The Bush administration should have known
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To this hour, the Bush administration contends that the decision to invade Iraq was based on the "best available intelligence" at the time. The lesson learned is that without checks and balances—and subpoenas— policymakers can get away with almost anything.
The blame-the-intelligence argument is itself a fraud. A careful reading of the intelligence, and sometimes a casual glance, would have told anyone who really wanted to understand what was going on with Iraq's WMD program that U.S. intelligence didn't know.
In several instances, CIA appears to not have tried. And though White House officials also claim that allied intelligence services had similar concerns about Iraq's non-existant WMD, that is not the case. As we point out in our book, the French didn't believe Saddam had an inventory of banned weapons. Neither did the Italians.
One of the prime chances to deep-six the intelligence of an Iraqi nuclear deal with Niger came in early February 2002 , when SISMI, Italian Military Intelligence, finally delivered a "verbatim text" of one report it was using to describe Iraq's alleged purchase of 500 tons of uranium per year from Niger. This text had been copied from a document in a large trove that was eventually provided by an Italian operative, Rocco Martino, to an Italian journalist.The verbatim text was obvious junk mail, if CIA officials had bothered to fact-check. The text purported to be the final approval by Niger's Supreme Court of the uranium deal. It was "signed" by Niger's current ambassador to Washington.
What were some of the obvious errors? Among other things, the document misnamed the court, calling it the State Court (Cour d'Etat), which had been renamed as the Supreme Court (Cour Supreme) in 1990. The document named five officers of the court who had last served in that capacity in 1989, 11 years before the supposed date of ratifying the Niger deal.
The "verbatim text" was a key bit of intelligence used by the Defense Intelligence Agency in those early days of February 2002 to produce an alarming report that landed on Vice President Dick Cheney's desk. Cheney, in turn, demanded answers of his CIA briefer. That led to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger the same month.
Wilson, of course, reported back what many at the CIA already knew. Impossible, he said, Iraq could not purchase uranium from Niger, and hadn't even tried to do it. A little fact-checking by any of the analysts who reviewed the verbatim text, including those from CIA's Africa section, would have made Wilson's trip unnecessary. You might never have heard of Joseph Wilson, and certainly not of his wife, Valerie Plame, while Scooter Libby might be making plans for the summer instead of getting ready for 30 months in the slammer.
"The problem is you don't always have the right people looking at the right documents at the right time," an intelligence source told us. "If you had the right people looking at these documents, they would have said, 'Gee, these terms are hosed up, they're out of date."
A casual reading of the documents surrounding so-called intelligence about Iraq's deal with Niger makes clear that the material was pilfered and dusted off from the files of Italian military intelligence.
The Italian Letter itself was a crude document, supposedly addressed to Saddam Hussein by Niger's president, Mamadou Tandja, confirming the non-existent sale. A little problem: The phony Tandja said he based his power to approve the sale based on "the Constitution of 12 May 1966" —which had been superceded by three new constitutions in the 1990s. The real Tandja would have known that.