I wonder if this is why folks (you know, those “lying liars”) were suggesting that Iraq was trying to buy “yellowcake” uranium in Niger and other African nations during the pre-war years.
It was Saddam Hussein’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as “Baghdad Bob,” who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade — an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium.
What’s that? What Rethuglican flack is spreading such scurrilous tales and pathetically transparent lies about this already discredited matter? After all, we all know that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was sent to Niger on behalf of the CIA and State Dept. to determine whether such rumors were true, and he reported back categorically that it was all a tissue of lies, which report was then blown off by an administration seeking war. So who’s peddling this claptrap?
That’s according to a new book Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had been trying to buy enriched “yellowcake” uranium. Wilson wrote that he did not learn the identity of the Iraqi official until this January, when he talked again with his Niger source.
Oh. Never mind.
Sahhaf’s role casts more light on an aspect of Wilson’s report to the CIA that was publicly disclosed last summer. On the heels of Wilson’s public criticism that intelligence was exaggerated and his statement that his trip to Niger had turned up no uranium sales to Iraq, agency Director George J. Tenet took the blame for allowing President Bush to make assertions about the Iraqi quest for nuclear material in his 2003 State of the Union address. Tenet said the intelligence had been too “fragmentary” to merit inclusion in the speech.
Tenet’s statement noted that Wilson had reported back to the CIA that a former Niger official told him that “in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss ‘expanding commercial relations’ between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.”
In his book, Wilson recounts his encounter with the unnamed Niger official in 2002, saying, he “hesitated and looked up to the sky as if plumbing the depths of his memory, then offered that perhaps the Iraqi might have wanted to talk about uranium.” Wilson did not get the Iraqi’s name in 2002, but he writes that he talked to his source again four months ago, and that the former official said he saw Sahhaf on television before the start of the war and recognized him as the person he talked to in 1999.
So Wilson found no evidence of sales, but he did have indications that an Iraqi delegation had perhaps been looking to discuss uranium sales. And now it turns out that it was an actual, identifiable Iraqi official who really may have been making such inquiries.
I mean, it’s not quite a smoking gun, but it’s not Evil, Lying, Rethuglican Fantasy” time, either.
(via QandO)