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.