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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- Tenet: [White House] Official
insisted on Iraq claim
Democratic senator says CIA director
acknowledged White House pressure
for discredited evidence on Saddam’s nuclear pursuit
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
WASHINGTON, July 17 — CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged at a closed-door hearing on the Bush administration’s use of now-discredited documents on Iraq’s pursuit of uranium that a White House official had insisted the unverified allegation be included in the president’s State of the Union address in January, a Democratic senator said Thursday.
The president’s spokesman vigorously disputed that assertion.
U.S. officials said, meanwhile, that top CIA officials did not receive the documents until after the president’s speech.
NEWSWEEK AND THE Associated Press both quoted unidentified U.S. officials as saying that CIA headquarters did not obtain the documents until February, after Bush’s Jan. 28 address to the nation in which he cited the “evidence” that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weapons.
Newsweek, quoting three administration sources, said the agency got its copies nearly four months after they had been delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Rome and had been passed along to the State Department. The embassy provided the documents to the CIA station chief in Rome, but the [CIA] station chief didn’t send them along to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., apparently believing they were being forwarded by the State Department, Newsweek reported.
Without the documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to purchase enriched uranium from Niger, the CIA could investigate only generalities of the claim, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also under fire for his use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, said in an address to Congress on Thursday that he believes “with every fiber of instinct and conviction” that the U.S.- and British-led war on Iraq was justified, even without broad international support.
Blair did not specifically address the discredited Niger-uranium documents, but he suggested that the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime will lead history to forgive Blair and Bush if it turns out they were wrong [or LIED?] about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The AP reported that the U.S. government turned the documents over to the United Nations shortly after the CIA obtained them. U.N. officials quickly determined they were fakes. The U.N. Security Council was informed of that March 7, two weeks before U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq.
DISCREDITED DOCUMENTS
The discredited documents are a series of letters purportedly between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated Niger would supply uranium to the government of Saddam in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.
Even without the documents, the CIA had its doubts, but Bush administration officials repeatedly sought to include the assertion in public statements aimed at vilifying Iraq, the AP reported.
The CIA sometimes succeeded in getting the information removed from such statements but acquiesced to an edited line in the State of the Union address that attributed the claim to British intelligence, it said.
That assertion was bolstered Thursday by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who was present for Tenet’s 4½-hour appearance before Intelligence Committee members on Wednesday.
Durbin said that during the closed-door hearing, Tenet told the lawmakers that a White House official insisted the State of the Union address include the [doubtful] assertion about Saddam’s nuclear intentions.
Durbin said that person’s identity could not be revealed because of the confidentiality of the proceedings, but sources, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, said that Tenet “reluctantly” identified the official as National Security Council member Robert Joseph.
One source said that the revelation led to a series of questions about [whose instructions Joseph was acting on].
WHITE HOUSE FIRES BACK
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was quick to dispute Durbin’s account.
“That characterization is nonsense. It’s not surprising, coming from someone who was in a rather small minority in Congress who did not support the action we took,” McClellan told reporters.
Durbin, appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said that Tenet “certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa.”
“And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth, and unfortunately those 16 words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year,” Durbin added.
Countered McClellan: “The whole idea that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was not real was something that was never under debate previously. This is an attempt to continue to rewrite history.”
Though lawmakers ALSO have raised questions about prewar intelligence indicating that Saddam’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to the al-Qaida terror network, the 16-word passage in Bush’s speech has come under the most scrutiny.
Tenet said last week the line — “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” — should not have been included in the speech. He took responsibility for its inclusion, without explaining how it came to be used.
The White House acknowledged last week that the claim should not have been in the speech because it could not be substantiated independently by U.S. intelligence sources and was based in part on the documents from the African nation of Niger that were later determined to have been forged.
BACK-AND-FORTH ARGUMENT
NBC has previously reported that Joseph, the NSC official, and the CIA’s weapons proliferation director, Alan Foley, argued back and forth about whether the reference should have been in the speech. Sources have told the network that, after Foley objected to the first draft of the passage, Joseph came up with the suggestion of attributing it to the British, asking Foley if that would make it technically correct. Since the British were reporting it, Foley had to acknowledge that the passage was 'factually accurate,' even though the CIA did not think the assertion was true, according to the sources.
