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What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?
Sat Jun 28 20:09:00 2003
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What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?

The Case of the Phantom Uranium raises questions about the president
that could lead to legitimate calls for impeachment.

June 17, 2003 - What did the president know and when did he know it?

The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon
as he was about to be impeached.

Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional
Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on
whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us
of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to
public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you
consider the gravity of the charge.

"To put it bluntly," former Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote
on the legal Web site FindLaw (www.findlaw.com) on June 6, "if Bush
has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus
information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of
national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high
crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be
a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-
conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United
States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.'."

Of course, intelligence data is often open to interpretation, and
some political distortion is probably inevitable. Consider, however,
just one of the recent revelations about how Iraq weapons
intelligence was handled by the Bush administration and you'll start
to see a disturbing pattern of cynical mendacity.

Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document,
later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery, that
was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed
it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an
attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy
a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They
knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes - which U.N. inspectors would
establish as baseless - would scare Americans much more than talk of
mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's M.O.

Thus in his 2003 State of the Union address, the president intoned
that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." Scary stuff.
Problem was, the document was signed by an official who had given up
his post a decade earlier, and the CIA had told the White House the
story did not check out.

On Friday, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain reported that, according
to a senior CIA official, on March 9, 2002, a full 10 months before
the speech, the White House was duly informed that an investigation,
including an agent traveling to Africa to verify the story, had found
no basis for the document. Three senior administration officials told
the Knight Ridder reporter that Vice President Dick Cheney and
officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon
ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the allegation should
be included in the case against Hussein.

This is just one example of the administration's manipulation of
intelligence in justifying a war that already has killed thousands of
people and continues to take the lives of several Americans each
week. It is exceedingly odd that the same congressional Republicans
who impeached Bill Clinton for dissembling in a sexual scandal find
none of this worthy of a full public hearing. To pacify a growing
number of critics, they have instead scheduled a secret and limited
inquiry.

Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of
evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear
Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president
persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent
threat of deployed weapons - "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned
aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a
huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,
including "missions targeting the United States."

Instead, almost three months after we invaded Iraq, the United States
and Britain have yet to find anything of the sort.

"Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or
biological weapons, or delivery systems," Army Col. John Connell, who
heads the hunt for those AWOL weapons in Iraq, said in Sunday's Los
Angeles Times. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not
going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find
little pieces."

We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood.
What has not been established is whether the president was in on the
lie. If he was, he should be impeached.