New York Times - July 15, 2003 - Nicholas D. Kristof column

After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the

Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained

that there was more to the story that I didn't know.

Yup. And now it's coming out.

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this

picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the

Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The

Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security

Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits.

It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of

dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess -- and that

created the false expectations undermining our occupation today.

Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Condi Rice says she first learned of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's

fact-finding trip to Niger during a TV interview, presumably when George

Stephanopoulos asked her on "This Week" on June 8 about a column by me

describing the trip. (Condi, you're breaking my heart -- you didn't read

that column itself? How about if I fax you copies of everything I write, so

you don't miss any, and you fax me everything you write?)

Actually, I have to agree with Ms. Rice that the focus on that single

sentence in the State of the Union address is a bit obsessive. It was only

16 words, attributed in a weaselly way that made it almost accurate, and as

any journalist knows well, mistakes do get into print.

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spooks are so upset that they're speaking out.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has had town hall meetings in which everyone was told not to talk to journalists (thanks, guys, for naming me in particular). One insider complains: "In the most recent meeting, we also were told that, as much as possible, we should avoid `caveat-ing' our intelligence assessments. . . . Forget nuance, forget fine distinctions; they only confuse these guys. If that isn't a downright scary dumbing-down of our intelligence product, I don't know what is."

Intelligence isn't just being dumbed down, but is also being manipulated--and it's continuing.

Experts say the recent firefight on the Syrian-Iraq border involved not Saddam Hussein or a family member, as we were led to believe, but just some Iraqi petroleum smugglers. Moreover, Patrick Lang, a former senior D.I.A. official, says that many in the government believe that incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt cooperation between the U.S. and Syria.

While the scandal has so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hard-liner's urging the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spooks refused, and Colin Powell backed them.

Then there's North Korea. The C.I.A.'s assessments on North Korea's nuclear weaponry were suddenly juiced up beginning in December 2001. The alarmist assessments (based on no new evidence) continued until January of this year, when the White House wanted to play down the Korean crisis. Then assessments abruptly restored the less ominous language of the 1990's.

The latest issue of the Naval War College Review describes the ambiguities of the North Korean uranium program and argues that U.S. officials "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

"Is there a parallel with what is now going on, after the fact, in estimates about Iraq?" asked the article's author, Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, in an interview. "I think there may be."

So that chiding White House official was right: there was more to the

picture. But I'm afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like

a pattern of dishonesty.

==================

"Pattern Of Corruption"

New York Times - July 15, 2003 - Paul Krugman column

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position fordealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?

How did we get into this mess?

The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.

Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began

trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq.

Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why

we were going after a country that hadn't attacked us. It would also have

suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not

help, U.S. security.

So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence

assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to

predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were

expected to support the case for an Iraq war.

The story of how the threat from Iraq's alleged W.M.D.'s was hyped is now,

finally, coming out. But let's not forget the persistent claim that Saddam

was allied with Al Qaeda, which allowed the hawks to pretend that the Iraq

war had something to do with fighting terrorism.

As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.

And during the run-up to war, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, was willing to provide cover for his bosses -- just as he did last weekend. In an October 2002 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he made what looked like an assertion that there really were meaningful connections between Saddam and Osama. Read closely, the letter is evasive, but it served the administration's purpose.

What about the risk that an invasion of Iraq would weaken America's security? Warnings from military experts that an extended postwar occupation might severely strain U.S. forces have proved precisely on the mark. But the hawks prevented any consideration of this possibility. Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days.

It gets worse. Knight Ridder newspapers report that a "small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department" were sure that their favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, could easily be installed in power. They were able to prevent skeptics from getting a hearing -- and they had no backup plan when efforts to anoint Mr. Chalabi, a millionaire businessman, degenerated into farce.

So who will be held accountable? Mr. Tenet betrayed his office by tailoring statements to reflect the interests of his political masters, rather than the assessments of his staff -- but that's not why he may soon be fired. Yesterday USA Today reported that "some in the Bush administration are arguing privately for a C.I.A. director who will be unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call witnesses."

Not that the committees are likely to press very hard: Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems more concerned about protecting his party's leader than protecting the country. "What concerns me most," he says, is "what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president."

In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their tracks by corrupting the system even further.

"A Shifting Spotlight on Uranium Sales" New York Times - July 15, 2003 - By David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON, July 14 -- The White House defense of President Bush's State of the Union speech comes down to this: The president was technically accurate when he cited a British report alleging Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa, but he never should have said it.

The evidence "did not meet the standards we use for the president," said Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and the minder of Mr. Bush's pronouncements. That is putting it politely. American intelligence agencies questioned the accuracy of the British report, and even doubted their own evidence.

