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Special Report: The Rush to Invade Iraq: The Ultimate Inside Account
by Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise
Vanity Fair, May 2004
....
Wilson was shocked when Bush cited the Africa-uranium story in his State of the Union speech. He tried to get to the bottom of how the assertion had been included, but to no avail. He told journalist Seymour Hersh, "I gave them months to correct the record ... but they kept on lying." Finally, Wilson went public with his information. At a conference in Washington, Wilson revealed what he had discovered in Niger to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who got Wilson's permission to print his findings in a May 6 column. In a June 8 appearance on Meet the Press, Condoleezza Rice finally responded, "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."
Wilson contacted people he knew in the government-he will not name them-and threatened to correct the record if Rice would not. She didn't and he did, writing a July 6 op-ed piece in The New York Times called "What I Didn't Find in Africa," and talking with Washington Post reporters Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus for a piece that appeared the same day. To discuss the two articles Wilson went on Meet the Press.
As the uranium hit the fan, Tenet accepted the blame, saying that he was "responsible for the approval process in my agency." Yet he added that the C.I.A. had warned the National Security Council the intelligence was dubious. The White House continued to deny any responsibility. Rice told Face the Nation, "Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence ... it would have been gone." The next day, Bush echoed this statement: "Subsequent to the speech, the C.I.A. had some doubts. But when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared."
But the C.I.A. would not go down all alone. On July 22, Stephen Hadley admitted that he "should have recalled" the two memos from the C.I.A. alerting the White House to the questionability of the Niger intelligence. While both memos were addressed to Hadley (one was addressed to Rice as well), Bush continued to express complete confidence in his national-security team. Hadley offered to resign, but the president refused.
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http://zfacts.com/p/171.html | 01/18/12 07:24 GMT
Modified: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 05:43:56 GMT
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