Thursday, July 24, 2003

 
Bush Aides Disclose Key October Memos from CIA Warning that the Niger Uranium Papers Were Highly Suspect

The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa, White House officials said yesterday.

The officials made the disclosure hours after they were alerted by the CIA to the existence of a memo sent to Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on Oct. 6. The White House said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, on Friday night discovered another memo from the CIA, dated Oct. 5, also expressing doubts about the Africa claims.

The information, provided in a briefing by Hadley and Bush communications director Dan Bartlett, significantly alters the explanation previously offered by the White House. The acknowledgment of the memos, which were sent on the eve of a major presidential speech in Cincinnati about Iraq, comes four days after the White House said the CIA objected only to technical specifics of the Africa charge, not its general accuracy.

In fact, the officials acknowledged yesterday, the CIA warned the White House early on that the charge, based on an allegation that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium in Niger, relied on weak evidence, was not particularly significant and assumed Iraq was pursuing an acquisition that was arguably not possible and of questionable value because Iraq had its own supplies.

Yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions; other pieces of evidence have also been challenged.

Hadley, who also received a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet before the president's Oct. 7 speech asking that the Africa allegation be removed, took the blame for allowing the charge to be revived in the State of the Union address. "I should have recalled . . . that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," he said. He said Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were counting on his dependability, and "it is now clear to me that I failed." Hadley said Rice was not made aware of the doubts but "feels personal responsibility as well."

"The high standards that the president set with his speeches were not met," Hadley said, acknowledging that the problem was not solely that the CIA failed to strike the reference from the January speech. "We had opportunities here to avoid this problem. We didn't take them," he said.

It remains unclear why the Africa uranium claim continued to bubble up in key presidential speeches. White House officials insist they did not push hard for the accusation to be included, and the intelligence community largely dismissed the significance of the matter.

The intelligence reports about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger, Somalia and Congo represented only four paragraphs in the Oct. 2 National Intelligence Estimate, the definitive collection of U.S. intelligence's views on Iraq's weapons programs. Iraq's alleged attempt to obtain uranium was not among the "key judgments" used in the report to support the idea that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program. Yet the White House twice sought to include it in a presidential speech.

Yesterday, Bartlett insisted that its inclusion in the State of the Union address was "not at the specific request of anyone" and said that one of the speechwriters had come up with the information after reviewing the Oct. 2 intelligence estimate.

The new information amounted to an on-the-record mea culpa for a White House that had pointed fingers at the CIA for vetting the speech, prompting an earlier acceptance of responsibility by Tenet. But that abruptly changed yesterday after the CIA furnished evidence that it had fought the inclusion of the charge.

The disclosures punctured claims made by Rice and others in the past two weeks. Rice and other officials had asserted that nobody in the White House knew of CIA objections, and that the CIA supported the Africa accusation generally, making only technical objections about location and quantity. On Friday, a White House official mischaracterized the CIA's objections, saying repeatedly that Tenet opposed the inclusion in Bush's Oct. 7 speech "because it was single source, not because it was flawed."

Shortly after Friday's briefing, Bartlett and Hadley said yesterday, Gerson discovered the first of two CIA memos to the White House from last October. The CIA memo, dated Oct. 5 and addressed to Gerson, Hadley and others, objected to a sentence that the White House included in a draft of Bush's upcoming speech, saying Hussein's "regime has been caught attempting to purchase" uranium in Africa. The officials did not release the memo but said the uranium information was on Page 3 of a four-page document.

Hadley said the CIA -- the memo was not signed -- noted that the amount was in dispute and that it was not clear the material "can be acquired from the source." The CIA also pointed out that Iraq already had its own supply, 500 tons, of the "yellowcake" uranium ore it was accused of seeking.

The second memo, dated Oct. 6 and sent to Hadley and Rice, was brought to the White House's attention yesterday by the CIA, the officials said. In response to another draft of the speech that had already deleted the uranium reference, the memo included fresh CIA objections to the charge, saying there was "weakness in the evidence" and that the attempted purchase "was not particularly significant," Hadley said.

