[Peace-discuss] New Niger Uranium claims debunked

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Not much on the Niger-uranium claims has changed

Over the past year, I’ve become known as something of an
aficionado — whether that’s a compliment or not, I’m not sure
— on the whole Niger-uranium business. And over the past
couple weeks, I’ve gotten numerous e-mails asking me where the
story now stands, given all the new details we’ve gotten from
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report and
various new press accounts.

Here’s my read on the two questions I’ve heard the most:

1. Did Joe Wilson’s wife make the decision to send him to
Niger or recommend him for the gig?

That was certainly the implication of the SSCI report out
earlier this month. What the report left out, however, was
that the people who are presumably in the best position to
know actually disagree.

From the beginning of this case last July until today, the CIA
has said that Valerie Plame’s bosses came up with the idea of
sending Wilson to Niger and then asked her to sound him out on
the idea.

I wanted to see if this was still the agency’s take on the
matter. So I asked a senior intelligence official Monday
whether this was still the agency’s position — notwithstanding
the SSCI report — and he confirmed that it was. In other
words, Wilson’s account of his wife’s involvement is confirmed
by her bosses at the CIA.

Where Wilson went wrong was on several occasions making far
more categorical statements like the one picked up in Susan
Schmidt’s July 10 smack-down of Wilson in The Washington Post.

The entire matter is of no real relevance to the underlying
question of the administration’s use of the Niger claims and
whether they had reason to know they were false. But it has
become a major issue in evaluating Wilson’s credibility. So
that’s the whole story.

2. Did President Bush’s claim about the Iraqis seeking uranium
from Niger turn out to be true?

That’s certainly the impression you would get from a torrent
of editorials that columnists have penned over the past two
weeks — most prominently William Safire in The New York Times.
But it’s also pretty clearly false.

First of all, the remaining evidence that the Iraqis tried to
acquire uranium anywhere in Africa, let alone Niger, is
extremely thin. It rests almost entirely on a couple reported
conversations in which Iraqis discussed commercial ties with
Niger officials and thus might have been hinting at the
possibility of future uranium purchases. The thinness of that
evidence becomes still thinner when you consider that we now
know that the Iraqis had no active nuclear program that the
uranium would have been used for.

That’s the information that remains. The information that the
United States was going on at the time was contained in three
reports from Italian military intelligence (SISMI) received in
late 2001 and early 2002. (The SSCI report includes the dates
of the reports but doesn’t identify the country as Italy. A
July 14 New York Times article identified the country in
question as Britain. But that’s wrong; it was Italy.)

After the whole forgery matter became public in 2003, the
reports were compared to the documents. And it was clear that
the reports the Italians had sent — especially the latter two
— were based on the documents. In other words, by definition,
the reports the United States was going on were baseless, even
if U.S. intelligence didn’t know just how baseless they were
at the time.

The British “Butler Report” goes to great lengths to argue
that the British claims about Iraq and Niger weren’t
undermined by the later detection of the forgeries. In the
words of the report: “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.”

But that is disingenuous to say the least.

True, the Brits didn’t have “the documents.” What they neglect
to say is that one of their two pieces of intelligence — the
one they placed the most stock in — was a summary of the
forged documents, just like the United States had.

The Butler Report is intentionally obscure on this point. Far
more candid was a September 2003 British parliamentary report
that covered the same ground. And if you’re truly an obsessive
about these matters, like I am, you can find that report
online at www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/reports/isc/pdf/iwmdia.pdf
— see Pages 27 and 28 for the relevant sections.

What remains is this other source of intelligence, which the
Brits say they stand by but won’t disclose. And we’ve known
that since last year. So on that point, nothing has changed.

When you look at all the intelligence the Niger claims were
based on — and this is based both on the public record and on
my reporting, which will appear in a future article — close to
all of it can be traced back to the phony documents themselves
or reports different intelligence agencies had that were in
turn based on or summaries of those phony documents.

There’s a great effort now to say the Niger claim was true.
But the evidence says otherwise.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column
appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: jmarshall at thehill.com
	

 
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Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
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"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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