Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney

The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald-a distinct possibility. With so many forces at play, it is easy to lose perspective and context while plowing through the tons of information on this case. What follows is a retrospective and prospective, laced with some new facts and analysis aimed at helping us to focus on the forest once we have given due attention to the trees.

Background

In late May 2003, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) informed me that a former U.S. ambassador named Joseph Wilson would be sharing keynote duties with me at a large EPIC conference on June 14.

I was delighted-for two reasons. This was a chance to meet the "American hero" (per George H. W. Bush) who faced down Saddam Hussein, freeing hundreds of American and other hostages taken when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. More important, since Wilson had served as an ambassador in Africa, I thought he might be able to throw light on a question bedeviling me since May 6, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an intriguing story about a mission to Niger by "a former U.S. ambassador to Africa."

There Once Was an Ambassador in Niger...

According to Kristof, that mission was undertaken at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney's office to investigate a report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. The report was an entirely convenient "smoking gun." Since Iraq lacked any nonmilitary use for such uranium, it had to be for a nuclear weapons program, if the report were true. Or so went the argument. The former ambassador sent to Niger had found no basis for the report, pulling the rug out from under the "intelligence" the administration had used during the previous fall to conjure up the "mushroom cloud" that intimidated Congress into authorizing war.

Kristof's May 6 column had caused quite a stir in Washington. The only one to have totally missed the story was then-National Security Adviser and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (assuming she is to be taken at her word). Rice claimed that the information did not come to her attention until more than a month later. Right. (And the celebrated aluminum tubes were for nuclear enrichment-not artillery. Right.)

This ostensibly nuclear-related "evidence" was no mere sideshow; it went to the very core of the disingenuous justification for war. The Iraq-Niger report itself was particularly suspect. The uranium mined in Niger is very tightly controlled by a French-led international consortium, and the chances of circumventing or defeating the well established safeguards and procedures were seen as virtually nil. On March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced to the U.N. Security Council that the documents upon which the Iraq-Niger reporting was based were "not authentic." Colin Powell swallowed hard but took it as well as could be expected under the circumstances. A few days later he conceded the point entirely-with neither apology nor embarrassment, as befits the world's sole remaining superpower.

The Sixteen Words

Powell had long since decided that the Iraq-Niger report did not pass the smell test. But he was apparently afraid to incur Cheney's wrath by telling the president. Powell's own intelligence analysts at the State Department had branded the story "highly dubious," so he had chosen to drop it from the long litany of spurious charges against Iraq that he recited at the U.N. on February 5, 2003, a performance that Powell now admits constitutes a "blot" on his record. Asked to defend President George W. Bush's use of the Iraq-Africa story in his state-of-the-union address in January 2003, the best Powell could do was to describe the president's (in)famous "16 words" as "not totally outrageous," a comment that did not help all that much.

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