This post will take us admittedly deep into the weeds of the Iraq-Niger saga. But if you can handle the detail, let's proceed.
As we've noted several times recently, both the Senate intel committee report and the recent "Butler Report" in the UK managed to leave out key details that would undermine the storyline they were trying to present. On critical points both have, shall we say, used the truth sparingly.
Here's a brief example.
The Butler Report -- on pages 121-25 -- describes the British intel judgment that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. The key points in the Butler Report's rendition of events is that the judgment was based on multiple reports and that neither was the sheaf of forged documents that bamboozled the US.
As the Butler Report puts it ...
We have been told that it was not until early 2003 that the British Government became aware that the US (and other states) had received from a journalistic source a number of documents alleged to cover the Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger. Those documents were passed to the IAEA, which in its update report to the United Nations Security Council in March 2003 determined that the papers were forgeries ... The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
In other words, whatever the deal was with those forgeries, it doesn't affect our judgment because we didn't have the forgeries.
This is what can only be called an artful rendering of the truth.
No, they didn't have the forged documents. But one of their two reports -- indeed, the more important of the two -- was a written summary of the documents provided by Italy -- the same summary the Italians had earlier provided to the Americans, which the CIA used to brief Joe Wilson before they sent him off to Niger. The second report came to them apparently only a week or so before they issued their public document with the claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa.
This point is pretty widely understood by people following or reporting on this story. But what's interesting to note is the difference between the Butler Report's rendition of events and that of a UK parliamentary committee report produced in September 2003 and chaired by Ann Taylor, an MP who would later serve as a member of the Butler committee.
Here's how the parliamentary committee described the Brits' two sources of evidence on pages 27 and 28 (emphasis added)...
89. The Committee questioned the Chief of the SIS about the reporting behind these statements. We were told that it came from two independent sources, one of which was based on documentary evidence. One had reported in June 2002 and the other in September that the Iraqis had expressed interest in purchasing, as it had done before, uranium from Niger. GCHQ also had some sigint concerning a visit by an Iraqi official to Niger.90. The SIS’s two sources reported that Iraq had expressed an interest in buying uranium from Niger, but the sources were uncertain whether contracts had been signed or if uranium had actually been shipped to Iraq. In order to protect the intelligence sources and to be factually correct, the phrase “Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa” was used. At the time of producing the dossier, nothing had challenged the accuracy of the SIS reports.
91. In February 2003 the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) received from a third party (not the UK) documents that the party had acquired in the autumn of 2002 and which purported to be evidence of Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. In March 2003 the IAEA identified some of the documents it had received as forgeries and called into question the authenticity of the others.
92. The third party then released its documents to the SIS. The SIS then contacted its source to check the authenticity of its documentary evidence. The SIS told us that its source was still conducting further investigations into this matter.
93. The SIS stated that the documents did not affect its judgement of its second source and consequently the SIS continues to believe that the Iraqis were attempting to negotiate the purchase of uranium from Niger. We have questioned the SIS about the basis of its judgement and conclude that it is reasonable.
That penultimate sentence is key. By saying the documents didn't affect the judgment on the second source, we can fairly infer that they did affect the judgment of the first -- namely, because the documents (or rather a summary of them) were the first source.
As I say, there's a lot of jargon and bureaucratic gobbledygook here. But the key point is that the authors of the earlier report felt free to be candid about what the Butler Report chose to keep hidden -- namely, that most of the British judgment about 'uranium from Africa' was based on the phony documents the Butler Report claims had nothing to do with their judgment.
--Josh Marshall
More information on the thoroughness of the Senate intel committee report ...
This new article by Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel tells the story of one of the defectors who provided key information on those mobile biological weapons labs that turned out not to exist.
Maj. Mohammad Harith was brought to the Defense Department by James Woolsey in February 2002.
According to the article, Woolsey originally denied that he had played a role in bringing Harith to DOD. After Knight Ridder obtained access to a classified DOD report describing Woolsey's role, he declined further comment.
"By using his Pentagon contacts," write Landay and Strobel, "Woolsey provided a direct pipeline to the government for Harith's information that bypassed the CIA, which for years had been highly distrustful of the exile group that produced Harith."
The article goes on to say that, according to Francis Brooke -- Chalabi's key hand in Washington -- "intermediaries such as Woolsey and former Pentagon official Richard Perle, another leading war advocate, contacted the Bush administration multiple times on the INC's behalf."
Given the role of various Washington neoconservatives in providing conduits for Chalabi's defectors or pushing (what turned out to be) bad information into the system, the facts here aren't really that surprising. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with close administraiton advisors using their access to bypass normal channels, though it is inevitably problematic, as the article makes clear. What's worth noting, however, is that none of this appeared anywhere in the Senate report.
