The 16 words that changed the world - The White House, CIA, and yellowcake

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

These 16 words, spoken by the president in his 2003 State of the Union Address, ended up becoming the justification for preemptively invading Iraq and is the reason why Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff and assistant to the president, is now a convicted felon. It took a little over four years to play out, but the effect of those 16 words is now becoming clear.

Gov. George W. Bush came to Washington early in 2001, after a majority of justices on the Supreme Court “granted” him a (highly technical) electoral victory over Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Needless to say, he didn’t have a clear mandate. What he did have was Karl Rove, who had to know that no incumbent wartime president with an approval rating over 50 percent has ever lost an election. Rove’s mandate was clear: Keep the president’s approval rating up and the United States in a military conflict. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 19 guys with a death wish provided everything he would need.

Unfortunately, the war in Afghanistan was over by the end of 2001 and the 2004 election was too far away for the president to run as a “wartime incumbent.”

The State of the Union is a constitutionally mandated address to a joint session of Congress which the Bush administration has used masterfully. In 2002, the president created the “Axis of Evil” (countries which seek WMD’s and/or export terrorism): North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The countries were selected because of their synergy: North Korea seeks WMD’s, but doesn’t export terrorism, Iran sort of seeks WMD’s and definitely exports terrorism, and Iraq sort of seeks WMD’s but doesn’t export terrorism. The administration started with Iraq.

But by the fall of 2002, polls showed the administration had failed to make its case. Still, they couldn’t wait any longer. Their plan predicted a six month war which, even if it ran long, would still be over in time for the president to coast to re-election. So on Oct. 7, 2002, the president gave a speech in Cincinnati in which he outlined the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. In his original draft, the president was going to publicly accuse Saddam of trying to develop nuclear weapons by saying, “and the regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from sources in Africa.” But the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, personally told National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to remove that portion because he didn’t want the president to be a “fact witness for that statement.”

On the eve of the 2003 State of the Union address, there was fierce debate between the White House and the CIA. The president wanted the Africa/uranium story in the speech, but Tenet wouldn’t clear it. The White House needed Saddam to be pursuing nuclear weapons, but the agency had no evidence of it. The bottom line was Tenet couldn’t allow the president to make that exact statement. So they came up with a compromise: The president would represent the statement as truth, but attribute it to another source. Sure, the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Africa, but the American government had learned tbat the British story wasn’t true.

How? The vice president asked the CIA to investigate the story. The CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He told the CIA the story was wrong. The CIA notified the rest of the intelligence community, but not the White House — so the president could maintain plausible deniability (which he did). The rest is history.

When it became clear how wrong prewar intelligence was and the Africa/uranium story ended up being the last piece of the war-justification puzzle, Joseph Wilson spoke out in an op/ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” which destroyed the administration’s case for war. In response, the White House decided to destroy Wilson’s credibility — not by challenging the facts of his report to the CIA, but by trying to emasculate him. They suggested he was only chosen because his wife works for the CIA, and it was her idea to send him. It’s that disclosure (and its pathetic cover-up) which created this whole mess.

Ironically, the effort to get to the bottom of the Africa/uranium story and the effort to discredit the man who actually did the job were both coordinated out of the office of the vice president. Even more ironic is the fact that the man who asked the Justice Department to investigate the disclosure of the CIA agent’s identity — Tenet — is the same man who tried to prevent the president from using those now-infamous 16 words in the first place.

If they had listened, Lewis Libby wouldn’t
be a convict.

Iraq conflict is an insult to services - Connecting Saddam to September 11, 2001

Among the list of words and phrases the Bush administration avoids using at all costs (“Osama bin Laden,” “Abu Ghraib,” “WMD,” “Karl Rove”), none is more important than “Congressional Authorization.” The Oct. 16, 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is a brilliant piece of political fiction concocted by administration lawyers who implied and insinuated the Iraq/al Qaeda connection in order to get a compliant Congress to sign off on it as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. It was designed to piggy-back on a similar authorization a year earlier to use force against those nations, persons or organizations responsible for the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Congressional Authorization is the legal foundation for the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and warrantless domestic wiretapping. It is the basis for the Executive power grab Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been planning for since the Ford administration. The president will do anything to retain Congressional Authorization — and the time has come for the Democratic Congress to take another look at it.

The 2002 AUMF has no fewer than 10 references to Iraq’s WMD programs, almost 20 references to the United Nations/Security Council resolutions, and, most disgustingly, 10 mentions of international terrorism and/or Sept. 11, 2001. Why are these references problematic? Let’s take a look:

The WMD and weapons program references mention Iraqi defectors who basically said Iraq “had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program” which was closer to fruition than anyone thought. The problem is the U.S. intelligence community regarded the word of these defectors as less than credible, and one of them (code name “Curveball”) was called an outright “fabricator.”

The parts of the AUMF which mention U.N. resolutions are particularly interesting because the U.N. Charter (to which the U.S. is a signatory) says Member States will only use force when authorized by the Security Council, in cases of imminent danger, or in self-defense. Though Saddam Hussein was contained, the AUMF tries hard to paint the Iraqi government as a threat to U.S. security because of the weapons programs detailed by the “defectors.” The most offensive portions of the AUMF pertain to Iraq’s role in international terrorism and the hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001. First, it says Iraq was “supporting and harboring terrorist organizations” (a reference to one man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the fact that he maintained a safe-house in Iraq). Then it mentions that members of Al Qaeda, “an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, including the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 are known to be in Iraq” (referring to the same person). It goes on to say, “Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens,” as though the people who planned the hijackings were sitting around eating hummus and pita with Saddam.

The reason this is so offensive became clear in a White House press conference the president held last Aug. 21, in which the following exchange took place:

President Bush: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before
we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Q: What did Iraq have to do with that?

President Bush: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q: The attack on the World Trade Center?

President Bush: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.

Many of my fellow Americans, wanting to take the fight back to the terrorist enemy who brought the fight to our shores, volunteered for military service in the weeks and months following Sept. 11, 2001. In his rhetoric, the president combined the unwanted war in Afghanistan with the war of choice in Iraq, while his lawyers worked hard to justify it through the prism of international terrorism. Saying Iraq had “nothing” to do with the events of that September morning when his administration worked so hard to imply a connection between the two is an insult to the men and women fighting for us.