No Lie
President Bush, State of the Union, January 28, 2003:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Was this a lie? Time Magazine must have thought so, calling this an "untruth" on their cover. (One could quibble and say that literally an "untruth" isn't the same thing as a "lie", but clearly they were trying to create that impression.)

In fact, if you remember the summer of 2003, this one sentence received a huge amount of media attention, as it became more and more clear that the US wasn't finding stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. Howard Kurtz noted that this story was covered in 302 separate stories on the major networks and in the major newspapers. 302! This sentence became one of the major pieces of evidence that Bush had misled us into war.

Well there's been a lot of new relevations on this subject, with the recently-released British Butler report and the US Senate Intelligence Committee report. FactCheck.org, which seems to have a solid non-partisan record (see here for a not-so-friendly review), has a fairly recent summary of them, concluding that, contrary to Conventional Wisdom, "Bush accurately stated what British intelligence was saying, and that CIA analysts believed the same thing."

The FactCheck.org 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.

For those keeping score at home, since the other side of the anti-Bush story has been detailed, CBS, NBC and ABC have mentioned this twice (combined!), and those same newspapers mentioned above have a total of 7 pieces.

One might think after all the damage they did to Bush's credibility propagating "untruths", they might feel more of an obligation to set the record straight.
- posted by The Dutchman @ 5:08:00 PM