The Niger Report, whose validity has been seriously questioned by several intelligence agencies, provided the pretext for America’s decision to declare war on Iraq. The Niger uranium documents refers to falsified classified documents initially “uncovered” by Italian intelligence which depicted an attempt by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime to purchase yellowcake uranium from the country of Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the United States and United Kingdom governments asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating “weapons of mass destruction,” in defiance of United Nations sanctions. This claim was one of the political justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and led to considerable embarrassment when discredited. If you would like to know about the Niger Report, click on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_forgery.At the recommendation of his wife, Valerie Plume, Ambassador Joseph Wilson was asked to investigate the Niger document claims himself. Wilson had been posted to Niger 14 years earlier, and throughout a diplomatic career in Africa he had built up a large network of contacts in Niger. Wilson interviewed former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, who reported that he knew of no sales to Iraq. Mayaki did however recall that in June 1999 an Iraqi delegation had expressed interest in “expanding commercial relations,” which he had interpreted to mean yellowcake sales.

Ultimately, Wilson concluded that there was no way that production at the uranium mines could be ramped up or that the excess uranium could have been exported without it being immediately obvious to many people both in the private sector and in the government of Niger. He returned home and told the CIA that the reports were “unequivocally wrong.” The CIA retained this information in its Counter Proliferation Department, and was not even passed up to the CIA Director, according to the bipartisan, unanimous findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s July 2004 report.In early October 2002, George Tenet called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asking Hadley to remove reference to the Niger uranium from a speech Bush was to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. This was followed up by a memo asking Hadley to remove another, similar line. Another memo was sent to the White House expressing the CIA’s view that the Niger claims were false; this memo was given to both Hadley and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Further, in March 2003, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were “in fact not authentic.”

Retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a critical op-ed in The New York Times in which he explained the nature of the documents and the government’s prior knowledge of their unreliability for use in a case for war. Shortly after Wilson’s op-ed, in a column by Robert Novak, the identity of Wilson’s wife, undercover CIA analyst Valerie Plame, was revealed. The Senate Intelligence Committee report and other sources seem to confirm that Plame gave her husband a positive recommendation. However, they also confirm that she did not personally authorize the trip (and in fact did not have any authority to do so).
The actual words President Bush spoke: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” suggests that his source was British intelligence and not the forged documents.Since that time, the Administration has admitted that making the claim was a mistake.

The Butler Report issued after a review by the British government concluded that the report Saddam’s government was seeking uranium in Africa appeared credible. Nevertheless, the Butler report fails to advance any evidence to substantiate this conclusion. Furthermore, the Butler report concluded that “The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it,” which again could not be verified. In some ways the Butler Report does dispute the findings with this statement in the review: “authorship of the dossier was a mistaken judgment.”

After reading a dozen or so articles and books on this infamous Niger Report and trying to understand how it ended up in the President’s 2003 State of the Union address, I’ve come to this conclusion. There are always two sides to every story. So there are those who believe that Wilson misrepresented his investigation and there are those who believe that the Washington neocons refused to listen to it. Debates can go on forever about his wife recommending him for the job, why her secret position with the CIA got exposed, what his motive was in writing his article to the New York Times, and why the President and his staff allowed the report to become such a significant explanation for their reason for going to war.

It seems to me that we can debate many aspects of this issue but there is one indisputable truth. The Bush Administration – Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, Paul Wolfowitz, and several others – were predisposed to want to declare war on Iraq. They were not just receptive to finding a reason to go to war, they were actively pursuing some grounds that would justify this to the American people. I believe that they literally “ordered” the intelligence agencies to find the justification. The Niger Report – whether false or true, whether Wilson’s report was partially accurate or parts were omitted, whether someone in the SISMI, the Italian military branch, had monetary motives for selling the Niger Report info to the CIA, whether the CIA received a report falsified by the SISMI or whether they themselves altered it, whether the British government believed it to be true or not – it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the Niger Report provided the excuse for the Bush Administration to justify the war to the public.

It bothered me when in 2002 I read that Bush referenced “new evidence” to a group of reporters gathered at Camp David: “A report came out of the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Iraqis were six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. Bush said: “I don’t know what more evidence we need.” There was no new evidence. He was referencing the old Niger report?  In those infamous 16 words in the State of the Union address, the word that stood out for me was “recently.” “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” I know that “new evidence” and “recently” are both relative words, but to me they conjure up something more recent than a 3 or 4 year-old report that is old news by then, especially one whose accuracy is at best questionable. I am convinced there was a deliberate effort to convince (and deceive) the public about the threat of WMD in order to justify their decision to take us to War.It bothers me now when I hear them attempting to justify the war based on our benevolent desire to bring democracy to this poor country. No one will ever convince me that this war was not about oil and the desire to restructure the Middle East to our liking, in a way in which we can count on getting what we want from them in the future. Our motives were much more about how this will help us than how we could help them. It would bother a little less if they just admitted that.On September 8, 2002, everything was in motion to take us to war. The push was on to get the American people behind the war.