hawkeye

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


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 do***ents
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 **** 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 do***ents 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 ****yst 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.

james hall

"John" ...


Hey johnnie me boyo welcome back. BTB, would you kindly inform
the rest of us silly and foolish people what is this thingie called
"TRUST" ?

Thanking you in advance for your kind response and attention to detail.

JHall.

john

How about I just use it in a sentence?
I trust you are loser Dem. whining and grasping at straws.

And you assumed it would be kind.