Lieberman, Dean call for CIA director's resignation
Two of the Democratic presidential candidates called for the resignation of embattled CIA director George Tenet on Wednesday as the rest of the field faulted President Bush for misleading the public about Iraq.
"The president has to accept some responsibility," Joe Lieberman told supporters during a campaign appearance. "This president seems to be saying, 'The buck never stops here."'
From the Associated Press and Boston.com on July 16, 2003:
CIA didn't get disputed documents until February 2003 after Bush claim
When the Bush administration issued its prewar claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, U.S. officials say.
The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in President Bush's State of the Union address that alleged such a connection, the officials said.
Hm, that would seem to place the responsibility square on Bush's shoulders to know what the hell he was talking about... but there's more.
From Atlanta Journal-Constitution on July 17, 2003:
Senate panel probes possible White House blame
The Republican chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee suggested Wednesday that the White House might bear some responsibility for President Bush's faulty charge that Iraq tried to buy nuclear weapons fuel from Africa.
DO YA THINK??
From the Associated Press and SFGate.com:
From the Associated Press and Boston.com:Lieberman, Dean call for CIA director's resignation
RON FOURNIER, AP Political Writer
(07-16) 14:18 PDT CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) --
Two of the Democratic presidential candidates called for the resignation of embattled CIA director George Tenet on Wednesday as the rest of the field faulted President Bush for misleading the public about Iraq.
"The president has to accept some responsibility," Joe Lieberman told supporters during a campaign appearance. "This president seems to be saying, 'The buck never stops here."'
The Connecticut senator spoke as Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about questionable intelligence the White House used to justify war with Iraq. Bush's claimed in his State of the Union speech that Iraq sought uranium from Africa -- a statement apparently based on a series of documents now known to be forgeries.
Tenet accepted responsibility for allowing the reference to get in the speech, though officials with the National Security Council, the State Department and the White House staff were also involved in drafting the address.
Lieberman's rival, Howard Dean, said he has maintained for several days that Tenet should leave.
"The reason the director should step aside is that he is now part of the shifting of the blame," the former Vermont governor said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Dean, an outspoken opponent of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, argued that Tenet shouldn't receive all the blame, and faulted the National Security Agency, State Department and the vice president's office.
Lieberman, one of the most forceful supporters of the war among the nine Democratic candidates, said Bush must be held accountable for misleading the public about his justification for military action. Democrats have suggested that Tenet has become the administration's fall guy, taking the blame to shield Bush from political fallout.
"If, in fact, it was his fault, then George Tenet has to be held responsible," Lieberman said during a campaign appearance at Hyman's Seafood restaurant.
In an interview afterward, Lieberman said he would seek Tenet's resignation.
"The White House doesn't accept responsibility. Tenet steps forward and accepts responsibility. And then the president says he hasn't lost confidence in the CIA. Something's wrong here," Lieberman said.
"I guess I'd say under these circumstances, if I was president and I was put in a position to make a statement in a State of the Union to the American people that was not truthful and the CIA director came forward and accepted responsibility, I'd ask him to leave," the senator said.
The nine Democratic candidates have seized on the misleading intelligence to attack Bush on his greatest political strength -- the war on terrorism -- and raise larger questions about his credibility on domestic and foreign policy issues.
The White House dismissed the criticism as revisionist history from several Democrats who last fall backed the congressional resolution given Bush the authority to wage war. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration does not have a credibility problem.
"The president has been very straightforward about this from the beginning. He laid out a very compelling case, a very clear case," McClellan told reporters.
In a little-noticed Virginia appearance on Tuesday, Lieberman turned up the pressure on Tenet.
"Unlike the current president, I would not continue to have confidence in my CIA director, and would ask him to resign," Lieberman said. He added: "This president ought to hold someone accountable for causing him to say something that was not true."
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, during a campaign appearance in New York, focused on what he called Bush's credibility gap on national security as did John Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In a statement, Graham said simply, "we do not have a George Tenet problem, we have a George Bush problem," and he called on Bush to "come clean with the truth. Unfortunately, he continues to display an arrogant pattern of hiding information from the American people and ducking questions that need to be answered."
Edwards, the North Carolina senator, told reporters outside the committee room that Tenet has accepted responsibility, "but at the end of the day, the president when he speaks, has to take responsibility for what he said."
Associated Press Writers Will Lester and Nedra Pickler in Washington contributed to this report.©2003 Associated Press
From Atlanta Journal-Constitution:CIA didn't get disputed documents until February 2003 after Bush claim
By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press, 7/16/2003 23:01
WASHINGTON (AP) When the Bush administration issued its prewar claims that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, the CIA had not yet obtained the documents that served as a key foundation for the allegation and later turned out to be forged, U.S. officials say.
The CIA didn't receive the documents until February 2003, nearly a year after the agency first began investigating the alleged Iraq-Africa connection and a short time after it assented to language in President Bush's State of the Union address that alleged such a connection, the officials said.
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. Sometimes CIA succeeded in getting the information removed.
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.
The discredited documents at the center of the controversy are a series of letters purportedly between officials in Iraq and Niger. The letters indicated Niger would supply uranium to the government of Saddam Hussein in a form that could be refined for nuclear weapons.
''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.
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.''
When the Niger claim first arose, the CIA sent a retired diplomat to Africa to investigate in February 2002. 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.
