e're glad that someone in Washington has finally
taken responsibility for letting President Bush make a false
accusation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the
State of the Union address last January, but the matter will not end
there. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, stepped
up to the issue yesterday when he said the C.I.A. had approved Mr.
Bush's speech and failed to advise him to drop the mistaken charge
that Iraq had recently tried to import significant quantities of
uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. Now the
American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech
in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to
deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to
do.
So far, the administration's handling of this important — and
politically explosive — issue has mostly involved a great deal of
finger-pointing instead of an exacting reconstruction of events and
an acceptance of blame by all those responsible. Mr. Bush himself
engaged in the free-for-all yesterday while traveling in Africa when
he said his speech had been "cleared by the intelligence services."
That led within a few hours to Mr. Tenet's mea culpa.
It is clear, however, that much more went into this affair than
the failure of the C.I.A. to pounce on the offending 16 words in Mr.
Bush's speech. A good deal of information already points to a
willful effort by the war camp in the administration to pump up an
accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty
well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the well of the
House of Representatives last January. Doubts about the accusation
were raised in March 2002 by Joseph Wilson 4th, a former American
diplomat, after he was dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to look
into the issue.
Mr. Wilson has said he is confident that his concerns were
circulated not only within the agency but also at the State
Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Tenet,
in his statement yesterday, confirmed that the Wilson findings had
been given wide distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush,
Mr. Cheney and other high officials had not been directly informed
about them by the C.I.A. The uranium charge should never have found
its way into Mr. Bush's speech. Determining how it got there is
essential to understanding whether the administration engaged in a
deliberate effort to mislead the nation about the Iraqi
threat.
