Cheney says he never got Wilson's report. This is hard to believe. Read the following chronology:
January-February, 2002 - The Niger uranium story becomes a matter of contention within the CIA; By early 2002, the intelligence—still unverified—had begun to play a role in the Administration’s warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, “Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.”
A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, “With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.” (New Yorker)
By early 2002 U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbra Owens-Kirkpatrick was asked about Iraq-Niger uranium trade. She informs Washington that there is no basis to suspect any link.
Then Cheney's office decides to investigate the forged letters' substance. Former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph C. Wilson (a man of exceptionally distinguished diplomatic career), was (in his words) "invited out to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject. Wilson agrees to investigate the content of the documents, which he had not seen. He leaves for Niger in February 2002 and in early March returns and delivers an oral report to the CIA indicating that there is no evidence of any sales of uranium by Niger to Iraq.
February 24, 2002 – A four-star U.S. general, Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., deputy commander of the U-S European Command (the headquarters responsible for military relations with most of sub-Saharan Africa), visits Niger at the request of the U.S. ambassador. He meets with Niger's president on February 24 and emphasizes to him the importance of tight controls over Niger’s uranium ore deposits. Fulford afterwards confirms the Ambassador’s earlier findings, as he later tells the Washington Post, that there is no evidence of the sale of yellowcake to Iraq, and that Niger’s uranium supply is “secure.” The General’s report duly goes up through the chain of his command to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon and on to Rice at the NSC, Powell at State, the CIA, the Energy Department and other interested agencies. (The Source) According to MSNBC, Fulford also visited the country two months later. Fulford later tells the Washington Post that he had come away from his visit convinced that Niger's uranium stocks were secure. (CounterPunch)
March, 2002 – A U.S. State Department report on the dubiousness of the Iraq-uranium allegations is sent to Cheney in March 2002.
October 4, 2002 – The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is written and released at the request of Senators Bob Graham and Dick Durbin.
“Even so, that is not the most important point. What all should know is that the Bush administration’s decision for war against Iraq came well before the intelligence estimate. There is ample evidence that that decision was made, at the latest, by spring 2002.
"That there was no NIE before that speaks volumes. During my 27 years of service as a CIA analyst, never was a foreign policy decision of that magnitude made without first commissioning a National Intelligence Estimate. Why did Tenet not take the initiative and see that one was done? Surely, if he did not know that decisions on war and peace were being made at the White House and Pentagon in early 2002, he was the only one in Washington so unaware.
Previously, there was no NIE because Tenet realized that an honest one would show how little the intelligence community knew about the threat from Iraq and would hardly support a case for war. And so, consummate bureaucrat that he is, he kept his head down for as long as he could.” Tom Paine - Ray McGovern Article
According to a July, 2003 article in the Financial Times, in a footnote in the Estimate, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department's in-house intelligence analysis unit, stated that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium. (Financial Times)
The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons."
The INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium.
<
http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/pdf/Iraq/declass>
The National Intelligence Estimate noted that, if Iraq was left unchecked (which it had never been), it could "have a nuclear weapon during this decade." Further, if Iraq could acquire weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, "it could make a nuclear weapon within a year." Iraq was capable of "quickly producing and weaponizing" a variety of agents, including anthrax, "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives." Discrepancies in Iraq's accounting of its Scud missiles "suggested" that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "retained a covert force of up to a few dozen Scud missiles with a range of 650 to 900 kilometers." It also stated that the probability of an unprovoked attack by Iraq on the US was low.
The National Intelligence Estimate contained the report from SISME, based on the forged documents, that Iraq was trying to buy 500 tons of pure yellowcake uranium from Niger.
October 7, 2002 – In a speech in Cincinnati Bush states:
"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, Sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
Bush also stated: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (The full text of Bush’s speech can be found in Carnegie Report: First Strike Guidelines: the case of Iraq -- Project on Defense Alternatives)
In the speech in Cincinnati, Bush noted that "Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction" and then warned that "Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these
for missions targeting the United States."
(Presumably Bush was here referring to the Czech L-29 jet training aircraft, 169 of which Iraq bought in the 1960s and 1980s. The L-29 is a single-engine, dual-seat airplane meant to be a basic flight trainer for novices, the Soviet bloc's version of America's Cessna. It has a range of about 840 miles and a top speed of around 145 miles per hour. There is some evidence that even before the Gulf war Iraq had experimented with converting these aircraft into unmanned aerial vehicles-but they may have been merely crop-dusters. In any case, Bush did not explain how these slow-moving aircraft might reach Maine, the nearest point on the U.S. mainland, some 5,500 miles from Iraq, or why they would not be shot down the moment they crossed Iraq's borders.) (ZNet | Iraq | Iraq Wars)
In his October 7, 2002 speech, President Bush adds: "Some al-Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq."
(Since the "solid evidence" has never been released, one must assume that Rumsfeld and Bush are referring to about 150 members of a group called Ansar al Islam ("Supporters of Islam") who took refuge in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. The problem is that America's would-be Kurdish allies, not Saddam, controlled this area. There is no evidence of links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, a point often made by the CIA, and such cooperation would be implausible given Osama's religious commitments and Saddam's ruthlessly secular regime, whose only object of worship was Saddam himself.)
The CIA vetted Bush’s speech in advance and Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley was warned not to include a reference to the alleged Niger uranium purchase.
October 22, 2002 - In October 2002, in a notable front-page article titled "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable" (10/22/02), Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank noted two dubious Bush claims about Iraq: his citing of a United Nations International Atomic Energy report alleging that Iraq was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon; and that Iraq maintained a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used, in Bush's words, "for missions targeting the United States." While these assertions "were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought," Milbank concluded they "were dubious, if not wrong.” Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States" and "there was no such report by the IAEA." (FAIR)
December 7, 2002 - Iraq submits a 12,000-page declaration on its chemical, biological and nuclear activities, claiming it has no banned weapons.
