From an article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh. This is a follow up to an earlier post, about the badly forged documents that claimed that Iraq had tried to get uranium to build a nuclear bomb from Niger. These documents were used by George Tenet and Colin Powell to justify to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee why we had to go to war. More importantly, these documents were also referred to by President Bush in his State of the Union Address to justify to the nation why we had to go to war:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa... Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide."

Here are a few choice paragraphs from Hersh's article about how bad the evidence actually was. Keep in mind that our government has not denied that the documents were fakes, they simply claim that it was an innocent mistake.

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency's Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet."

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's "yellow cake" comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. "Five hundred tons can't be siphoned off without anyone noticing," another I.A.E.A. official told me.

I've deleted the comments I originally posted here so as not to generate too much antagonism in the sandbox. Read the article, and decide what you think.

Ennis posted this on March 30, 2003
It is filed under International Affairs

It is also indexed with the following tags: CIA | Niger | Yellowcake | Nuclear Proliferation | Iraq | War on Terror |