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It's been a long time
coming, but the Big Lies
come home: One of the reports cited by the
White House Iraq Group to promote Bush’s preemptive war has been declassified,
and comparisons show the edits and deletions from the original intelligence
analysis, published in a 2003 doctored version to manipulate public perception. Now that it has been revealed that at least 2 members of the White
House inner circle, Libby and Rove, met two weeks before former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s OpEd was published,
refuting the ‘yellow cake’ in Niger claims that Saddam was aggressively pursuing WMDs - to
discuss discrediting him - the question becomes, were their bosses aware of
their efforts? Libby is known as Cheney’s Cheney, and Rove is known as Bush’s brain.
Clumsy efforts this week by Bush spinners, trying to portray the president as
angry with Rove about his involvement, inadvertently suggests that the President lied when he said he
didn’t know anything at the time, prompting questions from Senators that evoke
Watergate, When was the president told,
and what did he know? Color
highlights, italics, mine -
kwc Secrets,
Evasions and Classified Reports The CIA leak case isn't just about whether
top officials will be indicted. A larger issue is what Judith Miller's evidence
says about White House manipulation of the media. The lengthy account by New York Times reporter Judy Miller
about her grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case inadvertently provides a
revealing window into how the Bush administration manipulated journalists about
intelligence on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Whatever the implications for special prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald's probe, Miller describes a conversation with Vice President Dick
Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on July 8, 2003, where he appears to significantly
misrepresent the contents of still-classified material from a crucial prewar
intelligence-community document about Iraq. With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in
Iraq and new questions being raised about the case for war, Libby assured Miller
that day that the still-classified document, a National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE), contained even stronger evidence that
would support the White House's conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs,
according to Miller's account. In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly
released just 10 days later, and it showed almost precisely the opposite. The
NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that had never been
publicly acknowledged by the administration prior to the invasion of Iraq. It
also included key dissents by State Department intelligence analysts, Energy
Department scientists and Air Force technical experts about some important
aspects of the administration's case. The assertion that still-secret material would bolster the
administration's claims about Iraqi WMD was "certainly not accurate, it
was not true," says Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, who coauthored a study last year, titled "A Tale of Two
Intelligence Estimates," about
different versions of the NIE that were released. If Miller's account is
correct, Libby was "misrepresenting the
intelligence" that was contained in the document, she said. A spokeswoman for Cheney's office said today that she
could not respond to Miller's account because it described grand jury testimony
in the Valerie Plame leak case. Following standard White House policy, the vice
president's office does not intend to make any public comments on any matter
relating to the investigation until after it is complete. Libby's comments about the NIE may seem at this point a sideshow
to the pressing question that is currently consuming much of Washington:
whether he or any other White House official will be charged with any crimes
stemming from the outing of CIA agent Plame, the wife of former ambassador and
administration critic Joseph Wilson. But Libby's comments do touch on what many
believe is a larger issue raised by the case: whether the administration accurately
represented the nature of what the U.S. intelligence community knew, and didn't
know, about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before the nation went to war. The
NIE was no small matter in that debate. Hastily prepared in the fall of 2002 at the request of
members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the NIE was supposed to be a
blue-ribbon document that represented the consensus view of U.S. government
intelligence agencies. A white paper based on the NIE was publicly released by
the administration in early October 2002 -
just one week before
Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the president to go to war. The
publicly released white paper unequivocally backed up the White House's case about the dangers posed by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. It stated boldly and without
caveats in the first paragraph that Baghdad "has chemical and biological weapons" and "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear
weapon during this decade." If Iraq obtains sufficient weapons-grade
material from abroad, the white paper further warned, Baghdad could make a
nuclear weapon "within a year." To support its conclusions about an Iraqi nuclear program,
it prominently cited, among other factors, Iraq's "aggressive
attempts" to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes-an effort that Miller
and her colleague Michael Gordon had first written about in an influential
front-page story for The New York Times the previous September. When Miller met with Libby for two hours at Washington's
Ritz-Carlton Hotel on July 8, 2003, the vice president's top aide provided an
additional detail that was not contained in the white paper, according to
Miller's account published in last Sunday's New York Times. The
still-classified NIE, Libby told her, "had
firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium" for a nuclear
bomb. The new information was potentially significant at that
moment because it came just
two days after
a New York Times op-ed by Wilson challenging the administration's claims about
Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium. In the op-ed, Wilson had come forward for
the first time to say that he had personally undertaken a CIA-sponsored mission
to Niger the year before and concluded that reports of Iraqi attempts to
purchase uranium from that country could not be substantiated. As Miller describes it, Libby's principal message during
their two-hour breakfast meeting that day was to rebut Wilson's attacks,
launching what she describes as a "lengthy and sharp critique" in
which he laid out the "credible evidence" of Iraqi attempts to buy
uranium from Niger. But Miller wanted more specifics. She "pressed Mr.