The Niger report, along with a notation that it was unconfirmed, was also included in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified summary of intelligence on Iraq. Tenet said the report was not a key part of the CIA's judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
The CIA had the Niger claim removed from at least two speeches before they were given: President Bush's October address on the Iraqi threat and a later speech by U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte, officials said.
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.
In recent weeks, the Bush administration has offered a number of defenses for using the statement:
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 uranium claim didn't appear in Colin Powell's address to the United Nations on Feb. 5.
It first surfaced in a Sept. 24, 2002, British dossier, which said Iraq ''sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'' The Blair administration says it did not view the now-discredited documents until October 2002, after the publication of the dossier.
Blair told the House of Commons Wednesday that ''the intelligence on which we based this was not the so-called forged documents.'' 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 documents were first acquired in Rome, a Bush administration official said. Another administration official said the Italian government possessed them.
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.
French diplomatic sources told the AP on Wednesday the French government never possessed the documents but did have suspicions Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Niger.
Associated Press writers Pamela Sampson in Paris, Tom Rachman in Rome and Robert Barr in London contributed to this report.© Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Senate panel probes possible White House blame
By BOB DEANS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- The Republican chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee suggested Wednesday that the White House might bear some responsibility for President Bush's faulty charge that Iraq tried to buy nuclear weapons fuel from Africa.
It was the first time a senior Republican has hinted that blame for the matter might extend beyond Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet.
"I think there were mistakes ma0de all up and along the chain," the committee's chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Ka., told reporters after his panel grilled Tenet on the matter for five hours behind closed doors. "The handling of this was sloppy."
Roberts promised additional closed-door hearings next week and said public hearings might be held as early as September.
"We are doing this very aggressively," said Roberts. "We will take this where it leads us. We'll let the chips fall where they may."
The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va.., echoed Roberts' concern that responsibility for the remark might extend beyond Tenet.
"In my mind, there remains the question of whether in fact that's where it should stop. I tend to think not, and I think we have to face up to that," said Rockefeller. "I think there are others in the administration who knew something about this."
Roberts said Wednesday's hearing focused "in considerable detail" on the process through which Tenet and officials at the White House National Security Council (NSC) discussed the Africa charge before it was included in Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union address.
The White House has since admitted that U.S. intelligence did not support the charge, which Bush attributed in his speech to British intelligence sources.
The issue seemed certain to be high on the agenda when Bush hosts British Prime Minister Tony Blair for a White House meeting on Thursday, immediately after Blair delivers a speech before a joint session of Congress.
Publicly, Blair has continued to stand by the British intelligence reports, asserting that the British had additional sources beyond those accessed by the CIA. The British reports were cast into question, however, after documents that formed part of the British intelligence assessment were later found to be forged.
The Associated Press reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation into the documents.
The matter has ignited a political firestorm centered on the question of whether the Bush administration intentionally exaggerated or manipulated intelligence information to help build momentum for war against Iraq.
The White House has denied that, blaming Tenet for signing off on the remarks prior to the State of the Union address.
Tenet has conceded that his agency erred in approving a draft containing the remark. He has also said, though, that his agency raised "several concerns" about the quality of the intelligence underlying the allegation prior to the speech.
"Ultimately the president of the United States is responsible for what he says, not the CIA, not George Tenet," Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a member of the intelligence committee, told reporters as he left the hearing. "There are still additional questions to be asked and answered."
Edwards is one of nine Democrats running to unseat Bush in next year's presidential elections, and the White House dismissed their criticism as the product of campaign politics.
"The last thing anyone should do is politicize this issue by rewriting history," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
McClellan also denied that Bush intentionally misled the public to build his case for war.
"Absolutely not. The President has been very straightforward about this from the beginning. He laid out a very compelling case, a very clear case," said McClellan. "The last thing the President wanted to do was go to war."
Another Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in a speech in Bronx, N.Y., that Bush had spawned an "intelligence gap" through his disputed State of the Union remarks.
"The truth is, the Bush administration went to war without a plan to win the peace in Iraq," said Kerry. "It gave presidential sanction to misleading information and is still trying to conceal what happened."
Yet another Democratic presidential contender, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., weighed in from afar, providing a press statement from Roanoke, Va., were he spent the day campaigning.
"Beyond the false information Bush provided the nation in his State of the Union address, there were other cases where the administration manipulated intelligence by cherry-picking from intelligence reports, ignoring intelligence that contradicted their case for a war in Iraq," said Graham. "He continues to display an arrogant pattern of hiding information from the American people and ducking questions that need to be answered."
Republicans, though, defended Bush, blaming Tenet for approving the controversial reference.
"The president of the United States was correct in saying what he said because he was told it was OK," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., a member of the intelligence committee. "Unfortunately, it was an error on the part of the intelligence community."
In his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, seven weeks before he launched the U.S.-led war against Iraq, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The CIA had earlier investigated British assertions that Iraq had sought uranium -- which can be used to form the core of a nuclear weapon -- from Niger. In September, the CIA urged the British to drop the charge, on the belief that it was unsubstantiated.
In October, at Tenet's urging, the White House removed a narrow reference to the Niger allegations from a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati, days before Congress voted to approve the use of force against Iraq.
Tenet said in a statement Friday that, prior to the State of the Union address, his agency raised "several concerns" with NSC officials about the quality of the intelligence behind the broader claim Bush made that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has said, however, that neither she nor Bush were aware of those concerns prior to the speech.© 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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