NYTimes 7/12/03.... excerpts
C.I.A. Chief Takes Blame in Assertion on Iraqi Uranium
By DAVID E. SANGER and JAMES RISEN
...Other senior administration officials had been more cautious about the information. In a recent interview, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that by the time he got to a meeting that Mr. Tenet attended at the C.I.A. three nights after the president's Jan. 28 speech, Mr. Powell's staff had already dismissed any thought of using the Africa claim to bolster the case the secretary was to make a few days later at the United Nations.
The intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell said, were "at that point not carrying it as a credible item."
In a briefing with reporters on Thursday night in South Africa, Mr. Powell suggested that he had looked into the assertion more closely and decided it was not based on sufficiently reliable information to repeat to the United Nations.
"When I made my presentation to the United Nations and we really went through every single thing we knew about all of the various issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction, we did not believe that it was appropriate to use that example anymore," he said. "It was not standing the test of time. And so I didn't use it, and we haven't used it since."
Yesterday, Ms. Rice said Mr. Powell's decision had not been driven by any new information but by longstanding concerns in the State Department's own intelligence branch about whether the data was reliable.
The State Department's intelligence unit, Ms. Rice said, "was the one that within the overall intelligence assessment had objected to that sentence."
In the classified version of a National Intelligence Estimate prepared by intelligence agencies last fall, the allegation about Iraq's activities in the African nation of Niger was included along with a footnote that said the State Department had its doubts about whether it was justified by the evidence. Somalia and Congo were also cited in the estimate....
...In recent days, the C.I.A.'s spokesman said Mr. Tenet had never personally approved Mr. Bush's use of the African uranium example in the speech. But Dan Bartlett, one of Mr. Bush's closest aides, who drafted parts of the address, said in an interview that the wording had been "cleared at the highest levels of the C.I.A." which would seem to mean Mr. Tenet or his deputy, John McLaughlin.
Inside the National Security Council, some senior staff members gave a slightly different account, saying the paper trail suggests the claim about Africa may have been approved at the agency's midlevels, by a senior expert on nuclear proliferation and arms control....
...But Mr. Tenet was clearly an official under fire yesterday. Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the select committee on intelligence, said he was "disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the C.I.A."
He added that he was most worried about "a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president." He accused Mr. Tenet of failing to warn Mr. Bush about any doubts in the agency.
The Senate, by voice vote on Thursday night, called for an investigation into what led to Mr. Bush's statement.
There are still major questions about whether there was a failure to communicate the doubts of some intelligence analysts to the White House or whether, as some senior intelligence officials maintain, in the prelude to the war, the White House stripped much of the nuance and balance from intelligence reports to make the threat from Mr. Hussein seem more urgent and the need for action more immediate.
There is evidence that there was concern in the C.I.A. about the credibility of the uranium information and that those doubts reached at least some White House officials months before the State of the Union address. Administration officials involved in drafting another speech Mr. Bush gave about Iraq, in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, said that at the C.I.A.'s behest, they had removed any mention of the central piece of intelligence about African uranium ?- a report about an effort by Iraq to obtain "yellowcake," which contains uranium ore, in Niger. No one has fully explained how, given that early October warning to the White House, a version of the same charge resurfaced in the early drafts of the State of the Union address just three months later, and stayed there, draft after draft....
...To Mr. Bush's critics, both in Congress and in the intelligence sector, the case of the African uranium is just one example of what happened to the evidence about Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism as it moved from individual scraps of intelligence, to the murky world of classified assessments, to the boiled-down language of executive summaries, to the crisp, declarative language of a president who knew, in the words of one of his top aides, that he "needed to rally the country for war."
Caveats and cautions often fell away, senior government officials and intelligence analysts in Washington and London said in recent interviews. Even when cautionary language survived, it was often drowned out in the echo chamber of talk shows and the shorthand of newspaper headlines.
Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director at the C.I.A. and the leader of a team of retired officials who have reviewed the prewar intelligence about Iraq, said that "certainly there is a difference between the intelligence and the public statements" of some government officials. "Intelligence is always written in a way that is not particularly useful in directly supporting policy," he said. "Everybody drops qualifiers when you want to make a point and make it sing a little bit. I would be surprised if they didn't."
"These are different kinds of products," Mr. Kerr continued. "Policy statements are meant to have a fairly clear and dramatic impact. They don't convey the subtle distinctions that an intelligence analyst would make. They don't convey the cautionary note that an analyst would provide."
Greg Thielmann, a proliferation expert who worked for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, added this week: "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: `We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.' When you sense this kind of attitude, you quash the spirit of intellectual inquiry and integrity."...
...When the first rumors of a purchase effort in Niger surfaced, at the beginning of 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney's office asked the C.I.A. to assess the information. Apparently without the knowledge of Mr. Cheney or Mr. Tenet, the agency sent a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, to investigate. He reported back that the government of Niger had denied the report, and that other indications were that it was bogus.
Before the speech, the crucial conversations between the C.I.A and White House over whether to include the African reference in the State of the Union address were held between Robert G. Joseph, a nuclear proliferation expert at the National Security Council, and Alan Foley, a proliferation expert at the C.I.A., according to government officials.
There is still a dispute over what exactly was said in their conversations. Mr. Foley was said to recall that before the speech, Mr. Joseph called him to ask about putting into the speech a reference to reports that Iraq was trying to buy hundreds of tons of yellowcake from Niger. Mr. Foley replied that the C.I.A. was not sure that the information was right.
