Libby Trial Is Revealing A Cover-Up
By David Ignatius in the Washington Post
Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the
CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to
build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the
many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice
President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried
that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early
2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to
resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others
were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.
The truth began to emerge on July 11, 2003, when CIA Director George
Tenet issued a public statement disclosing that the agency had tried
to warn the White House off the Niger allegations. In that sense, the
Libby trial is about a cover-up that failed.
What helped start the whole brouhaha was a 2003 op-ed article by
former ambassador Joseph Wilson, disclosing that his fact-finding trip
to Niger the previous year had yielded no evidence of Iraqi uranium
purchases. His piece opened with a devastating question: "Did the Bush
administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons
programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?" A frantic White House tried
to rebut Wilson's criticism by leaking the fact that his wife, Valerie
Plame, worked at the CIA and had suggested sending him to Niger -- as
if the CIA connection somehow contaminated Wilson's allegations and
made the White House less culpable.
To understand the Libby case, it's important to look at the
documentary evidence, which has been usefully compiled by
washingtonpost.com.
The record begins with a Feb. 13, 2002, memo from a CIA briefer who
had been "tasked" by Cheney on the uranium issue: "The VP was shown an
assessment (he thought from DIA) that Iraq is purchasing uranium from
Africa. He would like our assessment of that transaction and its
implications for Iraq's nuclear program." The CIA briefer responded
the next day with a comment that should have aroused skepticism on
whether Iraq needed to buy any more uranium: Iraq already had 550 tons
of "yellowcake" ore -- 200 tons of it from Niger. But the CIA, eager
to please, asked Wilson a few days later to go to Niger to investigate
the claim.
A glimpse of the pressure coming from the vice president's office
emerges from a memo from CIA briefer Craig R. Schmall, after he was
interviewed in January 2004 by FBI agents investigating the leak of
Plame's covert identity: "I mentioned also to the agents that Libby
was in charge within the administration (or at least the White House
side) for producing papers arguing the case for Iraqi WMD and ties
between Iraq and al Qaeda, which explains Libby's and the Vice
President's interest in the Iraq/Niger/Uranium case."
CIA and State Department documents show that analysts at both agencies
became increasingly skeptical about the Niger allegation and tried to
warn the White House. A memo from Schmall to Eric Edelman, then
Cheney's national security adviser, recalled: "CIA on several
occasions has cautioned . . . that available information on this issue
was fragmentary and unconfirmed." A memo from Carl W. Ford Jr., then
head of the State Department's intelligence bureau, noted that his
analysts had found the Niger claims "highly dubious."
The Niger issue wasn't included in Secretary of State Colin Powell's
famous U.N. speech on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to
Ford, "due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding
the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement."
But despite CIA warnings, Bush referred to uranium purchases from
Africa in his January 2003 State of the Union address, attributing it
to British sources.
So we begin to understand why the White House was worried about the
CIA in the summer of 2003: It feared the agency would breach the wall
of silence about the claims regarding weapons of mass destruction.
Robert Grenier, a CIA official who was the agency's Iraq mission
manager, told colleagues that he remembered "a series of insistent
phone calls" that month from Libby, who wanted the CIA to tell
reporters that "other community elements such as State and DOD" had
encouraged Wilson's Niger trip, not just Cheney.
The bottom line? Grenier was asked in court last week to explain the
White House's 2003 machinations. Here's what he said: "I think they
were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether
or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium." Let me say it again: This
trial is about a cover-up that failed.
.
|
