QandO

June 28, 2004

Calling Joe Wilson, call for Joe Wilson ....
Posted by McQ

I don't think he'll be answering. Per the Financial Times:

The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

This intelligence provided clues about plans by Libya and Iran to develop their undeclared nuclear programmes. Niger officials were also discussing sales to North Korea and China of uranium ore or the "yellow cake" refined from it: the raw materials that can be progressively enriched to make nuclear bombs.

Now, let's review. President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech said:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

So the intelligence reports say "between 1999 and 2001" - as I remember it Saddam Hussein was running Iraq at that time - there were discussions by an African nation - that would be Niger - with Iraq. And the discussions were about the illicit procurement of what?

Yellowcake uranium.

Well, well.

Can't wait to hear the thundering silence on this one as another favorite "Bush lied" meme bites the dust.

UPDATE (JON): The Belgravia Dispatch is (quite typically) useful on the topic, with additional insight. Josh Marshall is taking a contrary stance, though it's hard to tell if the "bad actors" he promises to reveal soon are coalition actors, Nigerian actors, Iraqi actors, or third party actors.

Kevin Drum argues...

...the article also mentions that while the CIA never believed Iraq had tried to procure yellowcake from Niger ... British intelligence has always contended that there really were serious contacts between Iraq and Niger. [...] Oddly, though, it remains unclear why the CIA discounted them, so it's hard to know what to make of this new information.

For my part, I will mention this: awhile back, there was a "dust-up" at my job, wherein a colleague and I took a professional stand against one another on this topic. This colleague insisted the "sought uranium in Africa" story had been definitively disproven. I insisted that the Niger document had been disproven, but the larger story could not have been disproven, as we didn't have access to the complete data, but evidence did apparently exist which left the accusation well in the field of play.

The only thing resolved was that we would have to agree to disagree, and each excercise "professional judgement" if it came up again in the course of our job. (i.e., she could assert it, I could "edit" as I saw fit) Our relationship has been, to say the least, chilly since then. Regardless of the outcome of this story, the fact that Joe Wilson asserted in his book that Iraq's former information minister, Mohamed Sayeed al-Sahaf, was assumed to have sought uranium in Iraq, seems to vindicate my position. If this is accurate, it would seem to call for a healthy does of crow pie.

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