CIA Tried To Stop Bush Yellowcake Lie 4 Times

White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

Fri, 12/19/2008 - 14:45 — dlindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment). Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted (not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time, even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years, and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know now,â€

I remember watching late-late nite tv, on a government channel. It was several months after 9/11. There were 2 CIA agents infront of a bunch of senators, and they were telling the senators that they were told to look for eveidence of WMD. They came back and said their were none. They were told to go back and look again. The CIA said they investigated and found none. They were told again to go and look for WMD. They came back and said their were none. They were told to go back and look again. They then decided that their answer was to say they found WMD's. They were very upset that the people were blaming their intelligents gathering for the attack on Iraq.