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Thread ID: 5836 | Posts: 16 | Started: 2003-03-26

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Zoroaster [OP]

2003-03-26 15:02 | User Profile

[url=http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1]http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1[/url]

March 26, 2003 | home

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.

Allan

2003-04-25 21:27 | User Profile

The supreme Law controlling the U.S. governents is the Constitution. The supreme Law calls for a Declaration of War from Congress "before" deploying U.S. troops. Resolutions are no law at all and the Senate cannot declare war without the House. Allan

Sisyfos

2003-04-26 05:32 | User Profile

Allan,

Your devotion to the instrument for which your country was once renowned and which continues to be imitated is touching, but the device is not deserving of the veneration.

As a vehicle to preserve the founders intent, it served faithfully for less than century and its present function is that of a mere doormat, still worthy of a courtesy wipe by the priests of our age. It has not been entirely remodelled, since we are still able to indulge our heretic leanings and have pleasant conversations across the cyber ether, but that oversight will be corrected presently. Not scrapped, just reshaped (or permitted to “grow,” if you like) and made to accommodate a gentler world, tolerant of all wickedness except the sort that strikes at its legitimacy.

A constitution, as you will come to learn, has a way of becoming tyrannical, for it is organized power of immense scale -- social power sans conscience. It can overcome highly positioned resistance and positively devours such pity obstacles as dignity and individuality. It has an unstable pivot and knows no limitation.

The supreme Law calls for a Declaration of War from Congress "before" deploying U.S. troops. Resolutions are no law at all and the Senate cannot declare war without the House.

Most tools working at the Capital went to priest-school so it is likely that they are aware of the pertinent constitutional law.

The supreme Law controlling the U.S. governents is the Constitution.

This theory demands revision. How about thus: Law is the supreme science. Now, do you have means to show congress true law? If so, where do I sign?

Drakmal

2003-04-26 08:42 | User Profile

Any constitution that becomes tyrannical is not worthy of the name. After all, the purpose of a constitution is to limit government, not people--to protect citizens and politicians alike from the odd tyrant who will inevitably work his way into power. And it does this well, provided we all keep its purpose in mind.

The problem is when people forget the purpose of a constitution. When this happens, politicians can distort it and use it to limit the people and free themselves. Or they can do as our current crop of Capital clowns do and ignore it altogether as a mere suggestion, like stop signs and pants.

Ultimately, government of any form is as tyrannical as the people who run it--no specific form of government can be a safeguard against tyranny. The only thing that can be done is to give the government as little power as possible, and for communities to be forever vigilant, and ingrain in each generation both a spirit of freedom and a sense of the history that made it possible. Americans haven't done either of these well for a century, and that's why the American Experiment is a failure.

Drakmal

Ausonius

2003-10-17 00:48 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Drakmal]Any constitution that becomes tyrannical is not worthy of the name. After all, the purpose of a constitution is to limit government, not people--to protect citizens and politicians alike from the odd tyrant who will inevitably work his way into power. And it does this well, provided we all keep its purpose in mind.

The problem is when people forget the purpose of a constitution. When this happens, politicians can distort it and use it to limit the people and free themselves. [I]Or they can do as our current crop of Capital clowns do and ignore it altogether as a mere suggestion[/I], like stop signs and pants.

Ultimately, government of any form is as tyrannical as the people who run it--no specific form of government can be a safeguard against tyranny. The only thing that can be done is to give the government as little power as possible, and for communities to be forever vigilant, and ingrain in each generation both a spirit of freedom and a sense of the history that made it possible. Americans haven't done either of these well for a century, and that's why the American Experiment is a failure.

Drakmal[/QUOTE]

Our current crop? We haven't had a grownup inside the Beltway since before 1914. The leftist/socialist nonsense that we are currently locked in mortal combat with started way back when in the 1880's or thereabouts. It was delayed by a depression and two world wars, all three of which were used to leverage the American People and came to a head in the 1960's. The 60's radicals are currently of age to run the very institutions they raged against 30 years ago. We will not be rid of their way of thinking until they all die off.

Men in power are concerned with only one thing: More. Which political party we have in charge matters little, they are all the same. Personally, I am torn between wondering when the day will come when they finally push us too far and bad things happen, and wanting it to come so we can settle this foolishness once and for all. Scratch game coming up, pick a side and get your game face on.

Ausonius

AgentOrange

2004-03-22 20:04 | User Profile

The Bill of Rights will be the tool that ends the USA as we know it. A nation that believes in everything in fact believes in nothing. We have no standard pre-defined set of morals to adhere to. We are doomed.........

Yukon

2004-07-04 21:08 | User Profile

I am the YUKON man and I agree with AgentOrange - we are indeed doomed as a nation. The Muslim hords will defeat us, we can not win. I believe we should negotiate a peace with the Muslims before it is too late, before they conqueor us.

Yukon

2004-07-04 21:57 | User Profile

"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." - G. Bush, Junior

[img]http://bushspeaks.com/img/liar_bush.jpg[/img]

Angeleyes

2005-05-20 02:36 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Yukon]I am the YUKON man and I agree with AgentOrange - we are indeed doomed as a nation. The Muslim hords will defeat us, we can not win. I believe we should negotiate a peace with the Muslims before it is too late, before they conqueor us.[/QUOTE] What a loser's attitude. You will always lose when you quit, when you admit defeat. If you keep fighting, you have not lost until you can't fight anymore.