The new information disclosed by the White House provides additional material for Democrats who have been criticizing Bush's handling of Iraq intelligence. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a former intelligence committee chairman and now a presidential candidate, said the admission "raises sharp new questions as to who at the White House engaged in a coverup." Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who has been pressing the administration on the matter for months, said, "Congress needs to investigate this with immediate public hearings."

But strategists in both political parties said the lifespan of the criticism, and the possibility of congressional hearings in the fall, largely depends on whether the occupation of Iraq continues to be as violent and chaotic as it has been. Yesterday's disclosures by the White House came at a time of otherwise good news related to Iraq, as the U.S. military confirmed that it had killed Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, and Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, a rescued prisoner of war, returned to her home town in West Virginia after four months of hospitalization.

Bartlett said he was "almost positive" Bush saw a draft of the October speech containing the Africa claim. "He has no memory of this subtraction being made," Bartlett said.

Bartlett said that while the president is "obviously not pleased," he "accepts the explanation" offered by his aides and has "the highest level of confidence" in his staff. Hadley and Tenet have taken some responsibility for the Africa charge being included in Bush's January speech.

"The president had every reason to believe that the text of the State of the Union was sound," Hadley said.

Hadley, who told Bush of the forgotten memos, declined to say whether he had offered the president his resignation, and Bartlett said he does not expect any resignations.

But Hadley said the issue is not necessarily resolved. "There is always the likelihood we will find additional information," he said. - Article

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posted by Thomas Ball 4:10 AM

 
Cheney's Intelligence Role Scrutinized

President Bush has drawn most of the critics' fire, but Vice President Dick Cheney's promotion of now-tarnished U.S. intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction also is under scrutiny as details emerge about his role in making the case for war.
The White House has conceded that it was a mistake for Bush to cite with such surety a controversial allegation that Iraq sought to buy uranium ore in Africa. And newly declassified documents released Friday show that Bush overlooked dissenting views by intelligence experts at the State Department and the Department of Energy about the immediacy of the danger posed by Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Cheney had access to those dissents but was just as sure and certain as the president in selling the war in public, especially when describing Iraq's nuclear program. In one nationally televised interview, on the eve of war, Cheney announced that Iraq had in fact "reconstituted" nuclear weapons His office says that was a mistake as well.

A look at the record shows that Cheney, as an advocate of war with Iraq, played a significant public and backstage role as intelligence was gathered and reports generated that he and other administration officials used to persuade the public that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction was grievous and imminent. That fear has not been borne out as allied soldiers continue to search the conquered nation for such destructive weaponry.

Cheney's influence on intelligence gathering clearly was felt early in 2002, when the CIA instituted a fact-finding mission after an inquiry from the vice president. Cheney asked agency officials then about now-discredited reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger, his staff says. The agency decided "on its own initiative" to dispatch an envoy to Africa, says CIA Director George Tenet, but the envoy, Joseph C. Wilson, says he was told by CIA officials that they did so to respond to Cheney's inquiry.

Cheney, in an unusual move, visited the CIA in the summer of 2002 to quiz agency analysts and review the agency's work on Iraq.

And it was Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, kicked off the campaign for military intervention, advancing the doctrine that the U.S. has the duty to employ its power against possible foes in pre-emptive wars.

Cheney's actions look "like a concerted effort to shape the intelligence and whip the troops in line," says Joseph Cirincione, a defense analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Congressional Democrats are concerned enough about Cheney's role that several are calling for a probe of possible undue influence.

The vice president's advisers scorn the notion, advanced by some of Cheney's foes, that he wields inordinate behind-the-scenes power from his West Wing office.

"He is an American realist. And a hard-liner," says Mary Matalin, an adviser and former aide. But Cheney, she said, "doesn't freelance. He is not going to go out and do something inconsistent with the president's thinking. He doesn't give contracts at the Department of Defense, and he doesn't dispatch the CIA to go do stuff. The suggestion that he is pulling all these levers, well, that is just not part of his job description."

