The truth is oozing out like a slime trail

I guess the next question has to be what distraction will be created to draw the public's attention away from the lies mess.

Since I don't have TV news and views, I wonder what mainstream news channels have been saying about all this?

BBB, Tartarin and all,
I thank you for your posts here. I've been at the same time thinking of what can empower citizens and information access keeps coming to the top of my priority list. Some of you may have heard there was a GIA (Government Information Awareness) project launched from MIT on the 4th of July to build links to sources of information about the various players of these deadly games. Here is the link to the GIA site:

http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
GIA

I don't believe there were discussions on forums that were about the Dept. of Homeland Security program called TIA - Total Information Awareness. Is anyone here familiar with where that stands?

TIA is allegedly fading out. But it may be that it is simply fading from view. Yes, there have been two threads (so far!) about the MIT program -- which wonderful and makes almost too much sense to be true! But it is true and one can participate, though I think they're still in beta.

Okay -- the CIA is beginning to square off against the White House on the 16 words flap. Good!



White House Releases Documents on Iraq Flap

By Ken Fireman and Knut Royce
Washington Bureau

July 19, 2003

Washington -- Seeking to blunt charges that it used flawed intelligence to buttress its case for war in Iraq, the White House Friday released an account of how a now-discredited assertion found its way into President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech that differed sharply from one given by the CIA.

It also released portions of a classified 2002 CIA "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraqi weapons programs that concluded Saddam Hussein was trying to revive his nuclear weapons program -- but included a sharp dissent from the State Department.

In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official also ruled out any testimony by White House staffers at hearings being held by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The panel is attempting to determine how Bush came to assert in January that Iraq was seeking enriched uranium in Africa even though the CIA had raised serious questions about the claim months earlier and had gotten it deleted from a Bush speech in October. The White House acknowledged last week that the assertion should not have been included in the January address; documents purporting to detail an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium in the West African country of Niger were exposed in March as forgeries.

The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, offered the most detailed account yet of how the African uranium claim made it into the January speech. The official contradicted Democratic charges that the White House had pressed to include the claim over CIA opposition and denied that the speech was rewritten to meet CIA complaints that an earlier draft was inaccurate.

The official said Bush speechwriters looking for concrete examples of Hussein's illicit weapons programs had latched onto the uranium claim because it was contained in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, as well as a public British document.

The official said the speechwriters initially had drafted a series of accusations about Iraqi weapons programs, including the African uranium charge, in the form of flat assertions. They later decided for stylistic reasons to attribute each accusation to a specific source; in the case of the uranium charge, they decided to attribute it to the British document because it was a public document, the official said. At no point did the draft ever include a reference to a specific African country, according to the official.

The proposed change was passed by Robert Joseph, an official with the White House National Security Council, to a CIA proliferations expert, Alan Foley, for review, the administration official said. Foley approved the change without any "protracted negotiation" or "a sharing of various language," said the official, who said his statement was based on Joseph's recollection of the conversation.

But Foley offered a sharply different account when he testified at a closed-door session of the Senate panel on Wednesday, according to a senior intelligence official familiar with the testimony.

Foley's recollection is that an early draft of the speech contained a reference to Niger and a specific amount of uranium that Iraq was supposedly seeking there, according to the intelligence official.

Foley expressed disquiet over that language because it might compromise intelligence-gathering methods as well as doubts about its reliability, the official said. Joseph suggested attributing the charge to the British; Foley reminded him that the CIA had urged the British not to include the accusation in their own intelligence document, but eventually signed off on the language with some reluctance, according to the intelligence official.

Told that the White House was saying Joseph and Foley discussed only attribution and not the credibility of the uranium charge, the official said: "That may be Mr. Joseph's recollection; it's not Mr. Foley's."

The excerpt of the National Intelligence Estimate released Friday concluded that Hussein's regime possessed illicit chemical and biological weapons and missiles and "if left unchecked ... will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

It said that "in the view of most" U.S. intelligence agencies Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program and cited attempts to obtain aluminum tubes for centrifuges, magnets, high-speed balancing machines and machine tools. The issue of African uranium was not cited as a key finding, but was mentioned later in the report with no judgment offered as to its veracity.

