From TIME Magazine, 7/13/03:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...464405,00.html

A Question Of Trust

The CIA's Tenet takes the fall for a flawed claim in the State of the
Union, but has Bush's credibility taken an even greater hit?

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND JAMES CARNEY


The State of the Union message is one of America's greatest
inventions, conceived by the Founders to force a powerful Chief
Executive to report to a public suspicious of kings.

Delivered to a joint session of Congress in democracy's biggest
cathedral, it is the most important speech a President gives each
year, written and rewritten and then polished again.

Yet the address George W. Bush gave on Jan. 28 was more consequential
than most because he was making a revolutionary case: why a nation
that traditionally didn't start fights should wage a pre-emptive war.

As Bush noted that night, "Every year, by law and by custom, we meet
here to consider the state of the union. This year we gather in this
chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead."

Just how aware was Bush of the accuracy of what he was about to say?

Deep in his 5,400-word speech was a single sentence that had already
been the subject of considerable internal debate for nearly a year.

It was a line that had launched a dozen memos, several diplomatic tugs
of war and some mysterious, last-minute pencil editing.

The line--"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--wasn't
the Bush team's strongest evidence for the case that Saddam wanted
nuclear weapons.

It was just the most controversial, since most government experts
familiar with the statement believed it to be unsupportable.

Last week the White House finally admitted that Bush should have
jettisoned the claim.

Designed to end a long-simmering controversy, the admission instead
sparked a bewildering four days of changing explanations and unusually
nasty finger pointing by the normally disciplined Bush team.

That performance raised its own questions, which went to the core of
the Administration's credibility:

Where else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support
for the war?

If so many doubted the uranium allegations, who inside the government
kept putting those allegations on the table?

And did the CIA go far enough to keep the bad intelligence out?

To that last question, at least, the answer was: apparently not.

In what looked like a command performance of political sacrifice, the
head of the agency that expressed some of the strongest doubts about
the charge took responsibility for the President's unsubstantiated
claim.

"The CIA approved the President's State of the Union address before it
was delivered," said CIA Director George Tenet in a statement.

"I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And ... the
President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him
was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text
written for the President."

Yet the controversy over those 16 words would not have erupted with
such force were they not emblematic of larger concerns about Bush's
reasoning for going to war in the first place.

Making the case against Saddam last year, Bush claimed that Iraq's
links to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) made the
country an imminent threat to the region and, eventually, the U.S.

He wrapped the evidence in the even more controversial doctrine of
pre-emption, saying America could no longer wait for proof of its
enemies' intentions before defending itself overseas--it must
sometimes strike first, even without all the evidence in hand.

Much of the world was appalled by this logic, but Congress and the
American public went along.

Four months after the war started, at least one piece of key evidence
has turned out to be false, the U.S. has yet to find weapons of mass
destruction, and American soldiers keep dying in a country that has
not greeted its liberators the way the Administration predicted it
would.

Now the false assertion and the rising casualties are combining to
take a toll on Bush's standing with the public.

FOLLOW THE YELLOWCAKE ROAD

How did a story that much of the national-security apparatus regarded
as bogus wind up in the most important speech of Bush's term?

The evidence suggests that many in the Bush Administration simply
wanted to believe it.

The tale begins in the early 1980s, when Iraq made two purchases of
uranium oxide from Niger totaling more than 300 tons.

Known as "yellowcake," uranium oxide is a partially refined ore that,
when combined with fluorine and then converted into a gas, can
eventually be used to create weapons-grade uranium.

No one disputes that Iraq had a nuclear-weapons program in the 1980s,
but it was dismantled after the first Gulf War.

Then, in the mid-1990s, defectors provided evidence that Saddam was
trying to restart the program.

Finally, late in 2001, the Italian government came into possession of
evidence suggesting that Iraq was again trying to purchase yellowcake
from Niger.

Rome's source provided half a dozen letters and other documents
alleged to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials
negotiating a sale.

The Italians' evidence was shared with both Britain and the U.S.

When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report caught the
eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, told TIME that during one of his
regular CIA briefings, "the Vice President asked a question about the
implication of the report."

Cheney's interest hardly came as a surprise: he has long been known to
harbor some of the most hard-line views of Saddam's nuclear ambitions.

It was not long before the agency quietly dispatched a veteran U.S.
envoy named Joseph Wilson to investigate.

Wilson seemed like a wise choice for the mission.

He had been a U.S. ambassador to Gabon and had actually been the last
American to speak with Saddam before the first Gulf War.

Wilson spent eight days sleuthing in Niger, meeting with current and
former government officials and businessmen; he came away convinced
that the allegations were untrue.

Wilson never had access to the Italian documents and never filed a
written report, he told TIME.

When he returned to Washington in early March, Wilson gave an oral
report about his trip to both CIA and State Department officials.

On March 9 of last year, the CIA circulated a memo on the yellowcake
story that was sent to the White House, summarizing Wilson's
assessment.

Wilson was not the only official looking into the matter.

