WTF Is It Now?!?

Niger documents were part of a campaign to deliberately mislead the American public
For more than two years we've been told by the misadministration that the US got into Iraq because of intelligence failures. What a load of horse-hockey.

Nine officials - from the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Pentagon - have come forward to call the infamous Niger yellowcake documents "a disinformation operation," "black propaganda," "black ops," and "a classic psy-ops campaign" to deliberately mislead the American public.

In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the CIA, the State Department or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy - only to be rebuffed by Bush administration officials who wanted to use the material.

"They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique - ruthless relentlessness."

The neocons had long said that they needed another Pearl Harbor in order to realize their dreams of regime change in Iraq. Now it had taken place. [And] now the Niger operation went into overdrive.

Enter Joseph Wilson, who went to Niger to investigate, and upon returning told CIA officials that he had found no evidence to support the uranium charges.

By now the Niger reports had been discredited more than half a dozen times - by the French in 2001, by the CIA in Rome and in Langley, by the State Department's INR, by some analysts in the Pentagon, by the ambassador to Niger, by Wilson, and yet again by State.

Ruh roh! So Cheney's pals in the CIA tried again, going back to French Intelligence, who again sent agents to Niger - and again found the charges to be false: "We told the Americans, 'Bullshit. It doesn't make any sense.'"

Still not giving up, the WH launched the White House Iraq Group to catapult the propaganda and 'sell the war through the media,' creating

... a full-fledged marketing campaign, featuring images of nuclear devastation and threats of biological and chemical weapons. A key piece of the evidence was the Niger dossier.

The opening salvo was fired on Sunday, September 8, 2002, when National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The smoking-gun-mushroom-cloud catchphrase was such a hit that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all picked it up in one form or another, sending it out repeatedly to the entire country.

Meanwhile, "highly placed White House sources such as Scooter Libby leaked exclusive 'scoops' to credulous reporters" - and camp followers such as Judith 'aluminum tubes' Miller - to further their agenda, which had shifted from finding nonexistant wmds to regime change.

"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former CIA and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew."

The CIA put it in writing and faxed it to the NSC. Even the National Intelligence Council unequivocally stated that "the Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest." But the neocons weren't done yet.

On March 7, the IAEA publicly exposed the Niger documents as forgeries. Then, on March 19, 2003, the war in Iraq began.

- read the whole thing at Vanity Fair.