The Niger Uranium Debacle

The CIA successfully got the White House last October to omit references to Iraq's alleged attempts topurchase uranium from Niger because the agency concluded that the documents used to back up the allegationswere forgeries, according to two Democratic members of the Senate's intelligence committee, both of whom werebriefed by the CIA in classified hearings last year about the uranium allegations.

But it still remains unclear how, after briefing the White House and the intelligence committee that thedocuments about Iraq's attempt to procure uranium from Niger wound up in President Bush's State of the Unionaddress in January.

Bush and his top White House advisers said last week that the CIA cleared the erroneous informationreferenced in the State of the Union address. But White House officials did not disclose that the Britishintelligence documents Bush cited were known forgeries. The claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from SouthAfrica was a key point the Bush administration used in trying to sway the public to support a war against thecountry.

George Tenet, director of the CIA, took responsibility Friday for allowing Bush to use the information inhis State of the Union address in January. Still, Democrats and a handful of Republicans want a broader probeon pre-war intelligence information used by the White House to build a case for war against Iraq.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair first mentioned the allegations last September about Iraq trying toobtain large quantities of uranium from a South African country just three hours before a Commons debate onwhether Britain would use military force and back the United States in a war against Iraq.

In an exclusive interview last week, the two Democratic U.S. Senators said the CIA tried to get Blair toremove the uranium reference from a dossier released by British intelligence officials because the documentsused to support the allegations were "crude forgeries," the Senators said.

The Senators said they could not speak "on the record" because the information the CIA sharedwith the intelligence committee is still considered classified.

A spokesperson for Blair and the CIA would not return numerous calls for comment.

These members said the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the CIA last September of withholdinginformation the committee requested on U.S. military action in Iraq and that after the accusations were madepublicly the CIA briefed the committee on the existence of the phony uranium documents an other intelligenceinformation

The British dossier, which said Iraq had sought large quantities of uranium from South Africa in an effortto jump start its nuclear weapons program, were quickly dismissed as forgeries last October in a privatemeeting in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to the head of the IAEA, MohammedElBaradei.

The IAEA quickly realized that the documents handed over by the U.S. and British were phony after oneletter purportedly signed by a Nigerian minister who had been out of office for 10 years.

"The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the Government of Niger, andto compare the form, format, contents and signatures of that correspondence with those of the allegedprocurement-related documentation," ElBaradei said in a statement in March. "Based on thoroughanalysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formedthe basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact notauthentic."

The IAEA said the documents in the British dossier included a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedlysigned by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The IAEA described the signature as "childlike" and saidthat it clearly was not Mamadou's.

Another document, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years.

A U.S. intelligence official told CNN in March that the documents were passed on to the IAEA within days ofbeing received last September with the comment, " 'We don't know the provenance of this information, buthere it is.' "

The IAEA had dismissed another erroneous report about Iraq's nuclear weapons program earlier in September.The IAEA said that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six monthsaway" from developing a nuclear weapon did not exist.

"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chiefspokesman, said in a Sept. 26 telephone interview with the Washington Times.

In a Sept. 7 news conference with Prime Minister Blair, Bush said: "I would remind you that when theinspectors first went into Iraq and were denied - finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of theAtomic - the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon.

The White House told the Washington Times that Bush was referring to an earlier IAEA report.

"He's referring to 1991 there," said Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan. "In '91, therewas a report saying that after the war they found out they were about six months away."

But Gwozdecky said no such report was ever issued by the IAEA in 1991.

The IAEA also took issue with a Sept. 9 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies - citedby the Bush administration - that concludes Saddam "could build a nuclear bomb within months if he wereable to obtain fissile material," the Washington Times reported

"There is no evidence in our view that can be substantiated on Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. Ifanybody tells you they know the nuclear situation in Iraq right now, in the absence of four years ofinspections, I would say that they're misleading you because there isn't solid evidence out there,"Gwozdecky told the paper.

"I don't know where they have determined that Iraq has retained this much weaponization capabilitybecause when we left in December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program.We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment," hesaid.

Gwozdecky said there is no evidence about Saddam's nuclear capability right now - either through hisorganization, other agencies or any government.

A few weeks later, on Sept. 25, 2002, just three hours before a crucial debate in the House of Commons onwhether the British would support a U.S. led coalition to disarm Iraq by force, Blair publicly released adossier, much of which was based on already available public information, but included the frightening claimthat Iraq could launch a nuclear missile in 45 minutes and that the country sought 500 tons of Uranium fromSouth Africa.

Father of the House Tam Dalyell, MP for Linlithgow, slammed the cynical timing of the document'spublication saying, "I now understand very clearly why the Government wanted to produce this report at8a.m. on the morning of the debate, rather than subject it to the anvil of expert scrutiny by publishing it aweek in advance."

The White House said the findings in the British dossier were "frightening" and proved that Iraqwas an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the U.S.

But a day after the dossier was released, Aziz Pahad, South African Deputy Prime Minister of ForeignAffairs, dismissed the report as a fake. Pahad said the IAEA had already rejected the claims that Iraq couldhave obtained uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons.

"The agency (IAEA) had said there was no substance to the report. Four African countries produceduranium -- South Africa, Namibia, Niger and Gabon -- but South Africa was the only one capable of producingthe enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons," Pahad said in a Sept. 26, 2002 prepared statement.

The IAEA also said in a statement in September 2002 that it is keeping an eye on stores of uranium thatcould be used for nuclear weapons in Africa­and they would know if any went missing.

Indeed, in a report by UPI in October 2002, the news service said, "It seems unlikely, all the same,that the South African government has sold uranium to Iraq. (Former South African President) F.W. De Klerk,apprehensive about what might happen with South Africa's nuclear capabilities under an African NationalCongress government -- now the ruling party -- had made provision for tight and regular inspections by theInternational Atomic Energy Agency, and the IAEA seems happy that its controls are adequate."

But the British and top officials in the White House continued to harp on the uranium allegations, despitethe fact that the IAEA had dismissed the documents as forgeries. When Iraq delivered its 12,000 page weaponsreport to the United Nations in December, the U.S. State Department released a fact sheet asking why hasn'tIraq accounted for uranium it tried to obtain from Niger.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also highlighted Iraq's alleged uranium purchases from Africa during aJan. 29 briefing with reporters and called for the U.N. to support the U.S. in the event of war.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said Jan. 23, in a speech before the Council of ForeignRelations in New York that Iraq's 12,000 page weapons report to the U.N. was unacceptable because "thereis no mention of Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from abroad."

The timing of the statements by Bush's top advisers was crucial because the U.N. was gearing up to hold avote on whether to find Iraq in material breach of a U.N. resolution calling for the country to disarm, whichif U.N. countries voted in favor of would have allowed the U.S. to start a war with Iraq with the full supportof U.N. member countries.

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, in a Jan. 23, New York Times op-ed column headlined "Why WeKnow Iraq is Lying," accused Iraq of filing a "false declaration to the United Nations that amountsto a 12,200-page lie."

"For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium fromabroad," Rice said in the column.