PUT UP or SHUT UP

Chemical forms of uranium during conversion: yellowcake and uranyl nitrate solution [UO2(NO3)2].

Recently I was challenged to prove that President Bush did not lying when he said that British Intelligence reported that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger and that the The Senate Intel Commitee report stated "that Iraq indeed did attempt to buy yellowcake",well I’m putting up!

As you recall this statement was a part the President’s 2003 State of the Union speech where he stated,“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”

This statement was called a lie by Joseph Wilson IV who subsequently accused the White house of outing the identity of his CIA agent wife Valeria Plame in a vendictive attempt to discredit him.

Without going into all of the pretext and subtext surrounding this issue it has been determined, after the fact, that we do not know if Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium. However without a doubt at the time that the President spoke those words the President had all of the authority behind him that former Vice President Al Gore presently enjoys on the topic of Global warming. All of the experts in the intelligence gathering community believed that Iraq attempted to get uranium and based on the experts findings the President made his remarks.

Further, Democrats on the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee also reluctantly concluded that the intelligence received by the Bush people suggested that Iraq was attempting to secure enriched uranium in order to produce nuclear weapons. That same intelligence suggested that Iraq already possessed a stockpile of both chemical and biological weapons.

This is part of the official conclusion of the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee and statement from the Chair of the Committee Pat Roberts:

Conclusion: The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.

The former ambassador’s wife suggested her husband for the trip to Niger in February 2002. The former ambassador had traveled previously to Niger on behalf of the CIA, also at the suggestion of his wife, to look into another matter not related to Iraq. On February 12, 2002, the former ambassador’s wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy Chief of a division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations which said, “[m]y husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possible shed light on this sort of actiity.” This was just one day before the same Directorate of Operations division sent a cable to one of its overseas stations requesting concurrence with the division’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger.

Conclusion: Other than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.

At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the intelligence Community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq unranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador’s comments to reporters that the Niger-Iraq uranium documents “may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’”could not have been based on the former ambassador’s actual experiences because the intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador’s trip. In addition, nothing in the reprot from the former ambassador’s trip said anything about documents having been forged or the names or dates in the reports having been incorrect. The former ambassador told Committee staff that he, infact,did not have access to any of the names and dates in the CIA’s reports and said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct. Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports.

Following the Vice President’s review of an intelligence report regardig a possible uranium deal, he asked his briefer for the CIA’s analysis of the issue. It was this request which generated Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger. The former ambassador’s public comments suggesting that the Vice President had been briefed on the information gathered during his trip is not correct, however. While the CIA responded to the Vice President’s request for the Agency’s analysis, they never provided the information gathered by the former Ambassador. The former ambassador, in an NBC Meet the Press interview on July 6, 2003 said, “The office of the Vice President, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.” The former ambassador was speaking on the basis of what he believed should have happened based on his former government experience, but he had no knowledge that this did happen.
These and other public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report “debunked” the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public’s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador’s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.

During Mr. Wilson’s media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and he had “debunked” the claim that Iraq was seeking uranimum for Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT “debunk” the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements maded by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect but, had no basis in fact.

The website FactCheck.org summaries the Joseph Wilson allegations as such.

Summary
The famous “16 words” in President Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address turn out to have a basis in fact after all, according to two recently released investigations in the US and Britain.
Bush said then, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .” Some of his critics called that a lie, but the new evidence shows Bush had reason to say what he did.
· A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush’s 16 words “well founded.”
· A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from “a number of intelligence reports,” a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.
· Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush’s 16 words a “lie”, supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger .
· Both the US and British investigations make clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes soon after Bush spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence Bush cited, or the CIA's conclusion that Iraq was trying to get uranium.
None of the new information suggests Iraq ever nailed down a deal to buy uranium, and the Senate report makes clear that US intelligence analysts have come to doubt whether Iraq was even trying to buy the stuff. In fact, both the White House and the CIA long ago conceded that the 16 words shouldn’t have been part of Bush’s speech.
But what he said – that Iraq sought uranium – is just what both British and US intelligence were telling him at the time. So Bush may indeed have been misinformed, but that's not the same as lying

Finally in the Senate

Congressional Reports: Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq; "II. Niger Section K." is the reluctant admission by the committee that that Iraq indeed did attempt to buy yellowcake it states:

K. Niger Conclusions
(U)Conclusion 12. Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forge foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger unranium deal, it was reasonable or analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence.

(U)Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador’s trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

Meaning that the original assessment of the NIE report stating that Irag had attempted to gain uranium from Africa, according to this Senate Community, was deemed creditable even in light of Joe Wilson’s attempts to discredit the war and the President.

To conclude; to my friend who has challenged me to put up or shut up, as I said the President did not lie America into War, The White house did not out Valerie Plame and the Senate Intel Commitee report stated "that Iraq indeed did attempt to buy yellowcake"as reported by NIE. Face it friend you, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are liars just like the rest of your Liberal Democratic cohorts.