5/29/2005
The Thirteen Words
Along with "catching up" on the news I'm finally getting around to reading Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command.
You might have assumed that the November election made this and other books of their ilk, passe. To which I respectfully respond: au contraire.
As it turns out, the Downing St. Memo and the report of pre-war bombing (Times of London) makes a second pass at this material that much more relevant.
One of the things that was never clear to me was the hubub over the passage in the 2003 SOU concerning whether Sadam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, and in particular the reaction against Joe Wilson. Why go the politically risky route of exposing a CIA operative in retaliation for exposing the weakness of that assertion? To me that would be like destroying a wildlife reservation so you can take your SUV on a roadtrip.
Okay, bad example. And, certainly, the Bush administration has never been accused of under-reacting on anything. Except of course for the PDB about Bin Laden attacking a month before he attacked. Okay, so you need to pick your examples carefully.
The point is, it wasn't just the SOU as we learn from this passage in Chain of Command:
Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foeign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, initially denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger when my story appeared, in March 2003. I learned later that an internal Senate investigation was launched to identify my source.)The same bogus Niger-uranium story was used to make the case to the Senate, and if I'm reading Hersh right, was a key piece of evidence to get them to authorize the war. That would at least explain why the reaction to What I Didn't Find in Africa was so strong.
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