"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." President
Bush made this unsubstantiated statement in his report on the State
of the Union on January 28, 2003. His friend, British Prime Minister
Blair, had given him the information claiming that British intelligence
had obtained it from "independent sources."
Specifically, the allegation referred to the uranium mines in the West
African state of Niger. The executives of the country's two extracting
companies, Somair and Cominak, responded to Blair's allegation "with
surprise, disbelief, amusement and denials," and Niger's prime
minister assured the media: "We have never discussed uranium with
Iraq."
I learned the details about Niger's French-controlled uranium production
straight from a report in London's Sunday Telegraph and discussed them
in my Sunday column on August 10 under the heading "Fabricating
yellowcake."
Worldwide, officials and commentators snickered about the failure of
national security adviser Condaleezza Rice and CIA chief George Tenet
to vet the President's speech and spare him the embarrassment. Not until
half a year later, however, on Friday, July 11, did Tenet admit: "This
was a mistake." Tony Blair, however, the purveyor of the phony
charge never apologized to either the American or the British people.
To provide more reasons for an invasion of Iraq, Blair asserted --without
any proof--that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction
within 45 minutes and that, according to information "from a high-ranking
Iraqi defector," Iraq possessed several tons of the deadly nerve
agent VX.
It was also Blair who advanced the notion that Saddam cooperated with
Bin Laden. Yet, according to the British Observer, already on February
10, five weeks before the invasion, Blair had received a confidential
assessment--made public only September 11--by the Government's Joint
Intelligence Committee that there was no evidence Iraq had provided
chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida.
Now America's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, has at long last confirmed
what other inspectors, such as Rolf Ekeus, Scott Ritter, and Hans Blix,
had long asserted: that Saddam Hussein destroyed his stockpiles after
the first Gulf War. Bush, Blair, and their neo-conservative allies,
however, remained so enthralled by their mirage of nuclear and chemical
weapons in the Iraqi desert that they would rather face ridicule than
admit their exaggerations. Whenever they were asked to explain the failure
to find those weapons, they routinely explained what nobody disputes:
that the world is better off without Saddam.
Blair and Bush thought that his forcible removal could best be justified
if Saddam possessed those weapons of mass destruction. Now they claim
that, even if he did not have WMDs, there is evidence that he had scientists,
laboratories, containers, and documents that could have been used again
for the developments of WMDs.
Spy satellites had actually photographed "suspicious" convoys
of trailer trucks in the western Iraqi desert. They could have carried
nuclear or chemical bombs but the inspectors soon discovered that they
did not. Since Hans Blix's team did not find what Messrs. Blair and
Bush wanted to see unearthed, they lost confidence in the inspectors
and invaded Iraq, on the assumption that their dreams of stockpiled
WMDs may yet come true.
As long as Tony Blair simply spread misinformation from his intelligence
sources, he did not bear false witness. Once he repeated, however, what
was proven to be untrue, he became guilty of barefaced lying.
Now he has set up his own inquiry into the accuracy of the intelligence
he received, but not, as he explicitly stipulated, into how intelligence
findings were used in support of his political judgments. He appointed
Lord Butler of Brockwell, a retired Westminster bureaucrat, to chair
the inquiry and report the results directly to him.
Lord Butler has a consistent forty-year record of not rocking Britain's
ship of state. The Daily Mail promptly greeted him with the headline:
"Enter Lord Cover-Up."