his trip. On roughly the 12th of June Dick Cheney personally informed Libby that Wilson’s wife worked at the agency. This was the same day that Pincus published CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid. The article reflected the Vice-President’s defense.
A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program — its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger — was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said.
The CIA’s failure to share what it knew, which has not been disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated evidence.
For a brief moment it looked like the Vice-President had succeeded in shifting the blame for the uranium claims in the SOTU to the CIA. But Joe Wilson would not go away. And, at this point, we have to retreat a bit back to May.