Nine days earlier, the State Department's intelligence arm had sent a
memo directly to Secretary of State Colin Powell that also disputed
the Italian intelligence.

Greg Thielmann, then a high-ranking official at State's research unit,
told TIME that it was not in Niger's self-interest to sell the Iraqis
the destabilizing ore.

"A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus," Thielmann
said later.

"This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the
other side. It was done, shot down."

Except that it wasn't.

By late summer, at the very moment that the Administration was gearing
up to make its case for military mobilization, the yellowcake story
took on new life.

In September, Tony Blair's government issued a 50-page dossier
detailing the case against Saddam, and while much of the evidence in
the paper was old, it made the first public claim that Iraq was
seeking uranium from Africa.

At the White House, Ari Fleischer endorsed the British dossier, saying
"We agree with their findings."

THE DOUBTS THAT DIDN'T GO AWAY

By now, a gap was opening behind the scenes between what U.S.
officials were alleging in public about Iraq's nuclear ambitions and
what they were saying in private.

After Tenet left a closed hearing on Capitol Hill in September, the
nuclear question arose, and a lower-ranking official admitted to the
lawmakers that the agency had doubts about the veracity of the
evidence.

Also in September, the CIA tried to persuade the British government to
drop the allegation completely.

To this day, London stands by the claim.

In October, Tenet personally intervened with National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to remove a line about the
African ore in a speech that Bush was giving in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Also that month, CIA officials included the Brits' yellowcake story in
their classified 90-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's
weapons programs.

The CIA said it could neither verify the Niger story nor "confirm
whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake"
from two other African nations.

The agency also included the State Department's concerns that the
allegations of Iraq's seeking yellowcake were "highly dubious"--though
that assessment was printed only as a footnote.

At a time when it was trying to build public support for the war, the
Bush Administration did not share these internal doubts about the
evidence with the public.

In December, for example, the State Department included the Niger
claim in its public eight-point rebuttal to the 12,200-page arms
declaration that Iraq made to the U.N. two weeks earlier.

And a month later, in an op-ed column in the New York Times titled
"Why We Know Iraq Is Lying," top Bush aide Rice appeared to repeat the
yellowcake claim, saying, "The declaration fails to account for or
explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad."

Nor did the U.S. pass on what it knew to international monitors.

When the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. group, asked the
U.S. for data to back up its claim in December, Washington sat tight
and said little for six weeks.

The battle between believers and doubters finally came to a head over
the State of the Union speech.

Weeks of work had gone into the address; speechwriters had produced
two dozen drafts.

But as the final form was taking shape, the wording of the yellowcake
passage went down to the wire.

When the time came to decide whether Bush was going to cite the
allegation, the CIA objected--and then relented.

Two senior Administration officials tell TIME that in a January
conversation with a key National Security Council (nsc) official just
a few days before the speech, a top cia analyst named Alan Foley
objected to including the allegation in the speech.

The nsc official in charge of vetting the sections on WMD, Special
Assistant to the President Robert Joseph, denied through a spokesman
that he said it was O.K. to use the line as long as it was sourced to
British intelligence.

But another official told TIME, "There was a debate about whether to
cite it on our own intelligence. But once the U.K. made it public, we
felt comfortable citing what they had learned."

And so the line went in.

While some argued last week that the fight should have been kicked
upstairs to Rice for adjudication, White House officials claim that it
never was.

NUCLEAR FALLOUT

But if it was good enough for Bush, it wasn't good enough for others.

Colin Powell omitted any reference to the uranium when he briefed the
U.N. Security Council just eight days later; last week he told
reporters that the allegation had not stood "the test of time."

Nor did Tenet mention the allegation when he testified before the
Senate panel on Feb. 11.

"If we were trying to peddle that theory, it would have been in our
white paper," an intelligence official told TIME.

"It would have been in lots of places where it wasn't. A sentence made
it into the President's speech, and it shouldn't have."

Did Bush really need to push the WMD case so hard to convince
Americans that Saddam should be ousted?

In a TIME poll taken four weeks before coalition forces invaded, 83%
of Americans thought war was justified on the grounds that "Saddam
Hussein is a dictator who has killed many citizens of his Iraq."

That's one claim that has never been contested.

In the same TIME poll, however, 72% of Americans thought war was also
justified because it "will help eliminate weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq."

The unseen threat of a Saddam with WMD was an argument that played to
Bush's strengths.

As a politician, Bush has always been better at asserting his case
than at making it.

After 9/11, his sheer certitude--and the faith Americans had in his
essential trustworthiness--led Americans to overwhelmingly support
him.

The yellowcake affair may have already changed that relationship, for
as the casualties mount in Iraq, polls suggest that some of that faith
is eroding.

Which means the next time Bush tells the nation where he wants to go,
it may not be so quick to follow.

__________________________________________________ ______

Amen!

Harry

In news:mlk3hv8qcvb9mhsr3ne2bgcjds1d964qmo@4ax.com Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> A Question Of Trust

Are you asking us to trust Time Magazine, or trust you?

Why?

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert@visi.com