Define truth
CIA Director George Tenet was the scapegoat in the scandal over the use of false information claiming Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger. Yet, many Americans believe responsibility lies higher up the chain of command. Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington
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Fed up with the Bush administration's playing cards featuring most-wanted Iraqis, an anti-war activist holds a deck of cards she designed in San Jose, California. She is selling her own deck
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On the top of every news hour for the past week, the 16 words that US President George Bush uttered in his State of the Union address in late January have been repeated, marking the first serious test of credibility facing the American president since toppling the Iraqi regime on 9 April. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush claimed in his State of the Union, widely regarded as the most important annual address by American presidents.
The writing and meticulous editing of the State of the Union address takes several weeks, and is a result of combined effort by nearly all government agencies that carefully review every single paragraph in the speech. The parts concerning Iraq, intelligence information and foreign policy are, naturally examined by American intelligence agencies, namely the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the State Department.
The claim that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger turned out to be patently false, and, even worse, the US administration knew about it long before the presidential speech, perhaps as early as March 2002. In late 2001, the office of Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA to investigate information that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger in an attempt to revive its nuclear weapons programme. The CIA dispatched a veteran diplomat who is both an expert on Iraq and Africa. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose editorial at the New York Times last week marked the first shot in the snowballing scandal, spent eight days in February 2002 in the former French colony, and concluded that the report was false. Following his return, he debriefed the CIA, assuming his information had definitely reached the vice president's office. Thus, Wilson was surprised when US officials continued to use the uranium purchases charge in their public statements, building up to Bush's State of the Union address.
As the story broke, CIA sources were quoted as saying that a similar, more detailed reference to the Niger claim was deleted from an address delivered by Bush in October 2002 upon the request of CIA Director George Tenet. The same sources said that the CIA also advised their British counterparts not to refer to this information in a September 2002 paper issued by the British government listing Iraq's alleged arsenal of WMDs. Furthermore, when Tenet worked on the speech delivered by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Security Council on 5 February, a week after Bush's State of the Union address, the two agreed to omit the reference to the uranium purchases report, simply because they thought the evidence was shaky.
President Bush, his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Powell, touring African nations, were clearly annoyed by CIA leaks to the press which they saw an attempt to shift blame to the White House for insisting on including false information in the presidential speech. In clearly coordinated statements, both Bush and Rice told reporters that the presidential speech was reviewed and cleared by the CIA. Tenet immediately got the message, and issued a statement admitting responsibility for allowing the infamous opening line to be included in Bush's speech.
But in admitting responsibility, Tenet also pointed a finger at the National Security Council (NSC) officials who decided to modify the wording. The altered version cited British intelligence reports, and not evidence obtained by the United States itself. Tenet said that after this modification was made, the CIA official working on the speech with his counterparts at the NSC cleared the controversial sentence, and that this was the mistake he made. British intelligence agencies are reportedly upset by Tenet's implication that he should not have relied on their information in a speech delivered by the American president.
After initially staying on the defensive, admitting it was a mistake to include a false allegation in a presidential speech, Rice and other Bush administration officials attempted to lead a counteroffensive, arguing, in the fashion of former President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair, that "technically" the sentence Bush used in his speech was truthful, mainly because he referred to the British reports which definitely existed.
Rice, in statements on Sunday, said she had great confidence in the British intelligence and noted that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government continued to insist that it had other credible information to back its charge. Yet, coming up with this argument has done little to tone down sharp attacks by Bush critics, mainly nine Democratic Party figures who are hoping to challenge him in the 2004 presidential race. Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont and a sharp critic of the war long before it started, said the controversy over the Niger report could develop into a new "Watergate", referring to the scandal that led to the resignation of former US President Richard Nixon in the mid- 1970s after the revelation that he had been lying to the American people.
Other Democratic leaders who are competing to win the party's nomination for the presidency, and who earlier voted for a bill authorising Bush to use force in Iraq, also lambasted the US president for undermining America's credibility with the international community. Several Republican senators demanded Tenet's resignation, insisting that the CIA director, who was appointed by former US President Bill Clinton, should be the only person to blame for the scandal. Yet, the majority of Bush's Democratic critics, insisting that the real culprits were elsewhere in Bush's administration, refused to sacrifice Tenet and close the case.
"This is not the issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush," Florida Senator Bob Graham, also a Democratic presidential hopeful, said on Sunday. "There was a selective use of intelligence -- that is, that information which was consistent with the administration's policy was given front- row seat," he added.
Those opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq have long insisted that the Bush administration exaggerated, distorted or manufactured evidence to make the case for war against Iraq. The Bush administration, opponents believe, never provided any solid evidence to back its claim that the former Iraqi regime posed an "imminent threat" to US security by actually possessing a huge stock of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Nor did the Bush administration provide any credible information to back its allegations of close links between the former Iraqi regime and the terrorist Al-Qa'eda organisation led by Osama Bin Laden. The Bush administration maintained that after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the world's sole superpower cannot take the risk of allowing another attack that might kill tens of thousands of Americans. One possibility, so far purely speculative and not supported by any evidence, is that anti-US regimes like that of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups like Al-Qa'eda. This, in the Bush's administration view, was ample reason to launch a "preemptive war" against Iraq.
To back its case, critics charge, the Bush administration, and particularly the "hawks" among its ranks -- namely US Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld supported by several close aides and a few influential think tanks -- stretched the existing evidence against Iraq to exaggerate the threat it posed to US and regional security and to justify launching the war.
The deteriorating security situation in Iraq, with almost daily attacks on US soldiers and the Pentagon's difficulties in mustering an international peace- keeping force to help the beleaguered American forces redeploy nearly 150,000 soldiers, will likely keep the Bush administration under fire even if it manages to overcome the current controversy over its faulty information. Democratic candidates emboldened by growing public disillusionment with the war in Iraq will also likely keep on digging for other similar reports that would undermine the credibility of the Bush administration. Whether the Democratic challengers succeed in toppling the incumbent president may depend on how the situation develops in Iraq and whether President Bush is able to jumpstart the ailing economy, another soft target for attacks by his opponents.
