Over the past year, I’ve become known as something of an aficionado — whether that’s a compliment or not, I’m not sure — on the whole Niger-uranium business. And over the past couple weeks, I’ve gotten numerous e-mails asking me where the story now stands, given all the new details we’ve gotten from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report and various new press accounts.
Here’s my read on the two questions I’ve heard the most:
1. Did Joe Wilson’s wife make the decision to send him to Niger or recommend him for the gig?
That was certainly the implication of the SSCI report out earlier this month. What the report left out, however, was that the people who are presumably in the best position to know actually disagree.
From the beginning of this case last July until today, the CIA has said that Valerie Plame’s bosses came up with the idea of sending Wilson to Niger and then asked her to sound him out on the idea.
I wanted to see if this was still the agency’s take on the matter. So I asked a senior intelligence official Monday whether this was still the agency’s position — notwithstanding the SSCI report — and he confirmed that it was. In other words, Wilson’s account of his wife’s involvement is confirmed by her bosses at the CIA.
Where Wilson went wrong was on several occasions making far more categorical statements like the one picked up in Susan Schmidt’s July 10 smack-down of Wilson in The Washington Post.
The entire matter is of no real relevance to the underlying question of the administration’s use of the Niger claims and whether they had reason to know they were false. But it has become a major issue in evaluating Wilson’s credibility. So that’s the whole story.
2. Did President Bush’s claim about the Iraqis seeking uranium from Niger turn out to be true?
That’s certainly the impression you would get from a torrent of editorials that columnists have penned over the past two weeks — most prominently William Safire in The New York Times. But it’s also pretty clearly false.
First of all, the remaining evidence that the Iraqis tried to acquire uranium anywhere in Africa, let alone Niger, is extremely thin. It rests almost entirely on a couple reported conversations in which Iraqis discussed commercial ties with Niger officials and thus might have been hinting at the possibility of future uranium purchases. The thinness of that evidence becomes still thinner when you consider that we now know that the Iraqis had no active nuclear program that the uranium would have been used for.
That’s the information that remains. The information that the United States was going on at the time was contained in three reports from Italian military intelligence (SISMI) received in late 2001 and early 2002. (The SSCI report includes the dates of the reports but doesn’t identify the country as Italy. A July 14 New York Times article identified the country in question as Britain. But that’s wrong; it was Italy.)
After the whole forgery matter became public in 2003, the reports were compared to the documents. And it was clear that the reports the Italians had sent — especially the latter two — were based on the documents. In other words, by definition, the reports the United States was going on were baseless, even if U.S. intelligence didn’t know just how baseless they were at the time.
The British “Butler Report” goes to great lengths to argue that the British claims about Iraq and Niger weren’t undermined by the later detection of the forgeries. In the words of the report: “The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.”
But that is disingenuous to say the least.
True, the Brits didn’t have “the documents.” What they neglect to say is that one of their two pieces of intelligence — the one they placed the most stock in — was a summary of the forged documents, just like the United States had.
The Butler Report is intentionally obscure on this point. Far more candid was a September 2003 British parliamentary report that covered the same ground. And if you’re truly an obsessive about these matters, like I am, you can find that report online at www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/reports/isc/pdf/iwmdia.pdf — see Pages 27 and 28 for the relevant sections.
What remains is this other source of intelligence, which the Brits say they stand by but won’t disclose. And we’ve known that since last year. So on that point, nothing has changed.
When you look at all the intelligence the Niger claims were based on — and this is based both on the public record and on my reporting, which will appear in a future article — close to all of it can be traced back to the phony documents themselves or reports different intelligence agencies had that were in turn based on or summaries of those phony documents.
There’s a great effort now to say the Niger claim was true. But the evidence says otherwise.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: jmarshall@thehill.com
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