Incomplete Chronology: The Niger Uranium Deception and the "Plame Affair"

An Incomplete Chronology
The Niger Uranium Deception and the "Plame Affair"
GARY LEUPP



November 9, 2005

I've been working on this timeline obsessively, the way historians do with chronologies. The more detailed they get, the more they clarify the problem. Imperfect though it is let me post it now, with these observations about its meaning.

(1) Officials in the Bush administration intent upon going to war with Iraq made it clear to their own intelligence services and those of close allies that it would welcome any information linking al-Qaeda and Iraq and indicating the Iraq sought to acquire WMD. They made it clear that any material, however questionable, would be of interest to them.

(2) The administration then used this "intelligence," including that specifically doubted by the sources, to build the case for war, attributing it where necessary to foreign sources and implying that the latter had validated it. (The most notable instance of this was President Bush's attribution of the Niger uranium story to Britain. But there were also the stories about a meeting in Prague between an Iraqi agent and Mohammed Atta, attributed to Czech intelligence, and much else.)

(3) Officials also solicited from Iraqi exiles supporting a U.S. invasion of Iraq (especially Ahmad Chalabi) any information which might help justify an attack, and used it without raising questions about its credibility. The aluminum centrifuge story that "Curveball" supplied, for example.


snip


http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m17644&date=10-nov-2005_04:23_ECT