Wednesday, 16 July 2003
Judge for yourself. The debate over whether George W. Bush made an "honest mistake" in his State of the Union Address, when he informed the American people that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from an African country, has been hampered by a lack of publicly available raw data. Evaluating intelligence reports is often a question of judgement; raw intel is unreliable at the best of times, delivered in whispers by people with ulterior motives, and success in the intel game requires sifting through the good and bad data and coming up with the truth.
Underneath all the charges and countercharges, the hair-splitting about lies vs. mistakes, is a fundamental question: Did the Bush Administration make a reasonable, objective judgement call, based on the information available to them at the time, when Bush made the claim in his speech? Or, did they rush to accept any piece of junk data that would support their preconceived decision to invade Iraq? Was it an honest error that you or I would make, or was it Tonkin Gulf-style misdirection that pulled the wool over our eyes?
Without access to the raw intel, the issue becomes an open-ended, red vs. blue, "do you trust President Bush" question, with lots of heat but no light on either side of the political fence. What's really needed here, what would allow people to judge the question fairly for themselves, is to let the public see the raw documents that supported the claim. These are the documents that were initially found by British Intelligence, later reported to be a fraud, that showed an attempt by Saddam Hussein to purchase 'yellow cake' uranium ore from an African country.
In an effort to do exactly that, I've obtained a copy of one of the documents. (Though this letter was also acquired by a Western intelligence agency, the document itself—a letter from a Niger government official—is not itself classified material, so I don't think I'm running afoul of any espionage laws here.) You can read the letter, and then decide for yourself: Did Bush mention this in his State of the Union Address because he was convinced it was true, because he wanted to err on the side of caution, or because he was deceiving the people (and possibly himself) with information that was clearly false? Read and decide.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.
