The
Dubious Suicide of George Tenet
By William
Rivers Pitt
t r u th o u
t | Perspective Monday 14 July 2003
Things have
reached a pretty pass indeed when you apologize for making a mistake, but
nobody believes your apology. So it is today with CIA Director Tenet, and by
proxy George W. Bush and his administration.
On Friday
evening, CIA Director Tenet publicly jumped on the Niger evidence hand grenade,
claiming the use in Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2003 of data
from known forgeries to support the Iraq war was completely his fault. He never
told Bush's people that the data was corrupted, and it was his fault those
"sixteen words" regarding Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from
Niger for a nuclear program made it into the text of the speech.
Problem
solved, right? Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld had been triangulating on
Tenet since Thursday, claiming the CIA had never informed the White House about
the dubious nature of the Niger evidence. Tenet, like a good political
appointee, fell on his sword and took responsibility for the error. On
Saturday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press corps that Bush
had "moved on" from this controversy.
Not so fast,
said the New York Times editorial board. The paper of record for the Western
world published an editorial on Saturday entitled "The Uranium
Fiction." The last time the Times editors used language this strong was
when Bush, in a moment of seemingly deranged hubris, tried to nominate master
secret-keeper Henry Kissinger to chair the 9/11 investigation:
"It is
clear, however, that much more went into this affair than the failure of the
C.I.A. to pounce on the offending 16 words in Mr. Bush's speech. A good deal of
information already points to a willful effort by the war camp in the
administration to pump up an accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and
that was pretty well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the well of
the House of Representatives last January. Doubts about the accusation were
raised in March 2002 by Joseph Wilson, a former American diplomat, after he was
dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to look into the issue. Mr. Wilson has said
he is confident that his concerns were circulated not only within the agency
but also at the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Mr. Tenet, in his statement yesterday, confirmed that the Wilson findings had
been given wide distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney
and other high officials had not been directly informed about them by the
C.I.A."
The sun came
up over Washington DC on Sunday and shined on copies of the Washington Post
which were waiting patiently to be read. The lead headline for the Sunday
edition read, "CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in October." The meat of
the article states:
"CIA
Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to
have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential
speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same
intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior
administration officials.
"Tenet
argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security
adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came
from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior
official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the
accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned
out to be forged."
What
do we have here?
Here is CIA
Director Tenet arguing in October of 2002 against the use of the Niger
evidence, stating bluntly that it was useless. He made this pitch directly to
the White House. These concerns were brushed aside by Bush officials, and the
forged evidence was used despite the warnings in the State of the Union
address. Now, the administration is trying to claim they were never told the
evidence was bad. Yet between Tenet's personal appeals in 2002, and Ambassador
Wilson's assurances that everyone who needed to know was in the know regarding
Niger, it appears the Bush White House has been caught red-handed in a series
of incredible falsehoods.
There are two
more layers on this onion to be peeled. The first concerns Secretary of State
Powell. One week after the Niger evidence was used by Bush in the State of the
Union address, Powell presented to the United Nations the administration's case
for war. The Niger evidence was notably absent from Powell's presentation.
According to CBS News, Powell said, "I didn't use the uranium at that
point because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to
present before the world."
What a
difference a week makes. The White House would have us believe they were
blissfully unaware of the forged nature of their war evidence when Bush gave
his State of the Union address, and yet somehow the Secretary of State knew
well enough to avoid using it just seven days later. The moral of the story
appears to be that rotten war evidence is not fit for international
consumption, but is perfectly suitable for delivery to the American people.
The second
layer to be peeled deals with the administration's newest excuse for using the
forged Niger evidence to justify a war. They are claiming now that they used it
because the British government told them it was solid. Yet there was the story
published by the Washington Post on July 11 with the headline, "CIA Asked
Britain to Drop Iraq Claim." The article states:
"The CIA
tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government
to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to
buy uranium in Africa that President Bush included in his State of the Union
address four months later, senior Bush administration officials said yesterday.
'We consulted about the paper and recommended against using that material,' a
senior administration official familiar with the intelligence program
said."
We are
supposed to believe that the Bush administration was completely unaware that
their Niger evidence was fake. We are supposed to believe George Tenet dropped
the ball. Yet the CIA actively intervened with the British government in
September of 2002, telling them the evidence was worthless. The CIA Director
personally got the evidence stricken from a Bush speech in October of 2002.