This whole subject area runs against the general thrust of the report, which is that the CIA sold the White House a bill of goods. And either by coincidence or design -- you pick -- the whole matter gets no airing in the report.
Then there's this passage ...
After several meetings, a DIA debriefer concluded that some of Harith's information "seemed accurate, but much of it appeared embellished" and he apparently "had been coached on what information to provide."Those findings weren't included in the initial DIA report on Harith, which noted that he'd passed a lie detector test, the Senate committee said.
However, further intelligence assessments in April, May and July 2002 questioned his credibility - including a "fabricator notice" issued by the DIA. Nevertheless, Harith's claim was included in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and cited by Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union message.
There's no indication in the Senate Intelligence Committee report why Bush and other top administration officials used Harith's information after it was found by intelligence professionals to be bogus.
There will be more of this.
--Josh Marshall
Don't miss Joe Wilson's letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reprinted here in Salon. And more on Wilson, the SSCI report, and Sen. Roberts this weekend on TPM.
If you don't have a subscription to Salon, you can find it here (scroll down).
--Josh Marshall
A blog called BlueGrassRoots has a post up saying that the Louisville Kentucky Republican party (specifically, the Jefferson County Republican Party) is handing out signs that read "Kerry is bin Laden's Man/Bush is My Man."
I put in a call to the head of the Jefferson County Republicans, Jack Richardon IV and asked him if this were true.
Richardson told me that he'd seen a bumper sticker with that phrase on it and agreed with it heartily. "I believe that if you look at John Kerry's voting record in the senate," he told me, "why wouldn't bin Laden prefer Kerry over Bush?"
When I pressed Richardson on whether or not his party organization was distributing it, he acknowledged that they probably were handing it out on their campaign literature tables at recent events. And if it was being handed out, "I make no apologies for it."
"I think it's funny how the truth not only can be amusing but also make a point," Richardson went on. "Why wouldn't Kerry be bin Laden's man? Bush certainly isn't bin Laden's man."
Toward the end of our conversation Richardson told me I should also be writing about equally anti-Bush signs and bumper stickers he'd seen and other "slanderous things" being said about the president. I told him that made a lot of sense and asked whether he could tell me about similarly aggressive campaign material being distributed by Democrats in his area.
No luck.
"Quite frankly, I don't care what they put out," Richardson said. "They run their business and I'll run ours."
--Josh Marshall
A bit of house-keeping. A couple days ago I noted how Oklahoma Senate candidate Tom Coburn had told an interviewer that he supported the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. A number of readers wrote in to ask if I could provide a link for the article in question. For some reason the piece doesn't appear on any news website -- couldn't find it with a google search at least. But if you have access to the Nexis database you can find it there. It ran first on July 9th out of Oklahoma City with a byline by Ron Jenkins.
Late Update: Alas, TPM readers have better google skills than I do. The story can be found here.
--Josh Marshall
Sen. Roberts: War a mistake, fault of <$NoAd$>CIA.
That's how I interpret this paragraph from today's article in the New York Times.
But in an hourlong interview on Wednesday morning in his office, Mr. Roberts said he was "not too sure" that the administration would have invaded if it had known how flimsy the intelligence was on Iraq and illicit weapons. Instead, the senator said, Mr. Bush might well have advocated efforts to maintain sanctions against Iraq and to continue to try to unearth the truth through the work of United Nations inspectors. "I don't think the president would have said that military action is justified right now," Mr. Roberts said. If the administration had been given "accurate intelligence," he said, Mr. Bush "might have said, 'Saddam's a bad guy, and we've got to continue with the no-fly zones and with inspections.' "
If you interpret it otherwise, let me know how.
--Josh Marshall
Perhaps later we'll be bringing you news on sudden icing reported building up on the gates of hell. But I found -- credit where credit is due -- very illuminating and well-taken this piece by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post ("Perception Gap in Iraq").
I don't agree with all the points. But the dynamic he examines is a real one, and a dangerous one.
--Josh Marshall
Robert Novak today has a column crowing about the Senate intel committee report with respect to Joe Wilson and the Niger matter. Nonetheless, he still manages to misstate its findings.
At the head of Novak's column he says that committee Democrats "did not dissent from the committee's findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger."
Dissenting from this finding would admittedly have been a challenge since this is not in fact what the Report said.
As this article by Doyle McManus in today's Los Angeles Times notes, "the committee found that the CIA's statement, in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, was reasonable' at the time. The committee added, however, that the evidence behind the assertion turned out to be weak, and charged that the CIA failed to make that clear to policymakers."
