Evidence

ORIGINAL

The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say.

An analysis of claims that there was any evidence of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006195.php

The Proof is in the Military's Own Autopsy Reports
Death By Torture: US Media Ignores Hard Evidence
By PETER PHILLIPS

Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church.

FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence
By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into one of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.

http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/717

The liberal blogosphere has been way out in front of investigating the origin of the forged Niger documents that may have been deliberately used to help sell the war in Iraq. I've come across a lot of insights from investigative bloggers who have been connecting the dots using information from the public record -- as well as doing some original reporting.

These forged Niger documents were publicly discredited as being "not authentic" by Mohamed ElBaradei on March 7th, 2003 before the war began 12 days later, but it has always been a bit of a mystery as to who forged them -- as well as how they ended up being used by the Bush Administration to help create the impression that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.

The cultural right has their takedown of Dan Rather under their belts, and if it turns out that the forged documents originated from the United States and can be tied to the Bush Administration, then that would certainly not bode well for Republicans in the next election cycle and could ultimately result in impeachment hearings with a Democrat majority in Congress.

Iraq on the Record: A searchable collection of 237 specific misleading statements made by Bush Administration officials about the threat posed by Iraq.
http://democrats.reform.house.gov/IraqOnTheReco

Treasongate: The Niger Forgeries v. the CIA Intel Reports - Preliminary Conclusion: An Italian Job
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/005952.php

Treasongate: The Niger Forgeries v. the CIA Intel Reports - Post Script 2: The 6/20/03 IAEA Letter to Rep. Henry Waxman
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006162.php

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DOUGLAS JEHL, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - A conversation between Karl Rove's lawyer and a journalist for Time magazine led Mr. Rove to change his testimony last year to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case, people knowledgeable about the sequence of events said Thursday.

by emptywheel, The Next Hurrah

eRiposte at the Left Coaster has been doing incredible work piecing together the Niger forgeries. For those who haven't been following along, I'd like to offer a quick summary of what he has shown, including:

By Martin Bright, New Statesman

Exclusive - For three months, behind the scenes, senior civil servants have been trying to stem an outbreak of leaks on the Iraq war which are proving highly damaging to Tony Blair. Martin Bright, who has had a ringside seat, reports on a government in disarray

By Bob Nichols, San Francisco Bay View

PHOTO: "RADIOACTIVE" is stenciled on Abrams tanks in these pictures taken Oct. 13, 2005, in Topeka, Kansas. Photo by: Chris Bayruh

By Mel Goodman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

President Bush, in defense of his decision to use force in Iraq, contends that the Congress supported the decision and that it had access to the same intelligence available to the White House. Not true!

The president and his key advisers, usually about five or six principals, receive the CIA's "President's Daily Brief" (PDB) five or six times a week. The PDB contains sensitive intelligence, including raw intelligence, that is not seen anywhere else in the policy community or on Capitol Hill. Most of this intelligence is of the compartmented variety that isn't even available to intelligence analysts working on a particular problem. In addition to the PDB, the briefer usually brings additional intelligence reporting that would be of special interest to the president or the secretaries of state or defense. Again, these items are highly classified and not available to the general community.

Document allegedly says PM dissuaded Bush push for attack on Al-Jazeera
NBC News and news services
Updated: 2:37 p.m. ET Nov. 22, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10153489/

LONDON - A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Embattled Washington Post editor Bob Woodward provided an important clue that may help shed light on the identity of the person who told him in June 2003 that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA agent.

In an interview with "Larry King Live" Monday night, Woodward said he realized that he was the first journalist to learn of Plame Wilson's covert CIA status when Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment last month of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, contradicting evidence that said former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed for 85 days for refusing to testify to a grand jury about her source, was the first reporter who was told about Plame Wilson.

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

DEMOCRACY NOW!:

* Colin Powell's Former Chief of Staff Col. Wilkerson on Prewar Intel,
Torture and How a White House "Cabal" Hijacked U.S. Foreign Policy *

We spend the hour with a former senior member of the Bush administration:
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He served as chief of staff to former Secretary
of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. In the interview, Wilkerson
discusses what he calls a "White House cabal", led by Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld; pre-war intelligence and Powell's February 2003 speech before the
United Nations; the "memory lapse" by Gen. Peter Pace, the Chairman of the

By Bob Graham
Washington Post

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

By Bob Drogin and John Goetz, The Los Angeles Times

The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told US officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.

Berlin - The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

While it is altogether appropriate for Congress's attention to be riveted on the future and, specifically, on how to end the disaster in Iraq, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) continue to be asked about the past and how the George W. Bush administration was able to create/corrupt intelligence to convey a false picture of the need for war on Iraq in the first place.

Renewed, if short-lived, interest in this issue can be traced to Senator Harry Reid's demand on November 1 that Pat Roberts, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, make good on his promise to complete his investigation into this issue (the so-called "Phase 2" study that Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller acquiesced in postponing until after last year's election).

