Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Lier liar pants on fire
This war will make history in many ways. Here is one big reason for its historical significance..
Last September 24th, the Congress was at odds with the President over information they were originally given early in the game. Congress was preparing to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, The CIA had not been able to make any case to connect Iraq with September 11th. 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.
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, 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 questioned, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was supported 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 (500) 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. Holy Shit!!! They said!
Five(5) tons is all it takes to 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.)
The testimony about the attempted purchase of 500 tons of uranium oxide scared the crap out of everyone, and it helped to swing the Democratic vote, two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.
Does anyone remember how President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message on January 28th? He also said that, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”
Bush lied folks! He lied to, Congress and to the American People. .
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 said, “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.”
I guess that world-changing-decisions being made by the Pentagon, Congress and the Administration is based on what do you call it again ahhhhhhh oh yea CRAP. Some call this crap mis-information.
The I.A.E.A. had first sought these 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.
This official said the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.”
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, was asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, he dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” OOPS, Oh well I guess that's that.
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.” I want to believe that he too was set up and deceived.
Is there any wonder why the rest of the world doubts our intentions? 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.” This is our Government in action folks.
Sources cited:
Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker
Posted 3/25/2003 9:58:40 PM
March 31, 2003 Edition
This war will make history in many ways. Here is one big reason for its historical significance..
Last September 24th, the Congress was at odds with the President over information they were originally given early in the game. Congress was preparing to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, The CIA had not been able to make any case to connect Iraq with September 11th. 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.
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, 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 questioned, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was supported 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 (500) 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. Holy Shit!!! They said!
Five(5) tons is all it takes to 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.)
The testimony about the attempted purchase of 500 tons of uranium oxide scared the crap out of everyone, and it helped to swing the Democratic vote, two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.
Does anyone remember how President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message on January 28th? He also said that, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”
Bush lied folks! He lied to, Congress and to the American People. .
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 said, “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.”
I guess that world-changing-decisions being made by the Pentagon, Congress and the Administration is based on what do you call it again ahhhhhhh oh yea CRAP. Some call this crap mis-information.
The I.A.E.A. had first sought these 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.
This official said the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.”
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, was asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, he dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” OOPS, Oh well I guess that's that.
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.” I want to believe that he too was set up and deceived.
Is there any wonder why the rest of the world doubts our intentions? 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.” This is our Government in action folks.
Sources cited:
Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker
Posted 3/25/2003 9:58:40 PM
March 31, 2003 Edition
# posted by Thomas @ 11:24 PM 
