Who faked the documents?
That’s the real story. It would sure be nice if we had some of our highly paid “journalists” working on that…
As always, YMMV.
P.S. For the record, even though I am happy that the Iraqis have a chance to experience freedom, I remain slightly opposed to the war in Iraq. I think President Bush was wrong about taking out Saddam, but I don’t believe all this recent hype that Bush lied.
This whole “story” just sounds like a modified repeat of Hillary’s infamous “Bush Knew” propaganda. Of course that one flew like a lead ballon so she bailed out on that stance almost immediately.
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I say it was Cheney. I mean, who was SecDef when the first US-Iraq war happened in 1991? Whos fault was it when we called the cease-fire? Hell, it was Dickie who gave the idea to Bush Sr. to have the ‘100 hour’ ground war, even though General Franks (Fredrick Franks Jr, not Thomas Franks), CO of VII Corps, General John Yesock, commander 3rd Army, General H. Norman Schwartzkoph, CO USCENTCOM, and General Colin Powell, Chairman-Joint Chiefs of Staff all disagreed with the idea. Who says it wasn’t Dickie who pushed us into this one to clean up his old mess, and Bush readily went along with it?
GOM, haven’t you been paying attention? Seymour Hersh has argued that British Intelligence forged the documents. IIRC we’ve already discussed that on the SDMB.
It was just some poor shmuck in Nigeria looking to make a buck by giving the intelligence officals what they wanted that did the actual forging. Gee. Nigerians involved in a scam. Who’d a thunk it. That frightens me, since I’m currently involved in a deal to spirit millions out of the Nigeria…
The forgeries were discovered to be forgeries after very little investigation by the intelligence agencies. What the real question is, is who allowed the obviously false documents be used as evidence. Even after it was pointed out to officials inside the Bush administration that the documents were false, if the rumors are to be beleived.
Nitpick: The African country in question is Niger, not Nigeria. That would make, as someone on this Board informed me, for a Nigerien scam, not a Nigerian scam.
P.S. GOM, “another Bush-bashing frenzy” by the media?? What planet are you living on? Has any president (and Administration, by extension) every gotten such a free ride from the media? Yes, Bush is often called stupid (in the ignorant, "I ain’t got much of that thar book-learnin’ " sense of the word), but that’s not a bash – that’s a nearly indisputable fact.
I agree that “Bush-bashing frenzy” is a gross mischaracterization. That guy has gotten so much slack from the media, I’m starting to think he has some sort of magical powers. After the rest of the planet has been harping on the subject for months, American journalists are just starting to acknowledge that something might be amiss. Contrast that with the British, who have been pretty much been roasting Blair for quite awhile now.
I think we’ve just gotten to the point where there is so much evidence against the administration’s decision to go to war that journalists start to look foolish to ignore it.
Believe it, GOM.
One more time: Bush said we needed to invade Iraq to defend ourselves against the threat that his WMDs might fall into the hands of terrorists. (Not only was that his rationale to the UN, and not only was that the basis for the Congressional resolution authorizing him to use force against Iraq, but he rather strongly repeated that claim on March 17, when he gave Saddam his 48-hour notice.)
On March 19, we went to war in Iraq. The war plan gave the field commanders complete freedom to secure prospective WMD sites that they came across, or not, as they felt they had the resources. By and large, those commanders had their troops keep on rolling toward Baghdad. The prospective WMD sites got looted to the ground before our special units got there to check them for evidence of WMDs; we never got to find out what was there before, and what might now be up for sale at the bazaar.
That was fine with the President, as evidenced by that huge “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier. If there was any risk that there had been WMDs at those sites, and they were looted and loose in the Middle East, then our President and his war planners would have not only failed to accomplish their mission, but we’d be in much greater danger than before.
So the entire WMD business was a lie. Bush & Co. never believed in it; if they had, they would not have had a war plan that recklessly endangered America in such a manner.
But they lied to us so they could take out Saddam. Why? Hell if I know. I’d sure like to. America’s armed forces are not supposed to be used for fighting private wars. And if they fight a war whose reasons are only known to a handful of decision-makers, that is effectively the same thing.
Why is it so important to know who the author of the documents was?
I’ve got no idea. It was a bad forgery, and our intel folks reported the likely falsehood of the Niger uranium connection over a year before we went to war - before Bush was even really beating the Iraq war drums. The Bushies weren’t set up by anyone else - only by themselves, and apparently quite willingly.
The main point, the real story, is still the Bush war plan. That’s what proves that Bush & Co. never expected to find substantial WMDs in Iraq.
I never understood why they said we expected to find weapons - if they did - we had more than a decade of Saddam giving every indication he was trying and wouldn’t quit trying. Shouldn’t that be enough for the international community to take a hard line with Iraq?
I was out of the country a lot of this winter. All the news I saw was “Saddam must be taken out of power, because he will create weapons of mass destruction and kill us all as soon as he’s killed all his people - BUT the US can’t do it because the US is bullies.” A bit confusing.
I’m only going out of town again if Bush promises me he won’t invade somebody while I’m gone.
It was them evil treasonous liberals again. Just ask Ann Coulter. :dubious:
Bush clearly lied. More interesting is the question of whether he knew he lied, or whether he was taken for a ride by Rummy and Cheney. He certainly has never demonstrated the level of skepticism to make him doubt their information, especially when it is in support of something he wanted to do anyway.
Bad data and misinformation gets fed into the intelligence hopper all the time. It must be filtered. This was an easy one to have been filtered (and was to some extent.) Did information that this was a forgery not get to the top, or was it ignored?
Beyond its political interest, I think the questions of origin are interesting just for themselves, like a trashy spy novel. I recall hearing a whisper involving the Italians but can’t recall where.
Anybody got more recent news or is a better Googler?
In keeping with the theme of this thread, my we assume that Senator H. Clinton forged the Niger document and foisted it off on Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld in order to enhance her chances at the presidency in that same universe where your President and mine is being unfairly pilloried by the press–especially by the Fox Network.
What is all this?
elucidator—I’ve heard the Italians in connection with this, too. As I recall, the forged documents were sold to British intelligence by an Italian agent. I don’t know where the Italian got them, or if this Italian cut and pasted them himself.
One remarkable fact about the Niger papers is that one of the documents is signed by a major figure in the Niger government who hasn’t been in power since the late 1980s. Anyone who has anything to do with intelligence in Niger would certainly know who the major players are in that government. This is one of the reasons the agents were so careful to alert the Bush administration that the documents were very likely forgeries.
I mean, if an American document dated 2002 bore the signature of an official from the late 1980s, like Donald Rumsf… er, Dick Chen… er, George B… er, Caspar Weinberger! Yes! There’s an old one who isn’t working anymore! If an American document dated 2002 bore the signature of Caspar Weiberger, don’t you think a foreign intelligence agent would question the validity of the document, to say the least?
Bush lied.
Nope.
Rice says the CIA cleared the entire speech…
That makes things much more interesting. To repeat bad intel (as President Bush did) does not make someone a liar, even if they are a Republican. If you guys want to claim this place is the Straight Dope you need to keep your facts straight.
If the statements you made about the documents are accurate it makes the CIA sound like the Keystone Cops.
hmmm
Or perhaps it means Rice is lying now.
Um, you do know that Bush has a BA in history from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, right?
Yeah, completely uneducated.
Do I think that Bush lives a highly intellectual life? Nope. But neither does 99.99% of the human race. Calling it a fact that Bush is uneducated is slander.
More on Bush and how “stupid” he is relative to other presidents can be found at
How about cites for, well, any of this?