{"id":27,"date":"2003-07-10T18:27:52","date_gmt":"2003-07-10T23:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=27"},"modified":"2003-07-10T18:27:52","modified_gmt":"2003-07-10T23:27:52","slug":"liar_liar_iraqs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/07\/10\/liar_liar_iraqs.html","title":{"rendered":"Liar, liar, Iraq’s on fire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since it’s nearly impossible to turn around over the past few days without running accross references to (essentially) Bush blatantly lying in his 2003 State of the Union<\/a> address about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, since that story was based on a forged document that the US new to be bogus a year earlier. <\/p>\n

Bush’s statement in question is remarkably short, and rather indirect:<\/p>\n

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.<\/p>\n

(That this whole brouhaha has been triggered by the White House itself <\/i>retracting reliance on that bogus document, long after the fact, not by some huge breaking bit of insider information is lost in the discussion.)<\/p>\n

The problem is, not only does this beg the issue of whether everyone thought that Iraq probably had WMDs ferreted away, but two other articles I’ve run across seem to indicate that the story is a lot more complex.<\/p>\n

First off, did the White House actually know the report was bogus? Or <\/a>was that analysis not passed on from the CIA<\/a>?<\/p>\n

A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program — its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger — was disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies, the officials said.<\/p>\n

(Though there is some question about this — other reports have mentioned in passing, other officials saying that the information was passed on, or perhaps was passed on without qualifications that might have flagged it as more believable.)<\/p>\n

Secondly, was the Niger\/Africa uranium story based only on that bogus document? Or was there other intelligence that pointed in that direction as well<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Addressing Parliament, Blair insisted that the story was not “a fantasy,” as some U.S. sources were claiming, and that reports that British intelligence had based its finding solely on documents that later turned out to be counterfeit were not true.
\n“The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called ‘forged’ documents, they came from separate intelligence,” Blair insisted, according to the BBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What I find amazing is that so much is being made over one, small, self-retracted statement in the SOTU as something that is tantamount to the Gulf of Tonkin — especially since (a) there were a lot of other statements in the SOTU supporting the case for war, and (b) it sounds like it’s not really a case of lying after all. If those who have doubts about the war’s justifications are looking for something to nail Dubya on, this seems like a pretty weak foundation upon which to do so, and may actually end up discrediting that cause.<\/p>\n

(via InstaPundit<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since it’s nearly impossible to turn around over the past few days without running accross references to (essentially) Bush blatantly lying in his 2003 State of the Union address about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitical-brouhaha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6174,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/04\/30\/let_them_buy_ca.html","url_meta":{"origin":27,"position":0},"title":"Let them buy cake!","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 30-Apr-04 3:00pm","format":false,"excerpt":"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...","rel":"","context":"In "Geopolitical Brouhaha"","block_context":{"text":"Geopolitical Brouhaha","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/geopolitical-brouhaha"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6036,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/06\/02\/shocked_2.html","url_meta":{"origin":27,"position":1},"title":"Shocked!","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 2-Jun-04 9:54pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The International Atomic Energy Agency is shocked, shocked, to find suspicious nuclear program work in Iran. 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