The missing e-mails from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003, cover another timeframe that is important to the “Plame-gate” affair. During this period, questions about the veracity of Bush’s Niger claims first surfaced.
During his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003, President Bush had cited what are now called the “16 Words” – “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
However, on March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.
"Well, this particular case is outrageous,” Wilson said. “We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by U.S. – the U.S. government – is just simply stupid.
“It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers.”
Wilson added: "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq."
What Wilson didn’t disclose at the time was that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA – in response to an inquiry from Vice President Dick Cheney – to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African country. Wilson had reported back to the CIA that the suspicions were almost certainly false.
Wilson’s critical CNN comments apparently caught the attention of the Bush administration. A month-old Chicago Tribune op-ed by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that had promoted the Niger allegations was redistributed by the State Department on March 10, two days after Wilson appeared on CNN.
The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception," repeated the suspicion that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
On the Attack
The Bush administration also went on the offensive against the IAEA. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 16, Vice President Cheney rebutted ElBaradei’s debunking of the Niger documents as forgeries.
“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.”
The next day – March 17 – Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, sent a letter click here to President Bush further challenging his use of the Niger suspicions and citing ElBaradei’s findings.
“As subsequent media accounts indicated, the evidence contained ‘crude errors,’ such as a ‘childlike signature’ and the use of stationery from a military government in Niger that has been out of power for over a decade,” Waxman wrote.
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