The truth is that we simply don't know whether the Iraqis ever 'sought' uranium in Niger or Africa in the years leading up to the war, though all the evidence we thought we had for such a claim has turned out to be baseless. (There remains the Brits' evidence which they stand by yet won't disclose, and we'll address that later.) And part of the uncertainty is based on the capaciousness of the term. 'Sought' can mean a lot of things -- everything from purchases and active negotiations to vague feelers which might have been intended to lay the groundwork for later attempted purchases.
One bit of evidence that weighs heavily against such claims that Iraq was hunting about looking for a uranium seller in the years just before the war is the simple fact that Iraq seems -- after a rather intense investigation -- not to have had any active nuclear program, thus rather diminishing the need to go around trying to buy uranium, with all the risks that would involve.
Even that doesn't entirely settle the question, though.
As a very knowledgable intelligence source pointed out to me recently, one of the things the Iraq Survey Group found was that from time to time Saddam would call aside this or that scientist or general and ask something to the effect of, 'If we had to, how long would it take us to restart this or that WMD program?'
(Beneath this there is an even further debate and question as to whether Saddam himself knew the extent of the decrepitude of his own army or just how shuttered his WMD programs were.)
My source's recollection was that the particular instances of this that the Survey Group found related to chemical weapons. But it's not inconceivable that Saddam might at some point have asked a similar question on the nuclear front. And that could explain why Iraq -- which had no active nuclear program -- might nevertheless have put out feelers about the possibilities of uranium purchases.
In any case, this is all theoretical or rather hypothetical -- speculation in the absence of any evidence. One point worth noting is that the Senate Report said the Niger uranium judgment was 'reasonable' as of September 2002 -- the time of the authorship of the NIE.
That was just before the forged documents came into possession of the United States. However, the main evidence that the US had at the time -- that which presumably made the judgment 'reasonable' -- was pair of reports the US had gotten from the Italian intelligence service, SISMI. And as later became clear, those reports were based on the forged documents. In other words, the evidence that made the claim 'reasonable' later turned out to be bogus.
One other point that deserves mention: quite a bit has been made about the portion of the SSCI Report that says that Wilson's wife recommended him for the assignment. As a matter of substance, who recommended Wilson is irrelevant. Yet, Wilson's credibility would be undermined if he said X were true, when in fact he knew Y was the case. The LAT article notes that Plame's bosses at the CIA continue to insist that the idea to send Wilson was not hers, but rather theirs. The Times quotes a 'senior intelligence official' saying that "Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going…. They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes."
What the truth of it is, I don't know. But the larger hullabaloo over this secondary point is simply intended to distract attention from the administration's persistent attempt to use weak and ultimately discredited information to muscle the country into war on a timetable which had precious little to do with preventing any sort of standing threat to the United States.
--Josh Marshall
If at first you don't succeed ...
From a new article in The Hill: "Realizing that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage faces little chance of passing soon, if ever, House Republicans yesterday discussed alternative approaches, including stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over the issue, passing a federal law to define marriage and using the appropriations process to ban gay marriage in Washington ..."
--Josh Marshall
So back to our topic at hand.
The newly-released Butler Report -- a rough analogue in the UK to the Senate intel report out last week -- not only exonerates Tony Blair's government for the claims included in the Iraqi weapons 'dossier' but -- in an act of supererogation that gives new meaning to the Anglo-British 'special relationship -- also exonerates President Bush for using his famous 'sixteen words' in the 2003 State of the Union speech, calling his claim "well-founded."
So let's see where this leaves us.
From the start of the Niger uranium controversy, or rather since the IAEA dismissed the purported agreement documents as forgeries, the British have stood by their claim that the Iraqis were trying to purchase uranium in Africa and, specifically, that their conclusion was based on sources separate from the discredited documents.
And, indeed, the Butler Report repeats precisely this claim: that the UK had "credible" evidence that the Iraqis were trying to purchase uranium in Africa, specifically from Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. (The relevant discussions in the Report are on pages 121-125)
The report states that, like many other countries, the Brits became aware of an Iraqi diplomat's visit to Niger in 1999 and concluded that this was likely aimed at discussing uranium sales. This judgment was made on the basis of a) Iraq's earlier purchases of uranium from Niger (circa late 70s and early 80s), b) their presumed resumption of a nuclear weapons program, and c) the fact the Niger exports little of value beside uranium.
This is a standard part of the story, widely known.
The reference to the additional evidence on Niger comes on page 122, paragraph 495 ...
