Two Explosive Books Tell the Inside Story of the Forged Iraq-Niger Docs (Amy Goodman)

  In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared the infamous sixteen words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The claim was central to the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction and served as a basis for launching the Iraq invasion less than two months later. Bush’s declaration was based on an intelligence document that provided evidence about Iraq’s purchase of uranium from the African country of Niger. But there was one problem: the document was a fake.

Amy Goodman: So we're back to the day that President Bush made his statement within the State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's attempt to get uranium from Africa. Peter Eisner, what role did the CIA play in this statement?

  In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with the authors of two explosive new books. Carlo Bonini is the Italian reporter who broke the Niger story. His new book is called “Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror.” Peter Eisner is a veteran foreign correspondent and is currently an editor at the Washington Post. His new book is “The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq.” [includes rush transcript]

  PETER EISNER: The CIA actually had attempted to block the statement by President Bush relating uranium purchases in Niger. And, in fact, three months before the State of the Union message, on October 7, 2002 -- strangely, the same day that Rocco Martino handed over the documents to Elisabetta Burba -- President Bush was scheduled to deliver a speech in Cincinnati, and the draft of that speech said pretty much what he ended up saying in the State of the Union message. That was, that the British had found that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Africa.

  The CIA was given routinely a copy of that text in advance and argued that that sentence about uranium should be removed. There was quite an argument between the lower CIA officials and White House staff, including Stephen Hadley, at the time the assistant National Security Advisor, now the National Security Advisor, once Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State. Finally, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, had to intercede on October 7 and demand that the White House remove the sentence describing uranium purchases in Niger. It was quite a dust-up.

  As a result of that, the White House, burned, decided that in the interim it would not provide advanced text of presidential speeches to the CIA to avoid having to withdraw information that it didn't want to withdraw. So, the day before the State of the Union message, no one at the CIA had seen the text of the State of the Union message, until the night before. Someone just mildly passed a draft text to George Tenet during a meeting, which was not the normal procedure for vetting a document. And basically everyone at the CIA was surprised when President Bush uttered that statement, which had already been excised three months earlier. The response by the White House staff was, “Whoops! We forgot.”

   AMY GOODMAN: And yet, what happened? This was still before the President's address?

   PETER EISNER: Well, in effect, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, the day before, received the text, handed it off to an aide, and nobody took a look at it. It could have been stopped, but usually, you know, days before, as the text is being prepared, written, analyzed, someone would look at it. In this case, they didn't, although the Bush administration did have allies elsewhere in the CIA that were kind of giving them cover to be able to make this statement, while a vast majority, I would say, of the intelligence community in the United States did not believe for an instant that Iraq was trying to buy uranium or that Iraq was trying to restart its nuclear program.

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