To: Sully- who wrote (428136 ) 7/17/2003 12:16:50 PM From: tejek Read Replies (2) | Respond to <font color=green> More and more of the truth is coming out! The more it comes out, the more questionable is the honesty of the Bush administration. This issue will not go away! Someone's head must roll! Who's will it be?<font color=black>Without the source documents, the CIA could investigate only their substance, which it had learned from a foreign government around the beginning of 2002. One of the key allegations was that Iraq was soliciting uranium from the African country of Niger. Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements. For instance, the agency tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, one U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press, speaking only on condition of anonymity. CIA Director George Tenet spoke in closed session to the Senate Committee on Intelligence about the matter Wednesday. ''Big questions remain about who forged the documents and the paper trail that followed,'' Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said this week. The CIA declined to say how the agency eventually obtained the documents. Officials at several other U.S. agencies, including the State Department, declined to say whether another U.S. government agency possessed or viewed them before Bush's speech last January. After the CIA received the documents, the government provided them to the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which quickly determined them to be forgeries. The U.N. Security Council was alerted March 7, two weeks before American and British forces invaded Iraq.<font color=red> But the documents had already been used for public claims in at least two places: the Dec. 19 State Department fact sheet and Bush's Jan. 28 address, in which he uttered the line: ''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' <font color=black> The diplomat, Joseph Wilson, reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Tenet said the CIA was unaware of any documents purporting to show such transactions at the time, and it is unclear when the U.S. government learned that the documents existed and were the source of the Niger claim. The CIA's doubts about the uranium claim were reported through routine intelligence traffic throughout the government, one U.S. intelligence official said. Those doubts were also reported to the British. On Jan. 28, 2003, the Africa allegation went into the State of the Union address. As the speech was being written, CIA officials protested the line, so the administration changed it to attribute it to British intelligence instead of U.S. intelligence. Tenet said last week it should have been removed. The CIA should have had it removed. It was based on more intelligence information than the Niger letter. It was technically true because it was attributed to British intelligence. It wasn't the reason the United States invaded Iraq. The Blair administration has not detailed its other intelligence. Bush administration officials have also said other information pointed to possible Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Tenet has called these reports ''fragmentary'' a term in intelligence circles for unconfirmed information of suspect accuracy. The chain of possession of the forged documents remains unclear. The apparent forger has also not been identified. The Italians this week denied providing the documents themselves to the U.S. or British governments, but the head of an Italian parliamentary intelligence committee said Wednesday that Italy may have passed on the disputed claims informally.