For those who know him, Cheney's involvement in crafting the case for war comes as no surprise. Friend or foe, they see the former Wyoming congressman - the son of a bureaucrat in the Soil Conservation Service who was born in Nebraska and grew up in Casper - as a brilliant political player whose influence has not been diluted by the heart troubles that have marred his term.

"With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I've ever met," says John Perry Barlow, a social commentator from Wyoming who supported Cheney's early campaigns for Congress. "If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you on a devastatingly brief tour of all the weak points in your argument."

Like the president he serves, Cheney is willing to take risks for a cause, to persevere through the inevitable storms of governing and to spend political capital. And, like Bush, the vice president is also a realist with an underestimated political touch.

But it is as a leading player in the war on terror that Cheney is drawing fresh attention.

The vice president is an ally of a loose affiliation of White House and Pentagon officials known as neoconservatives, in Washington's shorthand, "neocons." Their brand of conservative idealism calls for a bold use of military power, not merely to secure the American homeland but to seize this moment of U.S. dominance and remake the world according to American values, starting in the Middle East.

In 1997, Cheney was among those who signed the Project for the New American Century's "statement of principles." The neoconservative think tank's document called on the U.S. "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values ... promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles."

Other high-ranking Bush administration officials who signed the manifesto include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby; and Elliott Abrams, who serves on the White House National Security Council, supervising Middle East affairs. They are joined in the top ranks of the administration by neocon theorist Richard Perle, who sits on the Defense Policy Board; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who supervises Iraq's reconstruction and set up the Pentagon's special intelligence unit to review the CIA's work after the Sept. 11 attacks; and others.

In early 2002, Cheney was concerned about intelligence, particularly a report about Iraq seeking uranium ore - known as yellowcake - from Niger. Wilson, a former American ambassador, was sent to Niger by the CIA, met with officials there and cast doubt on the story upon his return. Wilson says the U.S. ambassador to Niger had similar doubts that were reported to the State Department.

A declassified CIA National Intelligence Estimate from earlier this year, released by the White House late last week, contains a warning from the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research that the Niger story was "highly dubious." Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to use it when he made the case for intervention in Iraq before the United Nations in February.

"Knowing how the system works," it is inconceivable that Cheney's office was not briefed by the CIA about his findings, said Wilson, a career diplomat who served under Republican and Democratic administrations. "If you are senior enough to ask the question, then you are senior enough to merit a specific response."

But Jennifer Millerwise, a spokeswoman for Cheney, says the vice president did not know of Wilson's trip or of his findings.

A senior White House official said Friday that Bush never saw the "highly dubious" verdict because it was contained in a footnote that the president failed to read. The president "is not a fact checker," the official said. Yet a reference to the State Department's doubts about the immediacy of the danger posed by Iraq's nuclear program was included in the very first paragraph of the "Key Judgments" that formed the heart of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate.

Iraq purchased yellowcake from Niger years ago, and one of Wilson's sources did speak of being approached in a mysterious way by an Iraqi seeking an economic transaction that the CIA thought might be about uranium.

The CIA ultimately labeled Wilson's report as "inconclusive." It warned British intelligence not to use the Niger incident when Prime Minister Tony Blair's government issued a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in September 2002. The British went ahead, and CIA officials told Congress that "we differed with the British dossier on the reliability of the uranium reporting," Tenet says.

According to administration officials, the CIA also persuaded the White House to remove a reference to the Niger report from a presidential speech on Iraq in October.

Cheney, meanwhile, kicked off the Bush administration's campaign against Iraq with the Aug. 26 speech before the VFW.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. ... This nation will not live at the mercy of terrorists or terror regimes."

Throughout the fall and winter, Cheney pressed the case against Iraq. His campaign culminated in a March 16 appearance on "Meet the Press," in which he stated that the U.S. government believed that Hussein "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Cheney's office says he misspoke and that he meant to say that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons programs. "The vice president was answering a question about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program, and it was clear from the context of his statement that he was referring to the nuclear weapons program," said Millerwise.

