Burden of Proof
Two reporters charge the Bush administration with using fraudulent intelligence to start a war.
Reviewed by Martin Kettle
Washington Post
HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
In October 2002, a file of documents from the U.S. embassy in Rome arrived on the desk of one of the State Department's senior nuclear proliferation analysts. The papers had been handed over by an Italian journalist, who had been given them by an informer who had, in turn, obtained them from a mysterious source in the embassy of Niger. The documents purported to show that Niger had signed a July 2000 deal to supply Iraq with 500 tons of yellowcake uranium -- about one-sixth of the African country's annual production and a key ingredient in a uranium-enrichment process that could provide Saddam Hussein's regime with a nuclear bomb.
As Simon Dodge of the State Department's intelligence bureau began to review the documents in Washington, he soon concluded that they were fakes. One of the papers described a secret meeting in Rome at which representatives of Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Pakistan formed a joint "plan of action" to defend themselves against the West in alliance with "Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations." Dodge later told Senate investigators that he considered the claim "completely implausible," or, as Michael Isikoff and David Corn put it, "something out of James Bond -- or maybe Austin Powers." Niger embassy stamps, palpably fake, linked the "plan of action" document to those depicting the Iraq deal. The papers are a hoax, Dodge e-mailed colleagues.
This was not what most in the White House wanted to hear. By October 2002, when Dodge began examining the Niger documents, the Bush administration was already accelerating its drive for war against Iraq. An authoritative demolition of one of the most dramatic parts of that case -- that Baghdad was building a nuclear weapon -- was deeply unwelcome and, coming from the diplomats at the State Department, viewed with particular suspicion by Vice President Cheney's office. Partly by accident (the CIA merely put its copy of the "obviously forged" Rome papers in a vault and left them there) and partly because it simply did not want to know, the White House remained in denial about the unreliability of the whole Niger uranium story. Fatefully, the president would use the claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003. It was the principal basis for the administration's repeated rhetorical flourish that the Iraqi smoking gun might "come in the form of a mushroom cloud." And it was a phony.
The Niger claim provides the central thread in Hubris , Isikoff and Corn's exhaustive reconstruction of the formulation and selling of the Iraq War. For those who wish to understand how one of the most powerful officials in the land -- Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- came to be under indictment for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements arising out of the Niger story, this book is indispensable.
But Niger was not the only proffered justification for the attack on Iraq that eventually crumbled to dust in the light of day. So did the false claims of Iraqi defectors, such as the shadowy informant known as "Curveball," that Iraq possessed mobile biological laboratories, a claim that was a centerpiece of then-secretary of state Colin Powell's U.N. presentation in February 2003. So did the misguided conviction that Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes was proof of a nuclear-arms program. So did the long-disproved claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague in April 2001, which became almost an article of faith for the administration's hawks.
(There is more.)
Reviewed by Martin Kettle
Washington Post
HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
In October 2002, a file of documents from the U.S. embassy in Rome arrived on the desk of one of the State Department's senior nuclear proliferation analysts. The papers had been handed over by an Italian journalist, who had been given them by an informer who had, in turn, obtained them from a mysterious source in the embassy of Niger. The documents purported to show that Niger had signed a July 2000 deal to supply Iraq with 500 tons of yellowcake uranium -- about one-sixth of the African country's annual production and a key ingredient in a uranium-enrichment process that could provide Saddam Hussein's regime with a nuclear bomb.
As Simon Dodge of the State Department's intelligence bureau began to review the documents in Washington, he soon concluded that they were fakes. One of the papers described a secret meeting in Rome at which representatives of Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Pakistan formed a joint "plan of action" to defend themselves against the West in alliance with "Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations." Dodge later told Senate investigators that he considered the claim "completely implausible," or, as Michael Isikoff and David Corn put it, "something out of James Bond -- or maybe Austin Powers." Niger embassy stamps, palpably fake, linked the "plan of action" document to those depicting the Iraq deal. The papers are a hoax, Dodge e-mailed colleagues.
This was not what most in the White House wanted to hear. By October 2002, when Dodge began examining the Niger documents, the Bush administration was already accelerating its drive for war against Iraq. An authoritative demolition of one of the most dramatic parts of that case -- that Baghdad was building a nuclear weapon -- was deeply unwelcome and, coming from the diplomats at the State Department, viewed with particular suspicion by Vice President Cheney's office. Partly by accident (the CIA merely put its copy of the "obviously forged" Rome papers in a vault and left them there) and partly because it simply did not want to know, the White House remained in denial about the unreliability of the whole Niger uranium story. Fatefully, the president would use the claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003. It was the principal basis for the administration's repeated rhetorical flourish that the Iraqi smoking gun might "come in the form of a mushroom cloud." And it was a phony.
The Niger claim provides the central thread in Hubris , Isikoff and Corn's exhaustive reconstruction of the formulation and selling of the Iraq War. For those who wish to understand how one of the most powerful officials in the land -- Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- came to be under indictment for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements arising out of the Niger story, this book is indispensable.
But Niger was not the only proffered justification for the attack on Iraq that eventually crumbled to dust in the light of day. So did the false claims of Iraqi defectors, such as the shadowy informant known as "Curveball," that Iraq possessed mobile biological laboratories, a claim that was a centerpiece of then-secretary of state Colin Powell's U.N. presentation in February 2003. So did the misguided conviction that Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes was proof of a nuclear-arms program. So did the long-disproved claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague in April 2001, which became almost an article of faith for the administration's hawks.
(There is more.)
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