Bush knew Niger claim was False, page 1

posted on Apr, 9 2006 @ 02:31 PM

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According to papers filed by Mr. Fitzgerld in the C.I.A./Valerie Plame leak case Bush knew well before, it was leaked, and later used in his State of the Union address that the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger was false, but used it anyway to boost his case for war.

www.nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, April 8 — President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came while it was already being discredited other officials in the administration.

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the June and July of 2003 show that what I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.

Mr. Libby said he drew on the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the report in part because of reliability issues.

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

What gets me about all of this is the fact that it was all out there beforehand, I know because I read articles in our paper (not exactly the Times) that the uranium claim was false and/or Cheney was pressuring the CIA about intelligence...and so on...trouble was the media wasn't doing its job and instead gave him a free ride to war. If half the stuff that was out there prior to and just after the war was started had been followed up on...there would have been no 2nd term for this man. When will his rabid supporters get it? We were knowingly buffaloed into a war of choice on trumped up charges.

Related News Links:
www.truthout.org

[edit on 9-4-2006 by UM_Gazz]

[edit on 14-4-2006 by asala]

Astronomer68

posted on Apr, 9 2006 @ 08:24 PM

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I voted yes to this article even though the headline is given as a statement of fact when it is in fact conjecture--perhaps accurate conjecture, but conjecture none-the-less. Even though Powell said the claims had essentially been discounted and were no longer the official line, the next several reports continued to reflect the same assessments. Reading the report on this whole mess (the congressional investigations about the intelligence failures) I got the impression the clerical/administrative arms of the DIA, CIA, et-al were incompetent.

koji_K

posted on Apr, 9 2006 @ 08:32 PM

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In fairness to the CIA, the head of the Middle East section during the years 2000-2005 has recently come out with an article (in the March/April Foreign Affairs) in which he complains that the CIA's warnings were not taken seriously by the administration regarding the unsuitability of the Niger "evidence."

He states:

In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy that prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected pieces of raw intelligence to use in its public case for war, leaving the intelligence community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable. The best-known example was the assertion by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore in Africa. U.S. intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly. But the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it as information from British sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching for the intelligence.

Source article here.

[edit on 9-4-2006 by koji_K]