Seymour Hersch: WHO LIED TO WHOM? (3/31/03 article)

[huckleberry]

This article by Seymour Hersch appeared in the March 31, 2003 issue of the New Yorker. I'm confused! If Mr. Hersch knew and wrote about this back then, why is everyone so surprised now? We all knew that this whole Niger thing was bogus. Anyway, here are some snips.


"Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability...

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium...

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium” from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.” The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, “african gangs offer route to uranium.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq...

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information...

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said."

more at
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

[teryang]

1. Deception is what this regime is all about

<Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”>

If you take the trouble to examine in detail our relations with any foreign policy question, you find * junta deceptions and misrepresentations. The only difference is that here they are caught irrefutably red handed.

For example, if N.Korea collapses from within, the deceptive, cruel and belligerent policies of this administration will never be widely examined. Junta misconduct will be regarded as statesmanship. If war occurs, no matter what the outcome, the prelude will be critically reviewed at some future point and the * junta's record will be found to be as replete with duplicity, dishonesty and wrongdoing as that described here.

[realFedUp]

2. More scrutiny into this lie because of Joseph Wilson

All of us have seen the lies over these past two and a half years
but the media doesn't seem to take them seriously until someone
with real credibility challenges the lie with the truth.
I hope for our sake we see others willing to come forward.