http://mediamatters.org/items/200502240002editorial misrepresented Senate findings on Niger uranium to defend Bush, attack Wilson
A February 23 Wall Street Journal editorial misrepresented the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusions regarding Iraq's alleged efforts to purchase uranium from Niger in order to defend President Bush's now-infamous "16 words" from the 2003 State of the Union address and attack former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA sent to Niger to investigate the allegation.
The Journal claimed that "both a British and a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee probe found that the White House had been accurate
and that it was Mr. Wilson was the one who hadn't told the truth." In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the Bush administration's Niger-uranium claim was unfounded. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion complemented the Central Intelligence Agency's own admission that the claim should not have been in Bush's speech because the agency lacked confidence in it. By contrast, the committee reached no conclusion about whether Wilson "told the truth" in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed describing his CIA-sponsored fact-finding mission to Niger -- which led him to conclude that the Niger-uranium allegation was baseless -- and accusing Bush of "manipulat intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion."
Neither the CIA nor the Senate Intelligence Committee has definitively stated (in public) whether it believes Iraq did in fact seek uranium from Niger, but following the International Atomic Energy Agency's revelation in March 2003 that documents purporting to chronicle such efforts were forgeries, no one has publicly produced additional evidence to support this allegation.
Rather than proving the White House was "accurate," the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee's "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" suggested the opposite: that by the time the president delivered his State of the Union address in January 2003, it was no longer supportable to claim, as he did, that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The committee wrote: "Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence" (PDF p. 82).<snip>
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