Libby to discuss additional information [about Iraq's nuclear program] that was
in the more detailed, classified version of the estimate," Miller wrote,
referring to the NIE. If the Times was going to do an article, "the
newspaper needed more than a recap of the administration's weapons
arguments." Libby, though, "said little more than that the
assessments of the classified estimate were even stronger than those in the
unclassified version," Miller wrote. Even when she sought to change the subject to Iraq's
chemical and biological weapons programs, Miller continues, "my notes show
that Mr. Libby consistently steered our conversation back to the
administration's nuclear claims. His main theme echoed that of other senior
officials: that contrary to Mr. Wilson's criticism, the administration had had
ample reason to be concerned about Iraq's nuclear capabilities based on the
regime's history of weapons development, its use of unconventional weapons and
fresh intelligence reports." What Miller didn't mention in her article is that on July 18, 2003, the White House did release a more
detailed version of the NIE. At the time, White House aides were trying to
explain how the claims about Iraqi uranium purchases in Africa had mistakenly
found their way into the president's State of the Union Message that year-even though, it turns out, they were
partially based on documents that were forged. But contrary to what Libby told Miller, the more detailed
version of the NIE was hardly stronger. In fact, it revealed for the first
time, in the very first paragraph-right after the sentence that "if left
unchecked, [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this
decade"-the fact that the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau
of Intelligence and Research (INR), had an "alternative view" of the
matter. That alternative view, relegated to a
boxed footnote inside the document, stated that while INR believed that Saddam "continues
to want nuclear weapons" and had a "limited effort" underway to
acquire nuclear capabilities, the evidence does not add up to a
"compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing a full-scale nuclear weapons
program. "Iraq may be doing so," the footnote read, "but INR
considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment." Specifically, the INR analysts challenged the assertion that
Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes was for the purpose of advancing a nuclear
program. They noted that "technical experts" at the Energy Department didn't believe they were suited for such
uses. In fact, INR-citing the large number of tubes being purchased and the
"atypical lack of attention to operational security in the procurement
efforts"-concluded that the tubes are "not intended for use in Iraq's
nuclear weapon program." As for the purported Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from
Africa, the NIE did indeed assert that Iraq had been "vigorously trying to
procure uranium ore and yellow cake." It based that assessment on foreign
government "reports" about attempted purchases from Niger and two
other African countries. But the
NIE also included an INR
written annex
in which the State Department analysts concluded that claims of Iraq uranium
purchases in Africa were "highly dubious." Those weren't the only dissents included in the INR that had
not been revealed in the earlier white paper. The original pre-Iraq war white
paper had asserted that Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or
missile that was "probably intended to deliver biological warfare
agents" and could even threaten "the U.S. homeland." The white
paper had attributed these conclusions to "most analysts." In fact, the newly declassified NIE disclosed for the first time that the U.S. Air Force's
intelligence agency, the Office of Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance, had a different view. The Air Force intelligence agency "does not agree" that Iraq's UAVs were "primarily
intended" for delivering biological weapons and believed they were more
likely to be primarily for reconnaissance, although unconventional weapons
delivery was "an inherent capability." As Carnegie president Mathews noted in her study last year,
the actual NIE had other caveats and qualifiers that were not in the
declassified white paper that was released before the war. In the prewar white
paper, the words "we judge" and "we
assess"
were deleted from five key findings of the NIE, making the conclusions seem like
flat declarative statements rather than more nuanced judgments. More
significantly, key sentences that were in the NIE-and revealed seeds of
doubt about some matters-were omitted from the prewar white paper. Among them: "We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD program."
Also: "We have low confidence in our
ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD." Miller, who had been among the most aggressive reporters in
the country writing stories about the threat posed by Iraqi WMD, was quoted in
a New York Times article that accompanied her piece last Sunday as saying for
the first time" "WMD-I got it
totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered
them-we were all wrong." Today, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on
the need for a federal "shield" law to protect journalists from
having to disclose their sources, she elaborated a bit: "As I painfully learned while covering intelligence
estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, we are only as good
as our sources. If they are mistaken, we will be wrong." She
made no reference to Libby. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9756141/site/newsweek/ |
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