Now Ms. Rice and her colleagues are pointing the finger at George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who never read the draft of the State of the Union speech that the White House sent him and, by his own admission, never asked that it be withdrawn.

It is a curious defense, one that acknowledges that the president cited dubious intelligence and admits that the vetting process failed, while arguing that history may yet prove him right. It plays to the central argument that Mr. Bush and his aides have used in trying to quiet a growing political storm: that Mr. Hussein posed an urgent threat, no matter what was going on in the uranium mines of Niger.

But if the White House's changing -- and sometimes contradictory -- time line of events leading up to the speech is to be believed, Ms. Rice's aides knew as early as October that some underlying evidence was suspect. The C.I.A., according to that time line, changed its assessment of the reliability of that evidence three times in four months -- enough to make clear that there was reason to doubt the quality of the evidence.

That has led to questions that Mr. Bush and his aides have still not answered. Why did Mr. Bush's aides keep coming back to the Africa case as "an emblematic example" of Mr. Hussein's surreptitious activities, as one administration official terms it, if so many in the intelligence world were questioning it?

Further, how did it survive so many drafts of the State of the Union speech in January, only to be thrown out, days later, by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who found the evidence so thin that he dared not take it to the United Nations for his own presentation?

By the time Mr. Powell made it to the C.I.A. to prepare his own case against Iraq -- three nights after the State of the Union address -- the intelligence agencies were "not carrying it as a credible item," he said in an interview. How it met Mr. Bush's standards and not Mr. Powell's is one of the mysteries the White House has not addressed.

The answer, some in the intelligence world say, is that the evidence did not change -- but the political environment around it did.

When the first reports of Mr. Hussein's reported interest in Niger flowed in, apparently from a foreign intelligence service, they caught the eye of aides to Vice President Dick Cheney, perhaps the most hawkish corner of a hawkish administration, but also one with long experience in Iraq. They knew that Mr. Hussein had obtained uranium ore -- called yellowcake -- in the African country two decades ago. It seemed reasonable he might go back for more. The request for further investigation went back to the C.I.A.

The report came back that Niger denied it had sold anything. But Ari Fleischer, who spent his last day as White House press secretary defending the administration's decision-making, noted today that it included an account of Iraqi businessmen who met with Niger officials seeking to "expand business contacts." As one official on White House national security staff said the other day, "Their contacts in Niger didn't think that meant they wanted to open a McDonald's. They interpreted it to mean they wanted more uranium."

But there was no proof, and an eager speechwriter included the specifics in a speech Mr. Bush was scheduled to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7 that Iraq had sought 550 metric tons of yellowcake. Mr. Tenet called Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, to have the dubious statement deleted. It was.

It is what happened next that has investigators searching for evidence that intelligence was manipulated for political purposes. Three weeks after the speech, the evidence that Mr. Tenet removed showed up in the classified "National Intelligence Estimate," which was sent to Congress. So was the statement that Iraq was looking for uranium in Somalia and Congo. There was a vague footnote explaining that the State Department had doubts. It turns out that so did many in the C.I.A., who say the charge never should have been in the formal intelligence estimate, a document reflecting the views of many intelligence agencies.

Its appearance in print cleared the way for repetition of the tale. And someone -- the White House won't say who -- put the reference into early drafts of the State of the Union address.

Mr. Fleischer insisted that the new reference "was different" from the one removed in Cincinnati -- it was a general claim that Mr. Hussein had "sought" uranium in Africa, not that he had obtained any. But clearly someone in the White House wanted more details to come out of the president's mouth. A mid-level N.S.C. official called the C.I.A. for more details.

After all, specifics would add dramatic effect and underscore the urgency to act. Chemical and biological weapons are hard to deliver and harder to understand, but the world knows the mushroom cloud, the image Ms. Rice used in describing what the next Sept. 11 attack could look like if Mr. Hussein gave nuclear weapons to terrorists. According to the accounts provided by the White House, the C.I.A. official, Alan Foley, pushed back, saying the specifics could not be verified. That is when the White House reached for the unclassified British report, and attributed the statement to Prime Minister Tony Blair's intelligence services. "It would have been better not to include it," Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, said on television on Sunday, when asked why his boss was citing foreign intelligence reports instead of his own.

That seemed to state the safely obvious. But was the report cited to manipulate the evidence?

"A lot of bull," Mr. Fleischer said about that accusation today, with the candor of a man about to go to the private sector. Inside the C.I.A. and the State Department, though, many are still asking how a White House aware of the doubts could have shown such caution in October, and thrown it to the winds in January.