Mr. Joseph then came back to Mr. Foley and pointed out that the British had already included the information in a report. Mr. Foley said yes, but noted that the C.I.A. had told the British that they were not sure that the information was correct. Mr. Joseph then asked whether it was accurate that the British reported the information. Mr. Foley said yes.
Other government officials said, however, that Mr. Joseph did not recall Mr. Foley's raising any concerns about the reliability of the information. If he had, they said, Mr. Joseph would have made sure that the reference was not included in the speech.
The White House would not say what the C.I.A. officers had been asked, or whether the issue had been raised with Mr. Tenet, who sees the president daily and speaks often with Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser.
The White House said it was stunned to learn, after the speech, that the Niger evidence was based on false documents, and that the sources for evidence that Iraq sought the yellowcake elsewhere in Africa were far short of reliable. "What the president says has to be bulletproof," a senior American official said. "This clearly wasn't."
I'll be interested to see the reaction to that piece, Blatham. I like Tom Oliphant and he made excellent points, but it didn't sway me towards Kerry who seems to be stuck in another time. What Oliphant pointed to as presidential struck me as inert, lacking in imagination as well as the sense that our role in the world should be greater in giving and smaller in taking (to say the very least!)
blatham, Thanks for the link on that interview with Kerry. I place Senator Diane Feinstein in the same league as Kerry; I trust her judgement explicitly, because she has shown ethics and humanity in her decisions. c.i.
Incompetence At It's Worst!
How to turn a huge success into total disaster!
Edited from today's New York Times:
"The budget was in surplus by $127 billion in fiscal year 2001, the last budget prepared by the Clinton administration and the fourth consecutive year with a surplus. In April 2001, shortly after taking office, the Bush administration forecast a surplus of $334 billion in 2003.
Since then, the economy has faltered, taxes have been cut, and government spending has risen, mostly for the military and domestic security in the aftermath of Sept. 11. As a result, the deficit picture has worsened by $789 billion, from a surplus of $334 billion to a deficit of $455 billion, in just two years.
The White House today projected a $455 billion budget deficit in the current fiscal year, by far the government's largest deficit ever and $150 billion higher than what the administration predicted just five months ago."
Not just a real financial debacle - because it ignores all the lives lost achieving it.
Is there a Democrat (or anyone else) who could be such a disaster?
Tartarin
Yes, I really like Oliphant, bright and with a good bullshit-detector. Kerry is lacking in charisma and does come across as stilted and conservative - too establishment for my taste and I doubt he could win it for dems. But I think him a smart, caring, and conscientious civil servant. And don't that just stand at an extreme contrast to Bush.
Count on me to forget something in a timely manner, Blatham, but the other day, probably on NPR, I heard Kerry make a statement which, in tone and language, I agreed with completely. When I get my mind back (I've been busy), I may even remember what it was. Or not. As the case may be...
Since, to many voters image is everything and reality is unimportant, probably the name Kerry (Irish origin?) has greater electoral appeal than Oliphant, which could be subject to constant jokes from day one.
And I think it a given that anyone who wears bow ties would not be considered manly enough for the post.
That's probably true about bow ties. Bow ties belong in the House.
Senator Paul Simon always wore a bow tie, and ran for President, but i think the lack on name recognition was a problem. I was once walking up "old highway 51" in southern Illinois, going to the market, and he and his wife stopped and gave me a ride. We chatted a bit, and he asked if i were a Democrat. I told him i considered myself an independent, but that my grandparents who had raised me were Democrats. He asked my grandfather's name, and when i told him, he replied: "Oh, i remember him, he was a Democratic precinct committeman and a justice of the peace, wasn't he?" This was in 1986, and my grandfather had died 25 years earlier, and it had been thirty years since he had been in politics. You can imagine how impressed i was, given that he remembered a small cog in the party machine, from more than a generation ago, and hundreds and hundreds of miles from his constituency. That man was an old-fashioned FDR Democrat, and was a very canny politician.
I loved to hear him talk. And, a true gentleman. Where have they gone?
(07-17) 06:02 PDT SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --
President Bush's approval rating among Californians has dropped to its lowest level since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and more residents feel the nation is heading in the wrong direction, according to a poll being released Thursday.
The nonpartisan Field Poll found that only 49 percent of those sampled approved of the job Bush is doing, compared with a high of 74 percent in the weeks after the attacks on the East Coast. He was viewed unfavorably by 41 percent; 10 percent had no opinion.
Asked which direction the United States was heading, 48 percent said it was going in the wrong direction while 42 percent said it was on the right track.
For the first time since Bush took office, a majority of those polled, 52 percent, disapproved of how Bush is handling the economy compared with 43 percent who support his economic policies.
I have no doubt that the presidents ratings are falling dramatically in such areas as the Northeast and California. I wonder however if they have changed much in areas such as the solid south, west and south west and areas where his staunchest support came from. A fall in those areas would be significant.
au, Good question; the south has always been a republican strong-hold. c.i.
BillW wrote:I loved to hear him talk. And, a true gentleman. Where have they gone?
both you and Setanta are right on: Simon was so interesting; I'm not surprised about his memory at all ... so sad ... reminds me of "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" ...
Dys, yes I saw that article as well. Don't remember if I posted on A2K or just another of my sites: but, anyway, "as goes California, so eventually goes the nation"...this gives me hope as we have time before the actual election to work with this, don't you think?
There is no hope for the south, it is still mired in pre-war delusionalism (that war by the way is Civil War).
the South is strange, Dys. While it's true - one can find areas where people just can't get their heads out of their billy-bob asses, the South has also been and continues to be the jumping off place for some of the most dramatic social change.
snood, Isn't one a precursor for the other? Your point is well taken!
