Something is up. The op-ed of the WSJ is raising some Bush questions ------------------
The Fog of Deceit By Albert R. Hunt 10 July 2003 The Wall Street Journal Preparing for his State of the Union in January, President Bush faced a challenge: American troops were amassed to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but public support for war was slipping. Iraq surely possessed dangerous weapons but an "imminent threat" meant a nuclear capacity. The president played that card. "Our intelligence sources," Mr. Bush intoned, showed Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes to be used for nuclear weapons. And he declared: "The British government learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." These stories were wrong. At the time, most intelligence sources doubted the tubes were suitable for nuclear weapons, and the alleged uranium purchase -- from Niger -- was bogus. Moreover, the president either knew the uranium story was dubious or he was kept in the dark, and allowed to deceive the public, by someone high in the administration. The phony Iraq-Niger deal may be the smoking gun in what was a pervasive pattern of exaggeration and distortion to justify the war against the Iraqi dictator. Some of these claims -- the alleged Baghdad-al Qaeda ties, the extent of his biological and chemical weapons or even his nuclear designs -- reflected selective use of conflicting intelligence. The false Niger connection was much more. Yet Congress, under pressure from the White House, is abdicating its responsibility to investigate why the public was misled on such a momentous matter. The Niger issue, widely reported the past few days, has a revealing evolution. It starts with the CIA, in early 2002, asking former African ambassador Joseph Wilson to check out reports of a Saddam effort to purchase uranium from Niger; this, the agency explained, was in response to a query from Vice President Cheney's office. Ambassador Wilson spent eight days in Niger. He never was shown the alleged documentation of any deal but interviewed top officials, analyzed the possibilities and concluded -- as did the Bush ambassador to Niger -- that there was little chance that any such transaction transpired. He reported this back to the CIA and the State Department. What happened then? It's inconceivable that the CIA, having sent a high-level emissary at the request of the vice president, didn't report his findings back to Mr. Cheney's office. Yet the British aired this charge in September and in December the State Department published a fact sheet asserting Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. That prompted the International Atomic Energy Agency to request documentation. But, as Rep. Henry Waxman's office revealed this week, the Bush administration waited more than six weeks -- until one week after the president's State of the Union speech with the uranium charge -- to respond to the IAEA and then privately acknowledged there were doubts about the validity. In quick order, that agency concluded the charge was fake, that the documentation was clearly forged. The revelations about a diplomat's trip to Niger didn't begin surfacing until several months ago, and Mr. Wilson finally outed himself in a New York Times column last Sunday. But in January, when President Bush gave the State of the Union, notes Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, it was widely known inside that the uranium report "appeared to be a fabrication." Did the president know that on January 28? If not, who failed to tell him? Why did he cite the Brits rather than our own government? Did Dick Cheney know about Mr. Wilson's findings? If not, what staffer kept them from him? Why did National Security Chief Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld make the same baseless charges on a Saddam-Niger connection? In contrast, why did Secretary of State Colin Powell omit any such reference in his key United Nations presentation in early February? The White House reluctantly acknowledged the presidential mistake this week but produces no details of what happened or who knew this was a phony rumor based on a forged document. Recently, Ms. Rice, in response to a question on NBC's Meet the Press, suggested "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one our circle knew there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." Ambassador Wilson, who also served as a National Security Council top aide on Africa, dismisses that explanation, having no doubt his conclusions reached the vice president's office. But this administration, whether it's stonewalling the commission investigating Sept. 11, or the facts leading up to the Iraqi war, is contemptuous of the public's right to know. "This is the most secretive administration at least since Richard Nixon," charges Sen. Graham. The tragedy here is that there was a case to take out Saddam without exaggerating or lying. He was a brutal despot, who aggressively destabilized the region and was in clear violation of United Nations resolutions on his weapons of mass destruction. (No other threat meets those particulars.) But the ends-justifies-the-means duplicity employed to rally political support was more than a disservice. If Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about sex, or Al Gore discredited for exaggerating his relationship with James Lee Witt, then lying about the reasons for going to war -- whether it was the president or one of his subordinates -- ought to command an inquiry from the people's representatives. -----Original Message----- From: Karen Watters Cole [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:31 PM To: Cordell, Arthur: ECOM Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Futurework] Bigger Than Watergate! Arthur, if applying Karen's 50% Rule, if only half of this is true, it's Serious. The best way to know is to investigate. If not true, it will unravel. To ignore would be extremely dangerous, ignorant and foolish. Much better to be embarrassed later than reticent now. There are legitimate, honest and experienced people working on election fraud, not just the Florida and Georgia examples. These people are alarmed at the possibilities and ramifications. They system of checks and balances may be compromised, but we have the internet to help us continue to ask questions and repeatedly so until we get satisfactory answers. - KWC Is this true, or will it turn out to be another "urban legend?" -----Original Message----- From: Karen Watters Cole [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:08 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Futurework] Bigger Than Watergate! The point should be to distribute this kind of provocative information as widely as possible, look for any publication elsewhere, generate letters to the editor and Congress. If the people who do these things believe that no one is paying attention, as all the voters should be in a democracy, then they can continue to operate with confidence; if the system is rigged, why bother concealing your contempt for the little guy, the minority voter, the independents? If the system is rigged, why hide the arrogance of your policy's intent to permanently institute a class society based on wealth, making education more difficult for all but a few of the lower classes? Note that there will be ballot challenges to affirmative action by diehard activists who are angry with the Supreme Court and also Pres. Bush for signing it (especially since he seemed to endorse the opposite opinion previously). If the system is rigged, do you really have to be concerned about consequences of policy on political campaigns? Not really. You simply remove those individuals who will receive too much negative attention during the political season, or who have "baggage" that might not survive a congressional hearing, or whose loyalty is not established. Hence, Whitman is gone, so is Ari Fleischer. There has always been some form of election fraud. Personally, I like the way the Canadians do it, with small polling stations so that paper ballots can be tabulated and checked quickly. But we have a much larger population. But until people are aware of the potential for abuse, and motivated to safeguard their right to a free and untainted election, we should not be silent or complacent, even when sometimes the evidence is alarming, provocative or hard to procure. - KWC _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
