[Vision2020] "The Buck Stops Here": Washington Post Article Included

[Ted Moffett]

All:

The link to the Washington Post story I posted earlier might not work.

Here is the article pasted into this e-mail:


U.S. Had Uranium Papers Earlier
Officials Say Forgeries on Iraqi Efforts Reached State Dept. Before Speech

By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A01


The State Department received copies of what would turn out to be forged 
documents suggesting that Iraq tried to purchase uranium oxide from Niger 
three months before the president's State of the Union address, 
administration officials said.

The documents, which officials said appeared to be of "dubious 
authenticity," were distributed to the CIA and other agencies within days. 
But the U.S. government waited four months to turn them over to United 
Nations weapons inspectors who had been demanding to see evidence of U.S. 
and British claims that Iraq's attempted purchase of uranium oxide violated 
U.N. resolutions and was among the reasons to go to war. State Department 
officials could not say yesterday why they did not turn over the documents 
when the inspectors asked for them in December.

The administration, facing increased criticism over the claims it made about 
Iraq's attempts to buy uranium, had said until now that it did not have the 
documents before the State of the Union speech.

Even before these documents arrived, both the State Department and the CIA 
had questions about the reliability of intelligence reports that Iraq was 
seeking uranium from Niger and other African countries.

Beginning in October, the CIA warned the administration not to use the Niger 
claim in public. CIA Director George J. Tenet personally persuaded deputy 
national security adviser Stephen Hadley to omit it from President Bush's 
Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

But on the eve of Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address, Robert Joseph, 
an assistant to the president in charge of nonproliferation at the National 
Security Council (NSC), initially asked the CIA if the allegation that Iraq 
sought to purchase 500 pounds of uranium from Niger could be included in the 
presidential speech.

Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, disclosed this detail when he accompanied 
Tenet in a closed-door hearing before the Senate Select Committee on 
Intelligence on Wednesday.

Foley, director of the CIA's intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control 
center, told committee members that the controversial 16-word sentence was 
eventually suggested by Joseph in a telephone conversation just a day or two 
before the speech, according to congressional and administration sources who 
were present at the five-hour session.

At the hearing, Foley said he called Joseph to object to mentioning Niger 
and that a specific amount of uranium was being sought. Joseph agreed to 
eliminate those two elements but then proposed that the speech use more 
general language, citing British intelligence that said Iraq had recently 
been seeking uranium in Africa.

Foley said he told Joseph that the CIA had objected months earlier to the 
British including that in their published September dossier because of the 
weakness of the U.S. information. But Foley said the British had gone ahead 
based on their own information.

When Foley first began answering questions on who from the White House staff 
sought to put the uranium charge in the State of the Union address, he did 
not mention Joseph's name, referring only to "a person" at the NSC. It was 
only after Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and several other senators 
demanded the name that he identified him.

A senior administration official said yesterday the only conversation that 
took place was about the classification of the source of the alleged uranium 
transaction. The question was whether to attribute the alleged transaction 
to a classified U.S. intelligence estimate or to a published British dossier 
and, he said, it was "agreed to use the British."

However, there are six other references to information carried in the U.S. 
estimate, and they are attributed to "U.S. intelligence" or "intelligence 
sources."

Both the Senate committee and the White House have begun internal 
discussions over how to handle the potentially delicate task of questioning 
presidential aides as part of a congressional investigation. Claims of 
executive privilege have in the past increased public interest and 
complicated the process of calling on White House aides to testify.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Wednesday night: 
"We will take this where it leads us. We'll let the chips fall where they 
may." A senior congressional aide said Roberts is prepared to seek a way to 
question Joseph and any other White House aides.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said 
yesterday: "The intelligence committee has crossed that line . . . and we 
are looking at people in the executive branch, including the White House." 
He said that both Republicans and Democrats are concerned "about the further 
implication beyond Tenet."

The FBI is also considering opening a counterintelligence case if it 
suspects a foreign government created the forgeries about the alleged Iraqi 
uranium purchase to influence U.S. foreign policy.

Next week, the Senate intelligence committee will hold a closed-door hearing 
to question the CIA's inspector general, who has been investigating the 
agency's handling of nuclear-related intelligence on Iraq.

The documents first came into the U.S. government's hands when a journalist 
turned them over to U.S. Embassy officials in Rome. Other officials said 
previously that the Italian intelligence services had given the documents to 
the British, which first mentioned the Niger-Iraq claim in its published 
case against Iraq in September.

"We acquired the documents in October of 2002, and they were shared widely 
within the U.S. government, with all the appropriate agencies in various 
ways," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday.

The embassy promptly informed the CIA station chief in Rome that it had the 
documents and, on Oct. 19, gave copies to intelligence officials.

A senior intelligence official said the agency did not consider the 
documents revelatory because they contained the same information, from other 
sources, already in intelligence reports. But in hindsight, the official 
said, "we failed to see the signals" that would have indicated they were 
forged.

Another intelligence official said "the documents were such a minor point of 
analysis for anyone" because the information was not deemed reliable.

On Feb. 4, the U.N. inspectors' Iraq team was called to the U.S. mission in 
Vienna and verbally briefed on the contents of the documents. A day later, 
they received copies, according to officials familiar with the inspectors' 
work.

Using the Google Internet search engine, books on Niger and interviews with 
Iraqi and Nigerien officials, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 
experts determined that the documents were fake.

On March 7, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei announced they were 
forged. It is not yet known who created the forgeries.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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