Intelligence insiders like Joseph Wilson and Greg Thielmann have stated
repeatedly that everyone who needed to know the evidence was bad had been fully
and completely informed almost a year before the data was used in the State of
the Union address.
In an
interesting twist, the profoundly questionable nature of Tenet's confession has
reached all the way around the planet to Australia. I spoke on Sunday to Andrew
Wilkie, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Office of National
Assessments, the senior Australian intelligence agency which provides
intelligence assessments to the Australian prime minister. Mr. Wilkie notes the
following:
"In the
last week in Australia, the Defense Intelligence Organization has admitted they
had the information on the Niger forgeries and says they didn't tell the
Defense Minister. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has admitted
they had the information on the Niger forgeries and didn't tell the Foreign
Minister. The place I used to work, the Office of National Assessments, has
admitted publicly that they knew the Niger evidence was fake and didn't tell
the Prime Minister about it.
"You've
got three intelligence organizations in Australia, the intelligence
organizations in the US, and every one is saying they knew this was bad
information, but not one political leader reckons they were told. All three
organizations have said they didn't give this information to their political leaders.
It is unbelievable to the point of fantasy."
I also spoke
on Sunday with Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who was interviewed
by truthout on these matters on June 26 2003. Mr. McGovern is not buying what
the White House is trying to sell.
"Tenet's
confession is designed to take the heat off," says McGovern, "to
assign some responsibility somewhere. It's not going to work. There's too much
deception here. For example, Condoleezza Rice insisted that she only learned on
June 8 about Former Ambassador Wilson's mission to Niger back in February 2002.
That means that neither she nor her staff reads the New York Times, because
Nick Kristof on May 6 had a very detailed explication of Wilson's mission to
Niger. In my view, it is inconceivable that her remark this week - that she
didn't know about Joe Wilson's mission to Niger until she was asked on a talk
show on June 8 - that is stretching the truth beyond the breaking point."
Andrew Wilkie
crystallized the issue at hand by stating, "Remember that the sourcing of
uranium from Niger was the only remaining pillar of the argument that Iraq was
trying to reconstitute its nuclear program. By this stage, the aluminum tubes
story about Iraq's nuclear program had been laughed out of the room. That had been
laughable since 2001, leaving the sourcing of uranium as the last key piece of
evidence about Iraq reconstituting a nuclear program. It's not just sixteen
words.
"It is
just downright mischievous to hear Condoleezza Rice on CNN this morning saying
it was just sixteen words. It was worth a hell of a lot more than sixteen
words. I can remember that October speech by Bush where he talked about
"mushroom clouds" from Iraq. The nuclear story was always played up
as the most emotive and persuasive theme. It wasn't just sixteen words."
A page on the
White House's own website describes the Bush administration's central argument
for war in Iraq. The Niger evidence is featured prominently, along with claims
that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of
botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents, almost 30,000
munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, and several mobile biological
weapons labs. The Niger evidence has been destroyed, and the 'mobile weapons labs'
have been shown to be weather balloon launching platforms. The vast quantities
of anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin, mustard gas and VX, along with the
munitions to deliver them, have completely failed to show up.
Many people
quail at the idea that the President and his people could have lied so
egregiously. What was in it for them? Besides the incredible amounts of money
to be made from the war by oil and defense corporations like Halliburton and
United Defense, two companies with umbilical ties to the administration, there
was an "ancillary benefit to all this," according to Ray McGovern.
"Not only did the President get an authorization to make war, but there
was an election that next month, the November midterms. The elections turned out
surprisingly well for the Bush administration because they were able to use
charges of being 'soft on Saddam' against those Democratic candidates who voted
against the war."
As Andrew
Wilkie says, this issue is not about sixteen words in a speech. It is about
lies and American credibility. "All of this breaking news is actually
distracting us from the core issue," says Wilkie. "The core issue is
the credibility gap. We were sold this war on the promise that Iraq had this
massive WMD arsenal. Of course that hasn't been found, and whatever might be
found now is not going to satisfy in any way that description of the 'massive'
arsenal, the 'imminent threat,' and all those great words used in Britain and
Australia and Washington. We've got to be careful that, in debating the details
on the issue of Tenet and Niger, we are not distracted from that core issue
which is still left to be resolved."
William Rivers Pitt <mailto:william.pitt@m...> is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto Press at www.SilenceIsSedition.com. (c) Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org