16 Words, 9 Questions
Here’s today’s load of articles on Bush’s SOTU yellowcake lie. Where do you want it?
From the Boston Globe: Bush trusts CIA after uranium claim. From the New York Times’ David E. Sanger: A shifting spotlight on uranium sales. And from ABC News, this really handy timeline of what happened when: Timeline of the Iraq uranium allegations.
Supporters of Bush, understandably, are trying to minimize the significance of this. “It’s just 16 words, for cryin’ out loud. Give the guy a break.” Rush Limbaugh, for one: They never should’ve caved on Africa line. (Actually, Rush goes farther. In his view, the SOTU statement was “100% true.” Heh.)
But see, it’s not just 16 words. Those 16 words raise a number of additional questions. Follow the link below, or scroll down, for my take on what some of those additional questions are.
1. Are the 16 words technically true?
Here’s the quote from the State of the Union address, for those of you who haven’t committed it to memory yet:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
At various times, members of the Administration, in particular Condoleeza Rice, have said that the attribution of the information to the British makes it technically true, even if the information on which the British are basing their assertion was false.
As I’ve written before, I don’t think this claim holds water. If the British statement was based on the same Nigerian yellowcake allegation that our own investigators had already determined to be false, then saying the British had “learned” of Saddam taking that action, without mentioning anything about that information having already been refuted, would be a lie.
The word “learned” is the key. Consider the following statment: “The American people have learned that Saddam Hussein possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the time of the US invasion. These weapons were deployed in a ‘Red Zone’ south of Baghdad, and were ready to be used on advancing US troops.” If someone said that to you today, would you be willing to accept it as being technically true? Most people, I think, would not. Given the demonstrated falsity of the underlying assertion, to make this statement true you’d have to replace “learned” with something else. Maybe something like, “The American people were told…” or “The American people believed…”
There are still a few other ways you could argue that Bush’s 16 words were technically true. The British statement could be based on information other than the forged Nigerian yellowcake documents. (Tony Blair’s people have claimed this, but so far as I know no actual evidence of it has ever been presented. And it seems doubtful, given the Tenet apology, that the administration is going to try very hard to convince people of that.) Or you could stretch the definition of “recently” to include known attempts that Saddam made 20 years ago, which led to Iraq’s existing stockpile of uranium.
Given Bush’s historical disdain for the kind of legalistic parsing represented by Clintonian statements like “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is,” why would his team engage in it now? My guess is that, as with Clinton before them, they’re desparate. They’ve been caught red-handed, and have determined that raising a rational-sounding but inherently-bogus fog is the best they can do. It won’t persuade many people capable of analyzing the argument, but it will provide cover with those temperamentally or ideologically inclined not to bother.
2. Who was pushing for those words’ inclusion?
The high-profile mea culpa by Tenet was clearly intended to take the heat off the administration. But it only raises the question: If Tenet pushed successfully for removal of the 16 words’ previous, not-attributed-to-the-British version, and then was guilty of an oversight in not objecting to the modified version, who was holding the other end of the rope in the game of political tug-of-war he was playing? Who was pushing for those false allegations to be included? Tenet’s attempt to take the blame notwithstanding, this Mr. (Ms.?) X is arguably much more responsible for the deception.
3. What was Condoleeza Rice’s role in the decision to include the 16 words?
As National Security Advisor, Rice is responsible for keeping on top of things like what our intelligence services know about whether or not Iraq is trying to acquire uranium from Niger. Yet in her statements about the decision-making that led to the inclusion of the 16 words, she comes off more like a flustered stenographer. To paraphrase: “Of course, if we’d known about the descrediting of those documents, we wouldn’t have included that statement in the speech. But we just didn’t know. The CIA said it was okay, so we just assumed it was okay.”
Sorry, no. If she really is that clueless, she’s incompetent and needs to be replaced for the good of the country. If she’s not (and I think it’s fairly obvious that she’s not), then she’s lying about what happened in the discussions leading up to the speech, and should be required to explain what really happened.
4. What was Colin Powell’s role in the decision to include the 16 words?
Likewise for Colin Powell. The Secretary of State either knew about the debunking of the Nigerian yellowcake forgeries, or he’s a boob. I don’t think he’s a boob. He took out the Nigerian allegations when he made his own presentation to the UN shortly after the SOTU. Why? Whatever his reasons were, did he know about them at the time that the SOTU was being drafted? What part did he play in those discussions?
5. What was Donald Rumsfeld’s role in the decision to include the 16 words?
The Rumsfeld role is particularly interesting given the really funny statements he’s made in the past week about what he knew and when he knew it. On July 9, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld said it was only “within recent days” that he learned the yellowcake story was bogus. Then, in his July 13 appearance on Meet the Press, the following discussion took place:
MR. RUSSERT: When Senator Pryor asked you on Wednesday when did you know that reports about uranium coming out of Africa were bogus, you said “Oh, within recent days.”
SEC’Y RUMSFELD: I should have said within recent weeks, meaning when ElBaradei came out.