The gathering and analysis of intelligence is supposed to be an exercise of objectivity, removed from partisan, hierarchal or ideological pressure. Presidents and vice presidents rarely visit the CIA, and if they do, it's to make speeches or preside at public ceremonies. Cheney made working visits in the summer of 2002 that were "unprecedented," says Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst who believes the vice president was pressuring the agency.

"In my 27 years there, never once did a vice president come to visit on a working basis," says McGovern, a member of a small organization of former intelligence officials who have called on Cheney to resign.

Cheney declined to answer a series of questions sent to him via his office. But Matalin responded, saying that there is no truth to the assertion that the vice president was trying to pressure the CIA to reach a certain conclusion.

The CIA's semiannual reports on the spread of weapons of mass destruction "underwent a dramatic transformation" in the months leading up to the Iraq invasion, notes Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "After reporting essentially the same data for many years" the CIA reports suddenly took on a "new alarmist tone" about Iraqi capabilities in 2002.

"Was it just the psychological impact of the Sept. 11 attacks that made previous Iraqi activity now seem more ominous? Did Vice President Cheney's visits to the CIA influence analysts to change their views?" asks Cirincione. "Did the CIA adopt a new methodology in 2002 that skewed their results? Did Vice President Cheney's adviser "Scooter" Libby advise the analysts as to their conclusions and style?"

As intelligence information moved from classified documents to public consumption via published reports or official speeches, many of the caveats - and qualifiers such as "probably" and "maybe" that give texture to intelligence - were omitted.

A public version of the CIA National Intelligence Estimate released in October 2002, for example, contained several arguable conclusions. It declared that "all intelligence experts agree" that Iraq was buying aluminum tubing for use in enriching uranium, and that Iraq had "begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents."

In fact, experts from the Departments of Energy and State disagreed about the tubing, while the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that it had "no reliable information" on whether Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical agents.

The CIA report also revived the yellowcake allegation, saying Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium, including "up to 500 tons of yellowcake" from Niger. The allegation was repeated in a State Department fact sheet in December, and Bush's aides then included a reference to Iraq's attempts to get uranium in Africa in his State of the Union address.

Though Bush accurately attributed the report to British intelligence in his speech, the CIA and the White House have since acknowledged that the intelligence about African uranium did not rise to the level of a presidential address. A few weeks after the State of the Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the CIA concluded that documents on which the Niger report was based were forgeries.

"Going down the list of administration deficiencies, or distortions, one has to talk about, first and foremost, the nuclear threat being hyped," says Greg Thielmann, who retired last September as the director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department's intelligence bureau. "The Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq."

Democrats in Congress are now pressing for a public investigation of how intelligence was used and whether the CIA adjusted its analyses in response to pressure from Cheney, the Pentagon or the White House.

"It is profoundly important that the president, the vice president and other senior administration officials accurately portray intelligence information," says Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "President Bush is leading us in a new doctrine of preemptive warfare. ... There is unanimity that preemptive warfare's essential ingredient is accurate intelligence. It can't be founded on theory or suspicion - it needs fact."

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., was more pointed in focusing attention on Cheney. On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Graham said:

"As to the role of the White House in increasing the sense of the imminence of an attack ... the figure that is interesting to me is the vice president. The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on several occasions. He asked specifically for additional information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States sent an experienced ambassador, who came back after a full review with a report that these were fabricated documents.

"You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice president didn't communicate that report to the president or national security advisers to the president." - Article

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posted by Thomas Ball 4:06 AM

 
BBC says it has a tape of Dr Kelly criticising Number 10

The BBC says it has a tape recording of David Kelly voicing serious concerns over the role of Downing Street in the disputed Iraq dossier.

The corporation is planning to submit the tape as evidence during the inquiry into the death of the weapons expert. Susan Watts, the science editor of Newsnight, recorded her conversations with Dr Kelly, parts of which were later broadcast anonymously as a "source", using the voice of an actor.