During 2002, the UK received further intelligence from additional sources which identified the purpose of the visit to Niger as having been to negotiate the purchase of uranium ore, though there was disagreement as to whether a sale had been agreed and uranium shipped.
The Report also says this with respect to the Democratic Republic of Congo ...
There was further and separate intelligence that in 1999 the Iraqi regime had also made inquiries about the purchase of uranium ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this case, there was some evidence that by 2002 an agreement for a sale had been reached.
The problem is that the Report doesn't give any details about what those reports were, thus giving very little way to assess their credibility. And that leaves us pretty much where we've been for a year, with the Brits claiming they had other evidence not connected to the documents but unwilling to describe what the evidence was.
If this subject interests you, I'd strongly suggest that you read the whole passage yourself. It's quite brief, no more than a couple minutes to read.
More on this to follow.
--Josh Marshall
Alack ... Karl Rove must be off his game.
As this site notes, the lawyer representing President Bush in the Plame case, James E. Sharp, is also defending Ken Lay in the Enron Götterdämmerung case.
Admittedly, it probably doesn't presage a joint defense. But the optics leave a bit to be desired, no?
--Josh Marshall
Couldn't happen to a nicer caucus ...
From the AP: "A split among Senate Republicans over different versions of an amendment to ban same-sex marriage is preventing a vote on an election-year issue pushed by President Bush and religious conservatives."
--Josh Marshall
Now, that's pretty pro-life.
Tom Coburn, a former member of the House of Representatives from Oklahoma, who is campaigning to become the Republican party's candidate to replace retiring Senator Don Nickles, recently said he supports the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions.
"I favor the death penalty," Coburn told the AP last week, "for abortionists and other people who take life."
The Republican primary is July 27th; the winner will face likely Democratic nominee Brad Carson.
--Josh Marshall
A cautiously optimistic take on the new Iraqi interim government that is well worth reading.
--Josh Marshall
A Republican lobbyist friend just sent me a link to today's Best of the Web column at the Wall Street Journal's opinionjournal.com. There James Taranto goes on a long and detailed series of responses and criticisms of things I've written over the last few days about the Plame controversy.
First (or rather last in Taranto's piece) is the answer to the question I asked yesterday. That was, if the decision to reveal Plame's identity creates no political or legal problems for the leakers, why don't they come forward?
The answer, Taranto says, is that doing so would expose them to further vilification from sites like TPM.
I think that explanation speaks for itself.
Then there's the matter of legal jeopardy for the leakers. Taranto seems to believe that it is legally significant whether the White House officials revealed Plame's identity to damage her personally or to damage Wilson's credibility by alleging she played a role in sending him on the trip -- thus making her collateral damage.
Taranto's point is that the White House was just trying to damage Wilson politically, albeit with what Taranto believes is a valid criticism. They didn't have any particular desire to expose Plame's identity. It was just that it was necessary to expose her identity in order to attack Wilson's credibility.
This, as we noted earlier, is the imagined 'need to attack the credibility of political opponents' exception to the law in question, which pretty clearly doesn't exist. The Wall Street Journal must have some in-house attorneys that Taranto could discuss this with.
It may be that these two valiant worthies could only serve the cause of the higher truth by breaking the law, a sort of oddly insider form of civil disobedience. But they were still breaking the law.
What would be a defense is if the leakers, for whatever reason, did not know Plame was covert. But, as we noted late last year, a careful analysis of both the language Novak used to describe Plame and that which he's used in past columns to describe other covert CIA employees makes it pretty clear that Novak knew quite well what her status was. And the only reason he knew is because they knew and they told him.
Taranto even still argues about whether Plame was even covert. But this is the silliest of arguments for the following reason. Plame's status is the predicate of the whole case. If she's not a person covered by the law then there's nothing even to investigate.
Yet an investigation into the matter has been going on for almost a year; and the quasi-independent Fitzgerald investigation has been underway for more than six months.
If Plame wasn't covert, the CIA never could have made its referral to Justice. If they did, that would have been the most obvious of reasons for Justice to decline to investigate. And surely Fitzgerald wouldn't have spent these months dragging members of the White House staff before a grand jury without satisfying himself that the first and essential legal predicate of the entire case (Plame's status as covert) was valid -- a factual matter that could have been nailed down in rather less than a day.
My apologies to regular readers for all the back and forth. But occasionally it's necessary.
--Josh Marshall
For the last several days, proponents of the Holy Grail of Niger-Iraqi uranium have been pressing a series of articles which have appeared in the Financial Times that they says confirms the uranium story by reference to alleged evidence in the hands of the British.