You can also fight on more than one front, see US in WW II. Three Front War. CBI, Japan, ETO.

Before you throw up your hands and quit, fight until you can't fight anymore. If that means trying to win the fight at home, so be it, if it means killing rag heads, fine, if it means trying to outsmart the Chinese, all to the good.

Throwing in the towel? You can do better than that . . . unless you want to wear one on your head for the rest of you life.

EDIT: In support of Ausonius's comments

"What would TR do?"

CornCod

2005-05-20 03:18 | User Profile

I soemtimes worry about the the excessive veneration some Conservatives and Nationalists exhibit towards the Constitution. Don't get me wrong, the US Constitution isn't really a bad one. It was of some use for a time. Today, people tend to ignore it. If you are going to have a supreme federal law, it makes sense to follow it for the sake of an orderly government. However, the abject worship of a DOCUMENT OF GOVERNMENTAL PROCEEDURE just shows how shallow many people are in the so-called "Right."

There is more to government and the exercise of political power than the following of proceedural rules. There are values that precede the constitution. My primary loyalty is to middle and working class whites and their welfare and future. My main political objective in life is to defeat the unholy coalition of Wall Streeters and gentile hating Jews and to create a new European-American Man. If for some reason the constitution ever got in the way of the aforementioned objectives I would gladly use it for toilet paper. All this worship of a man-made document is borderline blasphemous and has a kind of magical,gnostic quality about it.

grep14w

2005-05-20 06:52 | User Profile

The reason the Constitution gets so much veneration is that it's the only common thing we have left, now that we've thrown everything else away. Race? Religion? Culture? Language? We have all in effect denounced these as "unAmerican" and no longer things that can bind us together.

When the political system based on the myth of the Constitution collapses, America collapses without it - without the Constitution there's no longer an America anymore. Maybe something better will emerge afterwards, maybe not.

Angeleyes

2005-05-21 18:03 | User Profile

[QUOTE=grep14w]The reason the Constitution gets so much veneration is that it's the only common thing we have left, now that we've thrown everything else away. Race? Religion? Culture? Language? We have all in effect denounced these as "unAmerican" and no longer things that can bind us together.

When the political system based on the myth of the Constitution collapses, America collapses without it - without the Constitution there's no longer an America anymore. Maybe something better will emerge afterwards, maybe not.[/QUOTE] Some good points on the Constitution. The American experiment is still in progress. I am not ready to call it a failure. Might need some more ingredients from the "right" jar.

Xforce80

2005-08-05 21:49 | User Profile

I'm not sure if this belongs in this thread but a firend of mine who lives in Oregon and is active in GOP politics emailed this to me:

When you actually look at the Constitution, you see that Bush's appointment of Bolton is not authorized by the Constitution. It says, "The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate ...." [Art II, Sec. 2 (3)]. The key words here are "happen during." The vacancy involved here (and with Judge Pryor earlier) didn't happen during a recess; they happened much earlier than the recess.

Obviously, for far, far too long, no one has actually read the Constitutional provision in question. Barring the existence of a Supreme Court decision that tortures the meaning of "vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate ...." [Art II, Sec. 2(3)] so as to mean "any vacancies whether they occurred before or after recess," the Constitution is extremely clear.

Moreover, it is abundantly plain to me that "during'' makes sense from a drafter's point of view when answering the question that must have come up during the Constitutional Convention about how to fill an important position when it happens while the Senate is not in session and even getting the word out to them by pony express would take too long. It is equally plain to me that the framers who, incidentally did not trust an imperial presidency, could not possibly meant to give any president the authority to fill a vacancy that had been submitted to a Senate in session and not approved during such session simply by waiting for the Senate to go home.

Last but not least, the presidency has been gaining power for far, far too long. The grab for power has hurt this Nation in many disastrous ways. The current occupant is perhaps the worst but even if not the worst, is still a very, very dangerous man who should never have been entrusted with the power he has usurped.

The retort that this practice has gone on in prior times and thus must be accepted prima facie as legal is typical of shallow political substitutes for law and reason. It is the law that I'm attempting to present, not not how any particular set of political hacks have made a mockery of it.

Stay Safe

Exelsis_Deo

2005-08-06 01:27 | User Profile

you all make me want to vomit

DakotaBlue

2005-10-18 21:23 | User Profile

XForce:

I think Bolton was a recess appointment although the debate about him started months before. Clinton also made backdoor, recess appointments. It's become a common end-run.

As to your point about the presidency and its growing power, there could be no more powerful president than FDR who served for 12 years and elevated deceit to an artform.

As I see it, if the system of checks and balances doesn't work because the branches of govt. can't or won't effectively exercise their power, then we're vulnerable to a coup d'etat.

Angeleyes

2005-10-19 04:25 | User Profile

[quote=Exelsis_Deo]you all make me want to vomit

Is this because you find the Constitution itself unsympathetic to Papists and servants of the Caliph?

AE