The report, which was broadcast on 2 June, suggested Downing Street had been "desperate" to find information to justify its stance on a war against Iraq. Referring to the claim Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, the source said: "It was a statement that was made and it just got out of all proportion, They were desperate for information, they were pushing hard for information which could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it's unfortunate that it was.

"That's why there's an argument between intelligence services and the Cabinet Office and Number 10, because they picked up on it and ... you can't pull it back."

The BBC will submit the tape to the inquiry led by Lord Hutton. The corporation is also expected to argue Ms Watts and Andrew Gilligan, the Today reporter, checked their quotes with Dr Kelly before broadcast.

Last night, a BBC spokesman commented: "We do have a tape but it's only a small part of our evidence for the inquiry. We don't want to go into too much detail of our evidence before the inquiry starts." - Article

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posted by Thomas Ball 4:04 AM

 
Across the Board, U.S. Endures a Meltdown

We have experienced a meltdown.

The budget deficit is projected to be a record $455 billion this year and higher next, the White House says. The national debt is to grow by $1.9 trillion over the next five years.

White House spokesmen call this fiscal calamity "manageable." The Concord Coalition, an independent budget watchdog group that people listened to before the meltdown, says the record of this Congress over the past six months is "the most fiscally irresponsible in recent memory."

There are more Americans jobless than at any time in the past 20 years.

The American military is committed indefinitely to fill the role of imperial protector of Afghanistan and Iraq. Attacks on U.S. troops occur daily. The cost of these occupations is about $5 billion a month. That wasn't counted when the official count of the "manageable" deficit was made.

Friends turn down our requests for reinforcements in Iraq. They want some international imprimatur - that of the United Nations, for example - to commit. But we do not want the UN involved because we do not like its nettlesome habit of seeking consensus among many nations, its failure to do as we say without question.

The other day the president declared, inexplicably, that we invaded Iraq in part because we gave Saddam Hussein a chance to "allow the weapons inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." In fact, the UN inspectors were in Iraq during the months before the war. The White House put out the word they were incompetent dupes because they couldn't locate weapons of mass destruction. So what does that make us?

The state of homeland security is poor.

"America remains dangerously unprepared for another catastrophic terrorist attack," a bipartisan, independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations just concluded. The task force was headed by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.). Rudman, along with former Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), sat on another commission that had warned early on that an attack like the one of Sept. 11, 2001, might occur.

Rudman and other graybeards, the types Washington listened to before the meltdown, now warn that we've not even bought gas masks and good radios for the firefighters and cops. Cost is a problem for the states and localities that have been forced into the poorhouse by the bad economy and have laid off teachers and jail guards and closed libraries and firehouses.

"The incremental costs of responding to the additional national security threat posed by terrorism are appropriately a federal responsibility," the Rudman report said.

The feds are, mostly, shirking it.

A separate panel says we are unprepared for a bioterrorism attack because government medical and scientific experts are over-stretched and underpaid. "The federal employees responsible for our defense against bioterrorist tracks constitute a civilian 'thin blue line' that is retreating both in terms of capacity and expertise," warns the Partnership for Public Service.

Any one of these - the uncontrolled deficits, the moribund economy, the incompetent Iraq occupation, the failure to properly address homeland - used to be defined as a crisis. Crises used to inspire action.

Perhaps a strong speech by a president, calling on Congress to join him in fixing what is obviously broken. But George W. Bush has never conceded that anything on his watch has gone badly, or even failed to go as planned.

In years past, there might have been congressional hearings to build public and political support for action. Those aren't coming, either.

All the usual safeguards have failed - the definition of a meltdown.

The president is disinclined to admit error and apparently incapable of accepting responsibility. The Congress is controlled by the president's political party, and driven to protect him. The opposition party has no power whatever and no microphone sufficiently large from which to speak.

And so the meltdown has occurred and its fallout, raining down across the country, is ignored. Some other president and Congress, it seems, will have to dig out from this nuclear winter. - Article

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posted by Thomas Ball 4:02 AM