CBS News Reports President Bush Lied About Uranium In State Of Union Address

Current Axis-of-Evil wannabe nuclear powers have two advantages: They have access to most of the Manhattan Project’s discoveries, with none of its uncertainties. All they need to get started is uranium mined from a number of countries, including the African nation of Niger, the third leading producer of uranium after Canada and Australia. Uranium mined in countries like Niger is sold on the world market not as raw ore but as a concentrate called yellowcake. Before 9/11, pretty much anybody could buy all the yellowcake they could afford; the hard part was building the machines to process the stuff. It takes a LOT of yellowcake to eventually make a nuclear weapon. In the 1980s, Iraq had stockpiled over 500 tons of yellowcake (half of it from Niger) as the raw material to support a nuclear weapons program. After Gulf War I in 1991, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, an enforcement arm of the United Nations) went into Iraq and confiscated essentially all yellowcake, other various stockpiles of uranium Iraq had accumulated, and all the experimental machines Iraqis were developing to process them to weapons grade. By 1998, Iraq’s nuclear program had been virtually emasculated by the IAEA. Indeed, the trivial quantities of yellowcake currently being uncovered in 2003 Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom is a localized environmental threat, not a military one.

After Iraq kicked out UN weapons inspectors, including the IAEA, in 1998, there were concerns that Iraq would take steps to restart its nuclear weapons program from scratch. The first step in restarting an Iraqi nuclear WMD program would be for Saddam to replenish the previously confiscated Iraqi stores of yellowcake. Western concern that Saddam had indeed begun this process were fueled primarily by a memo leaked to the British which was later determined to be forged, probably by Iraqi exiles who wanted to provoke an American overthrow of the Saddam regime. To check out an informant’s tip about a madman with a secret plot for technological world domination, British MI5 normally sends in Bond, James Bond, who has a double-oh license to kill when he’s not at expensive hotels bedding down under the ladies. This time around, the CIA in February 2002 sent to Niger former U.S. ambassador Wilson, Joseph Wilson, who had a driver’s license for a rental car that took him to a cheap hotel to bed down under mosquito nets. After spending eight days in the West-Central African nation, the ambassador said he told the CIA that the information about the uranium was “bogus and unrealistic.”
“In short, there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a [Iraqi] sale to have transpired,” Wilson concluded. A CIA official told ABCNEWS that the agency “disseminated the [Wilson] report broadly.” Wilson says there are only two conclusions to draw: “Either the administration has some information that it has not shared with the public, or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision in a case that had already been made, a decision that had been made to go to war.”

Almost a year after Wilson’s February 2002 findings, President Bush prominently mentioned the supposed Iraq-Niger uranium connection in his January 2003 State of the Union address, citing British intelligence instead of the CIA as the source of the accusation and using it as a major WMD justification for America’s declaring war on Iraq. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush said. Within weeks American troops were in Baghdad looking for WMDs they have yet to find.

Earlier this week, CNN reported the White House was acknowledging its State of the Union uranium claim was inaccurate. Now CBS News is reporting that President Bush and his staff knew before the speech that this supposed Iraqi yellowcake purchase in fact never occurred and said that it was stated anyway in the most public forum possible to bolster support for war. As CBS delicately put it in its news report, “…but the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.”

Spin control has begun, with U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice blaming the CIA for not correcting claims that President Bush made about Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Huh?

One thing’s for sure, somebody’s lying…