Those Sixteen Words
The revelation of the warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored intelligence information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq. On January 12, 2003, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) "expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries," the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.
Those sixteen words are coming back to haunt Mr Bush yet again.
It nows transpires that sixteen days before Bush claimed that the US had learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa, that the State Department had told the CIA that the intelligence backing this claim was based on forgeries.
It now also turns out that Mohamed ElBeradei requested a look at the evidence so that the IAEA might look into it in December 2002. He also sent a letter to the White House and to the National Security Council saying that the administration should not cite this as evidence that Iraq was actively attempting to obtain WMD as he believed the documents were forgeries.
Beradei recieved no response to his letter despite making several follow ups.
So here we have the state department and Mohamed ElBeradei both giving the same warnings, indeed; we have ElBeradei continually trying to have a look at the evidence and the White House continually ignoring him.
The White House's defence has always been that they were never informed of any doubts regarding the Niger evidence. There are many, who consider this simply unbelievable.
I refuse to believe that the findings of a four-star general and an envoy the CIA sent to Niger to personally investigate the accuracy of the intelligence, as well as our own research at the State Department, never got into the hands of President Bush or Vice President Cheney.Of course, the startling thing about this memo is that, for the first time, it has the State Department - rather than simply Joe Wilson - casting doubts on to the veracity of the claims.
I don't buy it," said a high-ranking State Department official. "Saying that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was all it took, as far as I'm concerned, to convince the House to support the war. The American people too. I believe removing Saddam Hussein was right and just. But the intelligence that was used to state the case wasn't."
That's Bush's own administration saying "this duck won't fly". And yet, he went right on and made the claim.
I suppose there will be some, and it can truly only be the most avid Bushite, who still believe that the evidence was not cherrypicked.
To the rest of us it is plain that this war was based on lies; and that the lying liars knew they lying at the time they lied.
Click here to download a PDF of the memo.
Click title for TruthOut article.
No comments:
Post a Comment