Obsessing about how we came to be in the Iraq war

by Mary

In the blogosphere there are some that are especially obsessed by the Plame affair. And there are some of us who were obsessed about the underlying matters before there was a Plame affair. I think the results of this particular investigation is important because it will indicate whether our country will accept that our government can lie us into war whenever they are enamored with war.

Boy, there have been some mighty fine posts from a number of incredibly good bloggers (including our own eRiposte) and I've been fascinated by the twists and turns of the story. Tonight Digby connects both the UK and the US stories and shows how the propaganda affair from both governments was a jointly run operation.

There was an elaborate propaganda machine ginned up in both the US and the UK to sell the Iraq war. During those "two tense weeks in July" a lot of information about that was seeping out in the press in both countries. It threatened to overwhelm the administration.

They were able to calm the waters, slow the story down, stonewall any Justice Dept investigation for months.

Yes, the Bush administration did their best to bury the story in their stonewalling and their selective leaks to the press. Nevertheless, that story was not dead and people like Sam Gardiner, Seymour Hersh and Henry Waxman kept picking away at the lies. And, fortunately, the good guys won one when Patrick Fitzpatrick was named the prosecutor in this case.

The Senate Intelligence Report (SSCI) continues to be a source of truth and obfuscation. Tonight Tom Maguire used the SSCI to dispute the assertion that the Niger uranium claim was not credible when Bush put it into his SOTU address in January 2003. And as befits someone who is uncomfortable with the story being exposed, the excerpts he pulls from the report allows him to declaim: "See, see! Bush must have believed the Niger claim was true because all reasonable people believed it was true!"

(U) DIA and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denials that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger for what he believed was to discuss uranium sales.

(U) Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers. For the same reason, CIA's briefer did not brief the Vice President on the report, despite the Vice President's previous questions about the issue.

Yet, if you've been following the Niger claim from BEFORE the SSCI was published and if you've done your homework on what the two British investigations showed, it was clear long before Joseph Wilson's oped in July 2003 in the Times that the Niger claim was a lie whose only purpose was to stampede the gullible into a foolish and sinful war. It was clear BEFORE the vote to grant Bush the authority to take the country to war to rid Saddam of his WMD that a great con was being played. Here was what the experts said about the "evidence" submitted on the charge that Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program:

David Albright of ISSI (Institute for Science and International Security) was dismayed in SEPTEMBER 2002 that someone was trying to subvert the experts testimony that the centrifuge tubes were not suitable for use in a nuclear purposes.

Greg Thielmann, retired director for the Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs Office, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, U.S. State Department, specifically said that the State Department Intelligence agency (INR) had debunked the charge that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger months ago: "Only eight days later when Secretary [of State Colin] Powell made his presentation to the Security Council and didn't mention a word of it [the Bush SOTU claim], I realised it must be that same piece of garbage we discredited some months earlier," Mr Thielmann said. More on Thielmann's perspective can be found here.

The SSCI has some good information, but the final report definitely put a "spin" on the story. There is much better contemporaneous information that proved the the UK and US conspired to create a reason for war and that "reasonable people" who knew the facts absolutely understood the pro-war story was based on a pack of lies.

One way I have kept this straight is by my Iraq War timeline leading up to the war that I put together in July 2003 which proves that the Bush story was based on lies, not just a misinterpretation of the common wisdom. It contains a number of the original public documents from both the US and UK to document the actual events. I've been adding important new new evidence (like the Downing Street Memos) as they are exposed.

Another piece that blows the entire "secret deals to send Saddam 500 tons of yellow cake" out of reality into fantasyland is the impossibility of taking that amount out of Niger (almost HALF of its yearly output) and sending it to Iraq without anyone knowing anything about it. Laura Rozen had a great article when she considered what that story really meant:

You know, 500 tons of yellowcake is a pretty startlingly large amount. That's about 250 elephants worth of yellowcake. Even if it was very very dense, how many elephants could you fit on a C130? Like, three maybe, right? It wouldn't have been easy for Iraq to slip shipments of that size undetected by satellite and other means. What's more: Iraq already had uranium. It was under IAEA seal at Iraq's Tuwaitha nuclear facility since the 1991 first Gulf War, until the US invasion last year.

In fact, in the very same SSCI report that Tom Maguire uses for his assertion is the following statement:

The INR analyst's meeting notes and electronic mail (e-mail) from other participants indicate that the INR explained its skepticism that the alleged uranium contract could possibly be carried out due to the fact that it would be very difficult to hide such a large shipment of yellowcake and because "the French appear to have control of the uranium mining, milling and transport process, and would seem to have little interest in selling uranium to the Iraqis." The notes also indicate that INR believed that the embassy in Niger had good contacts and would be able to get to the truth on the uranium issue, suggesting that a visit from the former ambassador would be redundant. (pg 38)

So even before the CIA decided to send Joe Wilson to Niger, knowledgeable people knew the claim was bunk. And the sections that Tom Maguire used to support his assertion were shown to be wrong by just looking at whether the story was even plausible.

As I said in my Niger Primer post*:

The only "proof" that Niger was conspiring to sell uranium to Saddam were some rumors and reports that that never would have passed the sniff test if the adminstration hadn't been so anxious to "fix" the intelligence.

Mr. Minuteman, you need to dig a bit deeper in your research. Don't just accept what you read in the SSCI without understanding what was left out. There is much more to the story than the report disclosed. Fortunately, what Fitzpatrick is after is a truth that the Bush-friendly Senate report was unable or unwilling to reveal.

(*) eRiposte's excellent series convinced me that the documents that caused the CIA to send Joseph Wilson to Niger were the same forged documents that were finally handed over by the Italian journalist in September 2002.