The estimate included a sharp dissent from the State Department's intelligence arm, which said it was unconvinced Iraq was pursuing "a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program." It questioned whether the equipment cited in the estimate was suitable for nuclear uses and called the claim of African uranium purchases "highly dubious."

http://www.nynewsday.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=nyc-uranium0719&section=%2Fnews

FBI probing forged papers on Niger uranium
Wouldn't it be interesting if the culprit behind the forged uranium document was the old friend of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, Iraq exile Ahmad Chalabi, the most deadly con-artist of the decade?

---BumbleBeeBoogie

The Washington Times - Published July 19, 2003
www.washingtontimes.com
FBI probing forged papers on Niger uranium
By Bill Gertz

The FBI is investigating the origin of forged documents indicating that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, and one candidate for the forgeries is an Iraqi opposition group, U.S. officials said.
The documents, obtained first by Italy's intelligence service, ended up fooling the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies into believing Baghdad was trying to buy uranium ore from the African nation, U.S. officials say.
The documents ended up "tainting" other reliable intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and undermining the credibility of U.S. intelligence reports, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
One official said that the documents were provided first to the Italians and then to journalists before they ended up in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which dismissed them as fakes.
FBI spokesman Bill Carter said in an interview that a preliminary inquiry into the documents was undertaken after recent meetings between senior FBI officials and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Mr. Carter declined to comment further, citing a policy of not discussing FBI investigative matters.
Other officials said the FBI has sent agents to Italy and other nations to find out the origin of the documents, and the bureau's counterintelligence agents also are questioning officials at the CIA and State Department. The probe was first reported by Newsweek magazine.
Other intelligence obtained by Britain is considered reliable and indicates Niger had tried to sell uranium ore to Saddam Hussein's government, said officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.
President Bush chastised senior advisers, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and outgoing press spokesman Ari Fleischer, about the uranium intelligence flap and the White House's handling of it several times during the recent trip to Africa.
Spokesmen at the time initially said the White House was provided with bad intelligence from the CIA, only to reverse course a day later and claim the intelligence may still be valid although it should not have been included in a presidential speech.
"The president wanted the matter settled," one official said of Mr. Bush's harsh words for his advisers.
Although it received intelligence from the documents earlier, the CIA did not obtain copies of the forged documents until February 2003 ?- months after the Italians first obtained them and after the president's State of the Union address.
A U.S. official said the Italians initially only described the documents to the CIA. Then the State Department obtained a set from a journalist and that led to an investigative trip to Niger by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Mr. Wilson said Niger's government told him that the country would not sell uranium to Iraq, but also informed him that Iraqis were in the country discussing unspecified commercial transactions, which could have included uranium-ore purchases, the U.S. official said.
CIA Director George J. Tenet testified before a closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday to explain how the tainted intelligence ended up in a major U.S. intelligence-community report and the president's State of the Union speech.
An official said the documents included a letter about the purchase of some 500 tons of uranium ore, supposedly signed by Niger's president, Mamadou Tandja. The signature was found to have been faked.
Another document was described as an October 2000 Niger military document signed by a former foreign minister of Niger.
Besides Iraqi opposition, investigators also say the documents could have been produced by criminals, con men, or a foreign intelligence service.
The six main anti-Saddam groups before the war were the Iraqi National Congress, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi National Accord and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement.
In London on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair defended British intelligence on the Niger-Iraq uranium deal before the Parliament.
"The intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called 'forged documents' that have been put to the IAEA, and the IAEA have accepted that they got no such forged documents from British intelligence," Mr. Blair said.
"We had independent intelligence to the effect," the prime minister added.
U.S. intelligence officials suspect the bogus documents were created to exaggerate Iraq's nuclear-arms program as part of an effort to garner international opposition to Baghdad.
The forged documents undermined one element of a National Intelligence Estimate, a major interagency report, that became the basis for part of the president's January speech to Congress.
Officials familiar with the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction said it included one passage about efforts by Baghdad to buy yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.
However, the passage in the highly classified report did not have a "footnote" or objection attached to it, indicating it represented a consensus view of all intelligence agencies, including the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Only later in another section of the 90-page classified report did the State Department intelligence office indicate that it doubted the attempted Niger uranium purchases.
"There was no opposition to the main reference to Niger," said one official who has seen the estimate.
According to U.S. officials, the State Department's opposition to the intelligence on Niger uranium in the report was related to the department's doubts about Iraq's purchase of special alloy tubes that were believed to be for building gas centrifuges.