Filed by Jason Leopold and Larisa Alexandrovna, http://www.RAWSTORY.com

Despite news reports Thursday asserting National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was not the source who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA agent, sources with direct knowledge of the case still maintain that Hadley was the “senior administration official

BY: JUDD LEGUM, Christy Harvey, Nico Pitney, Payson Schwin,
Faiz Shakir and Amanda Terkel
SOURCE: APAF's 11-17-05 column, "The Progress Report."
URL: http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.
asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=917053

On Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said that "the suggestion
that's been made by some U.S. senators that the President of the
United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled
the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most
dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city." [1]

Let's be clear: President Bush and many members of his administration

By Kent Bye, Director, The Echo Chamber Project
http://www.echochamberproject.com

This is the audio from a 30-minute speech by Scott Ritter that I heard
on August 22, 2002 in Baltimore that is undeniable evidence that not
everyone believed that Iraq absolutely had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

URL: http://www.echochamberproject.com/scottritter

Money Quote from Ritter at the 7:03 mark:

But the problem is, this war hinges on Iraq's possession or efforts
to reacquire weapons of mass destruction. If you listen to the rhetoric
that comes out of Washington DC -- from members of the Bush

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

Senate Democrats have dug up additional explosive evidence over the past week that they say will help prove the Bush administration deliberately manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence that was used to convince Congress and the public to support a pre-emptive strike against the Middle East country in March of 2003.

Specifically, Carl Levin, the senior Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is interested in permanently debunking the administration's assertion that it "mistakenly" included the 16-word reference in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address claiming that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium - the key component to building an atomic bomb - from Niger. Levin's aides said the administration knew months before that the veracity of the allegations was dubious because it was based on forged documents.

From a Reuters news story:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's inspector general has agreed to review the prewar intelligence activities of former U.S. defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, congressional officials said on Thursday.

News of the Defense Department probe comes at a time of bitter political debate over whether President George W. Bush misled the American people with prewar intelligence. The increasingly bitter dispute has pitted the president and his top advisers against lawmakers including some from Bush's own Republican Party.

Bush DID limit access. Here's the undeniable proof.
LINK TO ORIGINAL

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
PRESS BRIEFING BY ARI FLEISCHER

October 9, 2001

<...>

Q: Can you tell us why the President decided to issue the memo to the key Cabinet officials on secrecy? What prompted it, what individual leak, if you will?

MR FLEISCHER: Let me read to you from the memo in question, which is a memo that the President has sent to his members of the Cabinet who would routinely brief Capitol Hill about matters relating to the military or relating to intelligence. And reading from that memo directly it states that, this administration will continue to work to inform the leadership of the Congress about the course of and important developments in our military, intelligence and law enforcement operations. At the same time, we have an obligation to protect military operational security, intelligence sources and methods, and sensitive law enforcement investigations.

By JAMES BRUNER, GUEST COLUMNIST, Seattle Post Intelligencer

Marty McNett of Burlington (Letters, Wednesday) believes there is no proof that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so we should lay off claims that he did.

I refer McNett and anyone else who is laboring under that misconception to read "Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq," prepared by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform -- Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, March 16, 2004.

This 36-page report goes into great detail about outright false and deceptive public statements by Bush (55 misleading statements), Vice President Dick Cheney (51), former Secretary of State Colin Powell (50), former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (29) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (52) on the subject. These 237 misleading statements were made in a variety of forums (53 interviews, 40 speeches, 26 news conferences and briefings, four written statements and articles and two appearances before Congress) beginning at least a year before the war began, and their frequency peaked at key decision-making points.

An Incomplete Chronology
The Niger Uranium Deception and the "Plame Affair"
By GARY LEUPP, CounterPunch

I've been working on this timeline obsessively, the way historians do with chronologies. The more detailed they get, the more they clarify the problem. Imperfect though it is let me post it now, with these observations about its meaning.

(1) Officials in the Bush administration intent upon going to war with Iraq made it clear to their own intelligence services and those of close allies that it would welcome any information linking al-Qaeda and Iraq and indicating the Iraq sought to acquire WMD. They made it clear that any material, however questionable, would be of interest to them.

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 10 November 2005

I've been digging into one of the justifications for invading Iraq proffered by the Bush crew over the last two years. Bear with me, as this gets into chemistry.

Let's take a look at the Winnebagos of Death. You will remember these as the mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq so dramatically described by Colin Powell before the UN in February of 2003. "We have firsthand descriptions," said Powell, "of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulism toxin."

See this post and the linked documents:
LINK

By American Progress Action Fund

Ahmed Chalabi, the "guileful politician" whom the White House used to mislead the nation into the Iraq war, "resurfaces in Washington this week, at an embarrassing moment for the Bush administration." He is due to meet Condoleezza Rice at the State Department tomorrow and Treasury Secretary John Snow today. During the course of his stay, Chalabi is also expected to see National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and "possibly the vice-president, Dick Cheney." Chalabi returns to Washington with a sordid history. He is currently under investigation by the FBI for passing U.S. intelligence secrets to Iran and is widely viewed as having provided much of the misleading and false intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. On Wednesday, Chalabi will deliver an address at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "I understand why Ahmed Chalabi wants to see Condoleezza Rice, it is not entirely clear to me why Condoleezza Rice wants to see Ahmed Chalabi," said Danielle Pletka, an AEI scholar with close ties to the administration. (Others at AEI are still defending Chalabi.) By now, it is evident to most that the Bush administration made a mistake in trusting Chalabi before the Iraq war; it appears the administration is ready and willing to make the same mistake again. Here's a look at the rap sheet on Chalabi.