[Media-watch] FW: Who lied to whom?

david Miller david.miller at stir.ac.uk
Wed Mar 26 15:35:39 GMT 2003



>From The New Yorker.... Seymour Hersh, whom Richard Perle called a
"terrorist" because Hersh implied that Perle and others are profiting from
the Iraqi war...

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030331fa_fact1


WHO LIED TO WHOM?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
Issue of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-03-24

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution
authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior
intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central
Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s
weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush
Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s
claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an
immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former
Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy
of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in
which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there
is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” A few
Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before
Congress.
According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly
classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet
declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum
tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the
construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium.
The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this
time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed
by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence
showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred
tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers. The
uranium, known as “yellow cake,” can be used to make fuel for nuclear
reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons.
Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the
C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet
had briefed the senators on Niger.)

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier
containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given
in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium”
from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear
power programme that could require it.” The allegation attracted immediate
attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, “african gangs offer
route to uranium.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed
hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt
to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear
ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the
Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving
the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger
as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department
position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding
their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.)
A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on
Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief,
known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the
American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or
“scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report,
which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other
senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any
members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t think
anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told me. “You only
know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk about it.”

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his
State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the
source of the information: “The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He
commented, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He
clearly has much to hide.”

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the
director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told
the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq
uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence
of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,”
ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are
so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence
agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was
not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the
British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the
I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the
director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were
fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other
communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on
letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter,
dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office
since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of
Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with
inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they
could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning
sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a
French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in
France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without
anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me.

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who
actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes
in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in
Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old
letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators
suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi
Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in
February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British
intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps
through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United States
with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing to say.”

ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or
intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the
forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report,
dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is
resolved.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in
the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came
from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the
inspectors.”

The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe
about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a
few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the
White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American
official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as
explaining, simply, “We fell for it.”



The Bush Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have
stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching.
Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and
British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse
over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with
the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the
United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill
Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing,
but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for
international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told
me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false
information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its
Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in
Washington. “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration
official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in
Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least
one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and
British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable
intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be
funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London
and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move
on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,”
the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with
MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at
safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually
became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a bit,”
one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, “but
I was never officially told about it.”

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to
categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated
by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq
propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source
declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have
suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians,
the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional
intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents
were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his
State of the Union speech—and that “the Brits placed more stock in them than
we did.” It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official
told me, that “something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.”



What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British
intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American
officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top
layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct
of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State
of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more important
than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the
Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the
public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not
obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President’s
State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and
therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow
refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain’s MI6. Harlow’s
statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of
exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an
unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the
Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former
high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials
were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as
to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’
ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their
tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’
The Secretary of State never saw the documents.” He added, “He’s absolutely
apoplectic about it.” (A State Department spokesman was unable to comment.)
A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the
authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by
analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former
high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the
system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal
intention. Someone set someone up.” (The White House declined to comment.)

Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to
give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than
a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But
George W. Bush’s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout
the world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It
can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his
advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.

On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior
Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert
Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents.
Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he
wrote to Mueller, “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these
documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating
public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.” He urged the F.B.I. to
ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the
motives of those responsible, and “why the intelligence community did not
recognize the documents were fabricated.” A Rockefeller aide told me that
the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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