BRITISH DOSSIER DEBUNKING

I got this link from poster ELCYMOO on AOL. It's from a New Zealand paper and here's the meat part:

Dossier Blows Up in Faces of Blair and Bush
Monday, 20 October 2003, 12:41 pm
Column: Dennis Hans

A close reading of the latest report by the British government’s Intelligence and Security Committee and two classified memos made public by the Hutton Inquiry, coupled with material that’s been in the public domain for several months, leads to the following damning conclusions:

• The controversial statement in the British government’s September 24, 2002 dossier “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” — “But there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa” — was in reference to only one country: Niger.

• The wording of that sentence was not the work of the Brits alone. Rather, it was the result of difficult negotiations between British intelligence and their Italian counterparts who, as the “originators and owners of the reporting” of that particular intelligence, had final say on how the Brits could use it or publicly describe it.

• That “intelligence” consisted of summaries written by the Italians of documents later shown to be crude, laughable forgeries of purported correspondence between Iraqi and Nigerien officials and a “memorandum of agreement” for the sale of as much as 500 tons of yellowcake uranium.

• That bogus intelligence supplied by the Italians was the Brits’ only source that supported the specific wording of the dossier assertion. Thus, by extension, it was the only source to support George W. Bush’s 16-word assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address (SOTU) based on the dossier.

• Bush officials who continue to defend those “16 words” on the basis that Bush and the Brits had used the expansive term “Africa” — implying the Brits had uranium intelligence on a nation or nations other than Niger — are now left without that leg to stand on.

• Although the Brits had a second, non-documentary source on Iraq’s alleged pursuit of Niger’s uranium, from what is known of that source it could not be the basis for the actual dossier words. (See the section below on “’Just-In-Time’ Intelligence.”) A statement based on the Brits’ second source would likely sound something like this: “Some Nigerien officials, all of whom acknowledge that no Iraqi in the past five years has ever mentioned uranium or yellowcake in their presence, nevertheless hold unrealized suspicions that certain Iraqis may have wanted to talk with them in 1999 about purchasing an unknown quantity — significant or not we cannot say — of low-grade uranium, which the Iraqis would not be able to enrich into weapons-grade uranium because they don’t have centrifuges.”

• At the very time the CIA recommended that the Brits remove from an early draft of the dossier the statement that Iraq had recently “purchased” uranium from Africa, the agency was preparing a deceptive National Intelligence Estimate that would lead members of Congress to conclude that Iraq was aggressively seeking uranium in Africa and may even have found a willing supplier. The wording in the Brits’ published dossier — “has sought the supply of significant quantities” — was WEAKER than the CIA’s presentation in the NIE, as declassified excerpts show ( http://fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html ). The CIA should be viewed not as the “good guy” in a “good vs. evil” intelligence war against Pentagon neocons, but as a devious outfit that did its part to trick congressional fence-sitters into voting in October 2002 to authorize war.