Diplomat: U.S. knew uranium report was false

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flavio

Banned
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A former U.S. diplomat said Sunday he told the Bush administration that Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from Niger in the late 1990s to develop nuclear weapons.

Former Ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson told NBC's "Meet the Press" he informed the CIA and the State Department that such information was false months before U.S. and British officials used it during the debate that led to war.

During his State of the Union address in January, two months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, President Bush accused Iraq of trying to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from an unnamed African country. He cited British intelligence, which had published a similar report in September 2002.

"If they were referring to Niger when they were referring to uranium sales from Africa to Iraq, ... that information was erroneous and ... they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said.
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this was one of hans blix's main bugbears with the information coming out of the us/uk. he was aware that the nucleur threat had been pretty much dreamt up and he was disappointed with the public persistence in referring to programs to acquire enriched uranium from africa that simply didn't exist.
 
PRETORIA, South Africa, July 9 -- President Bush today brushed aside questions about the accuracy of his claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear materials in Africa, declaring there was "no doubt" that his decision to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein from power was correct.

The president avoided directly answering questions about whether he regretted the inclusion of the claim and whether he still believed the charge -- that Iraq had sought a form of uranium from Niger -- to be true despite the acknowledgement from White House aides this week that the allegation was wrong and should not have been in the speech.

Bush dismissed the matter as "attempts to rewrite history."
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Heh. I'd be dissapointed if he hadn't. I should right him a letter thanking him for proving to me that all the worst things I think about politicians are right.
 
Face it, the man is a war criminal. No better than Hitler...He has caused the deaths of Americans, Brits, and Iraqis with his obvious lies and he should pay for those deaths. :cuss:
 
LONDON, July 9 — Britain on Wednesday defended its allegations that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons programme, saying its evidence was separate from forged information used by Washington to make the same case.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman said Britain had ''different knowledge'' from the United States to back up its charge, set out in Blair's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
''We included it in the dossier on our own analysis and assessment,'' Blair's spokesman told reporters.
His comments followed an admission by the White House National Security Council that President George W. Bush's claim Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was based on forged documents.
The announcement added to controversy which has dogged Bush and Blair over whether they manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to make the case for war against Baghdad.
Nearly three months after Saddam was toppled, no such weapons have yet been found in Iraq.
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PMSNBC
 
His comments followed an admission by the White House National Security Council that President George W. Bush's claim Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was based on forged documents.
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:shrug: My point, exactly...
 
Question is, is that an admission of guilt or an admission we really really need to improve our intel? Dubya isn't off the hook but there has been a decade of intelligence budget slashes, not just cuts but SLASHES.

With the medicare subsidy & similar things he's falling quickly. I still fully support our action in Iraq though
 
State of the Union

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
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And then there's then there's the Bush administration .

At a news conference, Mr. Kean described the presence of "minders" at the interviews as a form of intimidation. "I think the commission feels unanimously that it's some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency," he said. "You might get less testimony than you would."

"We would rather interview these people without minders or without agency people there," he said.
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Interesting similarity.
 
"We would rather interview these people without minders or without agency people there," he said.
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Then take them out to lunch. This is a free country.
 
Bush Considers Iraq Uranium Issue Closed

How fscking convenient.

They said the CIA never told the White House that the claim was suspicious.
But U.S. officials told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell that Tenet himself advised Rice’s top deputy, Steven Hadley, to remove a reference to the uranium report from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, establishing that the nation’s top intelligence officials suspected that the allegation was false more than three months before they approved Bush’s repeating it in his nationally televised address on Jan. 28.
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A year, almost to the day since the last post. A long voyage indeed.

What have we learned about the whistleblower, the yellowcake & having a wife in the intel business?

Joe Wilson's cover has been blown. For the past year, he has claimed to be a truth-teller, a whistleblower, the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy — and most of the media have lapped it up and cheered him on.
But now Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV — he of the Hermes ties and Jaguar convertibles — has been thoroughly discredited. Last week's bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who has been telling lies.

For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson says in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)
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NRO

The non-story is the alleged martyrdom of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilson, supposed by many to have suffered cruel exposure for their commitment to the truth. The missed story is the increasing evidence that Niger, in West Africa, was indeed the focus of an illegal trade in uranium ore for rogue states including Iraq.
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MSN

Wasn't that fun
 
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