MR. RUSSERT: Back in March.
SEC’Y RUMSFELD: In March, exactly, because I’m told that I was — that after ElBaradei came out with his statement publicly, I read it, and I’m told by the CIA briefer who briefs me that I, on that next day, said, “Who’s right on this?” And they said, “We’ll check.” And it was shortly thereafter that they came out with a piece of paper saying that they thought that ElBaradei was right, and…
Did you catch that fancy footwork? He told the Senate committee he’d only learned of it in “recent days”. Then he tells Russert he should have said “recent weeks,” before acknowledging, under questioning, that the actual date he’s referring to was four months ago.
Wow. Classic Rumsfeld. So tell me: who is it who still takes anything he says at face value?
6. What was Dick Cheney’s role in the decision to include the 16 words?
Now we’re getting somewhere. A lot of people, myself included, think Dick Cheney is much closer than George Bush is to being the actual president these days, at least in functional terms. It was Cheney’s office, reportedly, that dispatched Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate the yellowcake story in February of 2002; according to Wilson the Vice President’s office was among the places where he delivered his opinion that the story was bogus. Cheney’s people haven’t disputed that. So, was Cheney the Tenet tug-of-war partner, the person directly responsible for getting the lie inserted into the State of the Union? My money says yes, but obviously that’s just an opinion at this point. Update: Check out this interesting letter from a bunch of retired intelligence folks to Bush, calling for him to fire Cheney over this: Intelligence unglued.
7. What was George Bush’s role in the decision to include the 16 words?
Here we get to the heart of the matter. The preparation and delivery of the State of the Union address is the president’s constitutionally-mandated duty. Was George Bush even involved in that process? If so, what was the nature of his involvement?
8. To what extent should Bush be held responsible for the inclusion of the 16 words?
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what mistakes his underlings made. The 16 words are Bush’s responsibility. He doesn’t get to just grant Tenet his forgiveness and move on. He doesn’t even get to fire Tenet and claim to have solved the problem, though that’s obviously the fall-back position we’re being prepared for.
For that statement to have ended up being delivered in Bush’s speech means that Bush was either incompetent or dishonest. Incompetent, if he relied on the advice of untrustworthy advisors. Dishonest, if he had reason to know those advisors were untrustworthy at the time.
In the case of George Bush, the argument that he was just incompetent, rather than intentionally dishonest, rises much closer to credibility than it does with the members of his administration discussed above. Bush is notoriously unconcerned with details. He constantly professes that he knows the truth, and that subsequent events will vindicate him.
Well, they haven’t. And our collective willingness to extend him that benefit of the doubt is eroding, one voter at a time. It would be one thing if he’d admitted error, asked for our forgiveness, and promised to do a better job in the future.
But he hasn’t done even that. He’s still claiming he did nothing wrong.
9. Were the 16 words an aberration, or part of a larger pattern?
This is the part that really bugs me about the defense of Bush I’ve been seeing on righty weblogs lately. Numerous folks are asserting that this isolated lie is just not a big deal. It was a tiny part of the SOTU. It was said only after Congress had already given Bush permission to go to war. It was never the centerpiece of the president’s war rationale. And so on.
Bullshit.
The reason I, and lots of other people, are focusing so much on the Niger yellowcake thing is that in this case the lie is glaringly obvious. It wasn’t some underling saying it; it was Bush. It wasn’t some subtle innuendo, some murky implication, some using-both-names-in-the-same-sentence Jedi mind trick; it was a bald lie. It wasn’t some photo-op speech delivered before a bunch of defense contractor employees or Army reservists or Young Republicans in red, white, and blue jumpers; it was the State of the Union address, delivered to a joint session of Congress and the gathered people of the nation via live television. And there’s an emerging body of evidence, in the form of written documentation and testimony by respected, nonpartisan sources, that this part of the speech, at least, was a lie.
So yeah, this particular lie was really bad. But it wasn’t an aberration. It was part of a pattern. There were lots of other lies in that speech. And lots of other lies before and after that. The Niger yellowcake story is just one end of a continuum of false statements on Iraq that Bush and his people have been giving us for more than a year.
Bush sold this war on the basis of a few key allegations which, taken together, painted Saddam Hussein as being an imminent threat to the people of the United States. The WMD allegations, especially the nuke allegations, and the alleged links between Saddam and al Qaeda, were the essential heart of that case.
The SOTU yellowcake lie was part of that. Not the whole thing. But an important part of it. And if it was a lie (which I think is obvious at this point, though you can continue to call it a mistake if you want), the rest of that case could very well be a lie (or a mistake), too.
Which means we may very well have invaded another country, killed thousands of its innocents, caused a lot of our own people to die, and saddled ourselves with spending $1 billion per week from now until basically forever, all for really crappy reasons.
That’s significant. It’s not just 16 ill-chosen words. There’s no do-over. We’re in Iraq for the long haul now, with no good options.
This really, really sucks. And George Bush is responsible for it.