December 26, 2002 - U.N. Finds No Banned Weapons (BBC News)
"Iraq says that after a month of 'intrusive, extensive and sometimes aggressive' inspections, the United Nations has found no evidence that Baghdad has weapons of mass destruction."
January 7, 2003 - No Nuclear Weapons Program Found in Iraq (CNN) "The U.N. agency searching for evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq said Monday that so far it has not found evidence of one."
January 11, 2003 - Atomic Agency Challenges Bush's Key Claim Against Iraq (International Herald Tribune) "The key piece of evidence that President George W. Bush has cited as proof that Saddam Hussein has sought to revive his program to make nuclear weapons has been challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency."
"Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, offered a sharply different assessment in a report to the UN Security Council. ElBaradei said Iraqi officials had claimed that they sought the tubes to make 81-mm rockets. ElBaradei indicated that he thought the Iraqi claim was credible."
January 28, 2003 - President Bush delivers the State of the Union address, stating, among other things: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.... Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide." Bush adds that the US is prepared to attack Iraq even without a UN mandate. (White House)
Bush also states: "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
Since as early as October, 2002 the CIA had warned the Administration not to use the Niger uranium purchase claim in public. CIA Director Tenet personally persuaded deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley to omit it from President Bush's October 7 speech in Cincinnati. But on the eve of Bush's State of the Union address, Robert Joseph, an assistant to the president in charge of nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC), initially asked the CIA if the allegation that Iraq sought to purchase 500 pounds of uranium from Niger could be included in the presidential speech. A CIA official said he told Joseph that the agency objected. Joseph then asked if it would be all right to cite a British intelligence report that the Iraqis were trying to buy uranium from several African countries. The CIA official acquiesced. Accordingly, Bush stated: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Washington Post)
February 5, 2003 - Colin Powell presents the Bush Administrations case for military action against Iraq to the UN Security Council. He attempts to prove that Iraq is evading the weapons inspectors, continues to produce WMDs, and is linked to al-Qaeda. (White House)
Powell cites the British dossier of February 3 as a "fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities." (Guardian) "Powell embellishes an intercepted conversation about weapons inspections between Iraqi officials to make it sound more incriminating, changing an order to "inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas" to a command to "clean out" those areas. He also added the phrase "make sure there is nothing there," a phrase that appears nowhere in the State Department's official translation. (FAIR; CommonDreams)
Powell says: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
He also presents pictures of supposed mobile chemical/biological laboratories (which were later determined to be used by Iraq to produce gas for balloons). The source of this misinformation was an Iraqi defector named “Curve Ball”:
“Curve Ball” was an Iraqi defector who told his foreign country intelligence handlers that Saddam had mobile biological weapons factories mounted on trucks and he and other defectors persuaded U.S. intelligence that these trucks existed, but Curve Ball’s report turned out to be fabricated. And one Pentagon expert, who had seen Curve Ball and had doubts about him, wrote a CIA colleague in an e-mail the day before Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. He expressed alarm that Secretary Powell's speech would use unverifiable information from a dubious source. And he got this answer back from the CIA officials, and it's quoted in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, quote, "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he is talking about."
The level to which Libby and Cheney stooped to get their war was highlighted by the momentous presentation of Saddam’s ‘‘threat’’ before the United Nations Security Council by then Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell gave a presentation six weeks before the war where he said, ‘‘every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions.’’ Those assertions resulted in grudging acceptance of the war from many Democrats.
Powell, according to both US News and Vanity Fair, was so irritated by Libby’s hodgepodge of unsubstantiated facts that he threw documents into the air and said, ‘‘I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.’’
Libby, whose nickname is “Scooter”, was particularly unhappy that Powell had thrown out sections of the presentation that would have attempted to link Al-Qaeda to Saddam, including a discredited report that top 9/11 Al-Qaeda airline hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. According to Vanity Fair, ‘‘Cheney’s office made one last ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam and Al-Qaeda and to slip the Prague story back into the speech. Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried unsuccessfully to reach Wilkerson by phone. Powell’s staff chief, by then inside the Security Council chamber, declined to take the call. ‘Scooter,’ said one State Department aide, ‘wasn’t happy.’’’
According to Vanity Fair, Cheney himself urged Powell to go ahead and stake his national popularity on the nonexistent evidence by saying to Powell, ‘‘Your poll numbers are in the 70s. You can afford to lose a few points.’’(Link to Cheney deepens ‘leak-gate’ scandal - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News
February 24, 2003 – Newsweek reports that in a transcript of testimony supplied to the U.S. Government by Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s deceased son-in-law, all of Iraq’s WMDs were destroyed in 1991. (FAIR Press Release: Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed
Newsweek's John Barry-- who covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.
Kamel told the inspectors "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote. All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."
On Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-- an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"-- was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed that Tony Blair's "intelligence dossier" was plagiarized from a student thesis. This transcript can be seen at
<http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf>
In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."
March 7, 2003 - On March 7th, Mohamed El-Baradei, 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. (New Yorker)
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on March 7, 2003, just days before the invasion of Iraq, released their analysis of the documents. It only took the IAEA officials a matter of hours to determine that the documents were a fake. They used a simple Google search, and discovered laughable mistakes such as incorrect names of Niger officials. The IAEA then reported their findings to the United Nations Security Council.
March 16, 2003 - Dick Cheney states on Meet the Press: "We know he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization. . . . We know that based on intelligence that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El-Baradei frankly is wrong." (Mount Holyoke transcript)
March 16, 2003 – Vice President Cheney says, on being asked about the duration of the Iraq War, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators... I think it will go relatively quickly... in weeks rather than months."
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