That evidence, as detailed by the FT, involved smugglers mining uranium from abandoned mines, ones which would lack the industrial equipment required to turn the rock into yellowcake -- a key point that makes non-proliferation experts discount the signficance of the whole story. That's a point we'll return to.
However, for the moment, look at this section, the last two paragraphs at the end of today's follow-up in the FT.
The UK government has stood by its claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium, and its assertion is expected to be supported by an official inquiry headed by Lord Butler whose report is published tomorrow. The UK has made clear that its claim was not based on the evidence provided in the fake documents, and that it had other evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.The Senate report adds weight to these claims by detailing the extent to which French intelligence information supported that being gathered by other intelligence agencies. The French information was given particular weight because French companies control Niger's uranium output.
In other words, the British claim that there was other evidence beside the documents is given further weight by the fact that French intelligence also had suspicions about a Niger-Iraq deal. And France's suspicions were uniquely relevant since French consortia actually control the mines.
This is at best a very sloppy reading of the report.
Here's why.
Page 59 of the report states that on November 22nd 2002 French officials told their American counterparts that they had "information on an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger." They went on to say that they were confident that the transaction did not in fact occur -- a confidence presumably based on their own physical custody of the uranium.
However, in the context of the WMD debate, Iraqi intent was and is quite important, even if attempts to acquire the yellowcake failed. So the French suspicions were important -- particularly because of their role running the mines.
However, the FT ignores what appears in the report ten pages later. There on page 69 the report says ..."March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the [IAEA]."
In other words, the French suspicions, at least as detailed in the report, add no weight to the claims that there was other evidence beside the documents since the French suspicions, by their own account, were based on the documents.
--Josh Marshall
The president's story, from the speech yesterday at Oak Ridge: "In 2002, the United Nations Security Council yet again demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. As he had for over a decade, Saddam Hussein refused to comply. In fact, according to former weapons inspector David Kay, Iraq's weapons programs were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman, or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time."
In a story yesterday, the AP described this passage thus: "But Saddam refused to open his country to inspections, Bush said. 'So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.'"
Clearly, that's not precisely what he said. The president said Saddam "refused to comply" not that he "refused to open his country to inspections", though I don't think there's any doubt that the latter was the impression he meant to convey.
Dealing with the president's doubletalk is a challenging business.
Of course on other occasions, the wordplay has been less cagey ...
President Bush: "Saddam Hussein said, I'm not going to expose my weapons, I'm not going to get rid of my -- I'm not going to allow inspectors in, he said." February 26th, 2004.
President Bush: "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power..." July 14th, 2003.
--Josh Marshall
Ahmed's Willing Bamboozlers ... the whole sordid tale from the Columbia Journalism Review: "How Chalabi Played the Press."
--Josh Marshall
There's been a rush of egregious commentary about the Niger uranium story in the last couple days. And one point we hear again and again is that if Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, played a role in recommending him for the trip to Niger, as the SSCI report clearly states, then this wholly changes the legal and political implications of the administration officials' decision to reveal her identity in the press.
As I pointed out a couple days ago, legally it is clearly irrelevant. Political impact is of course both subjective and unpredictable. So, though we might all venture opinions, there's very little way to know.
But, really, why argue?
If there's no legal case and no political problem, why don't the senior administration officials who leaked her identity just come forward?
If their rationale is a good one and they face no legal jeopardy, what's the problem?
It seems like a great opportunity to clear the air, settle the story, ascertain the facts and let the chips fall where they may.
Doing so will save much of the money being spent on the investigation Mr. Fitzgerald is running. They can save themselves a lot of attorneys' fees. And they can have a free opportunity to explain the rationale behind their decision and why they believed it was the right thing to do in the context.
I can only assume by their silence that they're rather less confident about the quality of their explanation and the degree of their legal jeopardy than their many voluble defenders in the conservative press.
--Josh Marshall
This is actually quite helpful, a version of the Senate intel report that is searchable by keyword.
--Josh Marshall
There certainly is an unseemly eagerness on the part of the White House to canvass ideas (embodied in legislation) for a possible delay of the November election in the event of a terrorist attack, as this and other articles explain. The rationale is that we need to have some policy in place for a possible election postponement before some precipitating event actually occurs. But my understanding is that we already have a policy in place on postponements: i.e., we don't do them.
Added to my suspicion is the increasingly common refrain from the White House that the Madrid bombing was responsible for Spanish 'appeasement' in Iraq and the obvious subtext that the answer to any future terrorist attack would be to 'not give in', i.e. reelect President Bush.
--Josh Marshall
