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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (105445)	7/15/2003 7:49:16 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Uranium Quicksand ________________________ Editorial The New York Times July 15, 2003 In trying to defend the indefensible in its depiction of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration is now making a legalistic argument that would be laughable if the matter were not so serious. Because the British government believed in January that Iraq had been trying to import large quantities of uranium from Africa, top administration officials are saying, Mr. Bush was technically correct when he cited the British concerns in the State of the Union address. The explanation conveniently glosses over the fact that long before Mr. Bush delivered the speech on Jan. 28, American intelligence officials had concluded that the British charge was probably unreliable. The British-made-us-do-it defense might be more compelling if London had a better track record when it came to assessing Iraq's unconventional weapons programs. In fact, parts of the British dossier on Iraq's arms that was published with great fanfare in February were lifted verbatim from unsubstantiated Internet sources. Prime Minister Tony Blair's warning last September that front-line Iraqi military forces could launch chemical or biological weapons on short notice proved to be embarrassingly misinformed once the war in Iraq began. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was wary enough of the uranium report that he advised the White House last October to remove a reference about it from a speech Mr. Bush was planning to deliver in Cincinnati. It was dropped. Secretary of State Colin Powell found the supporting evidence so questionable he choose not to cite the accusation in his presentation about Iraq to the United Nations Security Council in February. Yet the charge still found its way into the State of the Union speech. Mr. Tenet has accepted blame for the C.I.A.'s failure to tell the White House to yank it, but the real question is why the White House put it in the address — and kept it there — long after it had been debunked. The decision to attribute it to British intelligence was clearly a desperate effort to get around the objections that had been raised by the C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies. By clinging to that weak justification, the White House is only compounding its mistake. The honorable response at this point would be to concede the error and apologize to the American people. nytimes.com