Re: NYTimes.com Article: Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin,

How many of us relish the gratifications of cheap energy to
continue our vapid planet consuming materialistic lifestyles
as we dwell in our simplistic religious illusions?
-T

At 7:20 PM -0400 07/08/2003, tganesh@stlawu.edu wrote:
> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by tganesh@stlawu.edu.
>
> Sanger uncovers more of the lies and deception - but to what avail?
> What effects will these revelations have?  Are they adequate to
> count in the coming elections?  For whom?  Such useless questions...
>
> tganesh@stlawu.edu
>
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>
> Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says
>
> July 8, 2003
>  By DAVID E. SANGER
>
>
>
>
>
>
> WASHINGTON, July 7 - The White House acknowledged for the
> first time today that President Bush was relying on
> incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American
> intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the
> Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase
> uranium from Africa.
>
> The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the
> key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides
> had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an
> attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was
> "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims
> added urgency to the White House case that military action
> to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could
> not await further inspections of the country or additional
> resolutions at the United Nations.
>
> The acknowledgment came after a day of questions - and
> sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials
> - about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New
> York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former
> ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year
> to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He
> reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent,
> a warning that White House officials say never reached
> them.
>
> "There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to
> obtain uranium from Africa," the statement said. "However,
> the information is not detailed or specific enough for us
> to be certain that attempts were in fact made."
>
> In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't
> prove it, and it might in fact be wrong."
>
> Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an
> unidentifed senior administration official as declaring
> that "knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's
> attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been
> included in the State of the Union speech." Some
> administration officials have expressed similar sentiments
> in interviews in the past two weeks.
>
> Asked about the statement early today, before President
> Bush departed for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer,
> the White House spokesman, said, "There is zero, nada,
> nothing new here." He said that "we've long acknowledged"
> that information on the attempted purchases from Niger
> "did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect."
>
> But in public, administration officials have defended the
> president's statement in the State of Union address that
> "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
> recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
> Africa."
>
> While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving
> the account the credibility of coming from a non-American
> intelligence service, Britain itself relied in part on
> information provided by the C.I.A., American and British
> officials have said.
>
> But today a report from a parliamentary committee that
> conducted an investigation into the British assertions also
> questioned the credibility of what the government of Prime
> Minister Tony Blair had published.
>
> The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair's government
> had asserted it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to
> procure uranium. But eight months later the government
> still had not told Parliament what that other information
> was.
>
> While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was
> apparently primarily based on American intelligence - a
> classified "National Intelligence Estimate" published in
> October of last year that also identified two other
> countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had sought the
> material, in addition to Niger.
>
> But many analysts did not believe those reports at the
> time, and were shocked to hear the president make such a
> flat, declarative statement.
>
> Asked about the accuracy of the president's statement this
> morning, Mr. Fleischer said, "We see nothing that would
> dissuade us from the president's broader statement." But
> when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later
> today.
>
> Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House
> officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that
> made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's
> statement.
>
> How Mr. Bush's statement made it into last January's State
> of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in
> drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or
> whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence
> estimate.
>
> That document contained a footnote - in a separate section
> of the report, on another subject - noting that State
> Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr.
> Hussein had sought uranium.
>
> If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed
> statements by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that
> Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and
> could build one in a year or less if he obtained enough
> nuclear material.
>
> In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the
> International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium
> reports about Niger, noting that they were based on forged
> documents.
>
> In an interview late last month, a senior administration
> official said that the news of the fraud was not brought to
> the attention of the White House until after Mr. Bush had
> spoken.
>
> But even then, White House officials made no effort to
> correct the president's remarks. Indeed, as recently as a
> few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush had quite
> deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he
> had spoken more generally about efforts to obtain
> "yellowcake," the substance from which uranium is
> extracted, from African nations.
>
> Tonight's statement, though, calls even those reports into
> question. In interviews in recent days, a number of
> administration officials have conceded that Mr. Bush never
> should have made the claims, given the weakness of the
> case. One senior official said that the uranium purchases
> were "only one small part" of a broader effort to
> reconstitute the nuclear program, and that Mr. Bush
> probably should have dwelled on others.
>
> White House officials would not say, however, how the
> statement was approved. They have suggested that the
> Central Intelligence Agency approved the wording, though
> the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had reviewed
> it. Other key members of the administration said the
> information was discounted early on, and that by the time
> the president delivered the State of the Union address,
> there were widespread questions about the quality of the
> intelligence.
>
> "We only found that out later," said one official involved
> in the speech.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/international/worldspecial/08PREX.html?ex=1058706420&ei=1&en=a9fe7da1b927dfde
>
>
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