OpEdNews - Page 5 of Article: More Than $600 Billion And Counting: Iraq War Lies Revisited

"Administration officials try to minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or unfairly attack them," Albright said. "For example, when Secretary Powell mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech, he said: 'Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher.' Not surprisingly, an effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration."

The 16 Words Were False

Eleven days before President Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he stated that the United States learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa, the State Department told the CIA that key intelligence behind the uranium claims may have been forgeries.

The revelation of the warning was contained in a closely guarded State Department memo, which didn't surface until April 2006. On Jan. 12, 2003, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) "expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries," the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.

Moreover, the memo said that the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.

Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reasons that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in Feb. 5, 2003, a week after Bush's State of the Union address.

"After considerable back and forth between the CIA, the (State) Department, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association), and the British, Secretary Powell's briefing to the U.N. Security Council did not mention attempted Iraqi procurement of uranium due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement," the memo further states.

Iraq's interest in the yellowcake uranium caught the attention of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Association. ElBaradei had read a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate and had personally contacted the State Department and the National Security Council in hopes of obtaining evidence so his agency could look into it.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who made the rounds on the cable news shows in March 2003, tried to discredit ElBaradei's conclusion that the documents were forged.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

As it turns out, ElBaradei was correct, the declassified State Department showed.

The declassified State Department memo was obtained by The New York Sun under a Freedom of Information Act request the newspaper filed in July 2005. The Sun's story, however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger documents.

The memo was drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, about a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA.

The Ambassador Emerges

A day after Bush's Jan.28, 2003, State of the Union address, Wilson said he reminded a friend at the State Department that he (Wilson) had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to investigate whether Iraq attempted to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger, according to Wilson's July 6, 2003, op-ed published in the New York Times.

In his book, The Politics of Truth, Wilson's said his State Department friend replied that "perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case."

But Wilson was certain that the administration was trying to sell a war that was based on phony intelligence. In March 2003, Wilson began to publicly question the administration's use of the Niger claims without disclosing his role in traveling to Niger in February 2002 to investigate it. Wilson's criticism of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence caught the attention of Cheney, Libby and Hadley.

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