Foley never consulted his superiors on the dispute, so Tenet never read or approved it, the sources said.
One senator who attended Wednesday’s Intelligence Committee hearing told NBC News that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed surprise when they learned that Tenet had not read the State of the Union speech and had not even heard of the controversy surrounding the 16 words until long after the speech had been delivered.
The CIA’s inspector general and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are investigating whether Foley should have consulted higher-ups and whether Joseph exerted undue influence, among other issues, the sources said.
Administration officials, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity early Thursday, said they expected “new information” to come out within 24 hours that would bolster the president’s claim in his State of the Union address.
The timing of such a release would correspond with Blair’s visit to the United States, but it was not clear whether the information would come from intelligence that British officials say has not previously been supplied to the White House or newly declassified material from the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. Tenet reportedly is still reluctant to release some of the CIA analysis, although the White House wants it made public to quell the political firestorm that has erupted over the prewar intelligence and how it was portrayed.
The furor intensified late Wednesday, as Democratic presidential contenders Joseph Lieberman and Howard Dean said that Tenet should resign.
‘BIG QUESTIONS REMAIN’
The controversy over Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address has undermined the administration’s efforts to quiet rising doubts about Bush’s justifications for going to war with Iraq. The United States said military action was justified, in part, because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but no such weapons have been found.
“Big questions remain about who forged the documents and the paper trail that followed,” Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said this week.
The AP reported that after the Niger claim first arose, the CIA sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate in February 2002. The diplomat, Joseph Wilson, reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.
Tenet said the CIA was unaware of any documents purporting to show such transactions at the time, and it is unclear when the U.S. government learned that the documents existed and were a main source of the Niger claim.
The CIA’s doubts about the uranium claim were reported through routine intelligence traffic throughout the government, one U.S. intelligence official said. Those doubts were also reported to the British.
The Niger report, along with a notation that it was unconfirmed, was also included in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified summary of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs. Tenet said the report was not a key part of the CIA’s judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
ATTEMPTS TO REMOVE CLAIM
The CIA tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, the U.S. intelligence officials said.
The CIA had the Niger claim removed from at least two speeches before they were given: Bush’s October address on the Iraqi threat, and a speech by U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte, officials said.
In recent weeks, the Bush administration has offered a number of defenses for using the statement:The CIA should have had it removed.
It was based on more intelligence information than the Niger letters.
It was technically true because it was attributed to British intelligence.
It wasn’t the reason the United States invaded Iraq.
The British dossier said Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The Blair administration says it did not view the now-discredited documents until October 2002, after the publication of the dossier.
Still standing by the report, Blair told the House of Commons on Wednesday that “the intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called forged documents.” The Blair administration has not detailed its other intelligence.
Bush administration officials have also said other information pointed to possible Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Tenet has called these reports “fragmentary” — a term in intelligence circles for unconfirmed information of suspect accuracy.
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC.com’s Mike Brunker and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation
and Homeland Defense:
ROBERT JOSEPHNational Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice announced February 22 the appointment of Robert G. Joseph as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense, effective January 22, 2001.
Prior to joining the National Security Council staff, Dr. Joseph served as a Professor of National Security Studies and Director of the Center for Counterproliferation Research at the National Defense University.
In the previous Bush Administration, he held the positions of U.S. Commissioner to the Standing Consultative Commission (ABM Treaty) and Ambassador to the U.S.-Russian Consultative Commission on Nuclear Testing.
In the Reagan Administration, he held several positions within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy.
Dr. Joseph has taught at Carleton College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.
from TIME Online:
The false assertion in President George W. Bush's January 28 State of the Union address -- that Iraq sought uranium from Africa -- and rising casualties in Iraq this summer "are combining to take a toll on Bush's standing with the public," write TIME's Jay Carney and Michael Duffy.
TIME's cover story, "Untruth & Consequences: How Flawed Was the Case for Going to War Against Saddam?," questions the effect on the President's credibility: "Where else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support for the war? If so many doubted the uranium allegations, who inside the government kept putting those allegations on the table?"
Carney and Duffy conclude, "The next time Bush tells the nation where he wants to go, it may not be so quick to follow."
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