If I understand it correctly I think yellow cake is the basic product for any nuclear use of uranium. It is simply concentrated and purified uranium ore.

Some of the most serious and telling things in anyone's life are the people they choose to hang out with, hire, support, be close friends with, do business with, etc. That's one of the aspects of Bush which I've found important in describing who he is. Chalabi always appeared to be one of the many examples of Bush's tendency to surround himself with sleaze -- top performing sleaze, but sleaze nonetheless.

Italian Journo Says She Gave Uranium Docs to U.S.
Saturday, July 19, 2003 - AP

ROME ?- A journalist for an Italian news magazine has come forward, saying it was she who turned over to U.S. diplomats some documents purportedly showing that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from Niger. The documents turned out to be forgeries.

In an interview published Saturday, Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily, quoted Elisabetta Burba as saying her source "in the past proved to be reliable." The journalist, who writes for the weekly Panorama, refused to reveal her source.

"I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried," Burba was quoted as saying. "If it turned out to be a hoax, and I published it, I would have ended my career."

The documents, later declared by experts to be forgeries, served as part of the basis for President Bush's assertion in his State of Union address in January that Saddam Hussein was trying to get hold of material that could be used for nuclear weapons.

Bush attributed the information to the British government. Both the Bush administration and that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been under growing fire for using flawed intelligence to justify going to war against Iraq.

It has been previously reported that the U.S. Embassy in Rome received the documents from a journalist. The documents were shown to CIA personnel in Rome and sent to State Department headquarters in Washington.

Corriere della Sera quoted the journalist as saying she went to Niger to try to check out the authenticity of the documents. Burba told the paper she was suspicious because the documents spoke of such a large amount of uranium -- 500 tons -- and were short on details on how the uranium would be transported and arrangements for final delivery.

After her return from Africa, she said she told Panorama's top editor "the story seemed fake to me." After discussions at the magazine, one of the publications in Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi's media empire, Burba brought the documents to the U.S. Embassy.

"I went by myself and give them the dossier. No one said anything more to me and in any case the decision not to publish it was already taken -- with no further way to check out the reliability of those papers, we chose not to risk. I informed my source that I wasn't going to write anything and for me that affair was forgotten," Burba was quoted as saying.

There was no answer at Burba's home Saturday. Offices of Panorama were closed for the weekend.

The NYTimes has come up, about an hour ago, with a long, analytical report of which what follows is the final paragraph. A very thorough report on who said what when:


"Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true," said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20WEAP.html?ei=5062&en=28360ecb210885f6&ex=1059278400&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

Cobalt - what I read (it was probably the NY Times but I don't remember) is that the TIA was simply not going to receive the funding, which effectively knocked it out of the box. There was also discussion about patriot II, but I know no more.

A lot of people had fully and hopefully expected that this story would be old, forgotten news by now. Up to now, the WH has been successful in clamping down on and hiding anything incriminating at all. Bu it looks like maybe the old fear factor isn't working so well anymore. Once people start allowing their names to be used as sources of information publically, the hide is off the horse.

PLEASE! No thousand dollar words; my dictionary is already over-used. c.i.

Mamaj -- I was trying to remember -- there was an article somewhere about TIA being renamed and reconstituted?

Bush is blaming everyone (Rice & Fleischer) but himself
"President Bush chastised senior advisers, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and outgoing press spokesman Ari Fleischer, about the uranium intelligence flap and the White House's handling of it several times during the recent trip to Africa.

Spokesmen at the time initially said the White House was provided with bad intelligence from the CIA, only to reverse course a day later and claim the intelligence may still be valid although it should not have been included in a presidential speech.

"The president wanted the matter settled," one official said of Mr. Bush's harsh words for his advisers."

I said earlier in another forum that Ari left after adding two and two together, and realized what was happening. I really think more people are gonna be placing their resignation letters on the presidents desk in the not distant future. c.i.

I wonder if, in a few years, we're going to get some George Stephanopolis-type tell-alls about the Shrubster's antics?

5 more years...amen to one and all!

Yeah, they're all gonna become political consultants to the media. c.i.

Here's a unrelated triva: When I took the family to NYC many, many, years ago, we went to see the very first David Letterman Show. As we were walking out, I told my family that this show has no chance of lasting more than a week. c.i.

Ci
That was my first impression of the Letterman Show. I've never been able to sit through any of it.

I can't watch Letterman -- he's SO self-conscious. Agony!