NYTimes.com Article: A Shifting Spotlight on Uranium Sales

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Sanger reviews the evidence on WMD used by the US to invade Iraq.

tganesh@stlawu.edu

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A Shifting Spotlight on Uranium Sales

July 15, 2003
 By DAVID E. SANGER 




 

WASHINGTON, July 14 - The White House defense of President
Bush's State of the Union speech comes down to this: The
president was technically accurate when he cited a British
report alleging Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in
Africa, but he never should have said it. 

The evidence "did not meet the standards we use for the
president," said Condoleezza Rice, the national security
adviser and the minder of Mr. Bush's pronouncements. That
is putting it politely. American intelligence agencies
questioned the accuracy of the British report, and even
doubted their own evidence. 

Now Ms. Rice and her colleagues are pointing the finger at
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who
never read the draft of the State of the Union speech that
the White House sent him and, by his own admission, never
asked that it be withdrawn. 

It is a curious defense, one that acknowledges that the
president cited dubious intelligence and admits that the
vetting process failed, while arguing that history may yet
prove him right. It plays to the central argument that Mr.
Bush and his aides have used in trying to quiet a growing
political storm: that Mr. Hussein posed an urgent threat,
no matter what was going on in the uranium mines of Niger. 

But if the White House's changing - and sometimes
contradictory - time line of events leading up to the
speech is to be believed, Ms. Rice's aides knew as early as
October that some underlying evidence was suspect. The
C.I.A., according to that time line, changed its assessment
of the reliability of that evidence three times in four
months - enough to make clear that there was reason to
doubt the quality of the evidence. 

That has led to questions that Mr. Bush and his aides have
still not answered. Why did Mr. Bush's aides keep coming
back to the Africa case as "an emblematic example" of Mr.
Hussein's surreptitious activities, as one administration
official terms it, if so many in the intelligence world
were questioning it? 

Further, how did it survive so many drafts of the State of
the Union speech in January, only to be thrown out, days
later, by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who found the
evidence so thin that he dared not take it to the United
Nations for his own presentation? 

By the time Mr. Powell made it to the C.I.A. to prepare his
own case against Iraq - three nights after the State of the
Union address - the intelligence agencies were "not
carrying it as a credible item," he said in an interview.
How it met Mr. Bush's standards and not Mr. Powell's is one
of the mysteries the White House has not addressed. 

The answer, some in the intelligence world say, is that the
evidence did not change - but the political environment
around it did. 

When the first reports of Mr. Hussein's reported interest
in Niger flowed in, apparently from a foreign intelligence
service, they caught the eye of aides to Vice President
Dick Cheney, perhaps the most hawkish corner of a hawkish
administration, but also one with long experience in Iraq.
They knew that Mr. Hussein had obtained uranium ore -
called yellowcake - in the African country two decades ago.
It seemed reasonable he might go back for more. The request
for further investigation went back to the C.I.A. 

The report came back that Niger denied it had sold
anything. But Ari Fleischer, who spent his last day as
White House press secretary defending the administration's
decision-making, noted today that it included an account of
Iraqi businessmen who met with Niger officials seeking to
"expand business contacts." As one official on White House
national security staff said the other day, "Their contacts
in Niger didn't think that meant they wanted to open a
McDonald's. They interpreted it to mean they wanted more
uranium." 

But there was no proof, and an eager speechwriter included
the specifics in a speech Mr. Bush was scheduled to give in
Cincinnati on Oct. 7 that Iraq had sought 550 metric tons
of yellowcake. Mr. Tenet called Stephen J. Hadley, the
deputy national security adviser, to have the dubious
statement deleted. It was. 

It is what happened next that has investigators searching
for evidence that intelligence was manipulated for
political purposes. Three weeks after the speech, the
evidence that Mr. Tenet removed showed up in the classified
"National Intelligence Estimate," which was sent to
Congress. So was the statement that Iraq was looking for
uranium in Somalia and Congo. There was a vague footnote
explaining that the State Department had doubts. It turns
out that so did many in the C.I.A., who say the charge
never should have been in the formal intelligence estimate,
a document reflecting the views of many intelligence
agencies. 

Its appearance in print cleared the way for repetition of
the tale. And someone - the White House won't say who - put
the reference into early drafts of the State of the Union
address. 

Mr. Fleischer insisted that the new reference "was
different" from the one removed in Cincinnati - it was a
general claim that Mr. Hussein had "sought" uranium in
Africa, not that he had obtained any. But clearly someone
in the White House wanted more details to come out of the
president's mouth. A mid-level N.S.C. official called the
C.I.A. for more details. 

After all, specifics would add dramatic effect and
underscore the urgency to act. Chemical and biological
weapons are hard to deliver and harder to understand, but
the world knows the mushroom cloud, the image Ms. Rice used
in describing what the next Sept. 11 attack could look like
if Mr. Hussein gave nuclear weapons to terrorists. 

According to the accounts provided by the White House, the
C.I.A. official, Alan Foley, pushed back, saying the
specifics could not be verified. That is when the White
House reached for the unclassified British report, and
attributed the statement to Prime Minister Tony Blair's
intelligence services. "It would have been better not to
include it," Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense,
said on television on Sunday, when asked why his boss was
citing foreign intelligence reports instead of his own. 

That seemed to state the safely obvious. But was the report
cited to manipulate the evidence? 

"A lot of bull," Mr. Fleischer said about that accusation
today, with the candor of a man about to go to the private
sector. Inside the C.I.A. and the State Department, though,
many are still asking how a White House aware of the doubts
could have shown such caution in October, and thrown it to
the winds in January. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/international/worldspecial/15ASSE.html?ex=1059391418&ei=1&en=194c55703b8b7d6c


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