7-19-05, 9:15 am

In the biggest admission of guilt yet on the Rove scandal, President Bush yesterday declared inoperative his previous assertions that anyone in his administration found to be involved in leaking the name of a CIA agent to the press would be fired.

After the discovery that Karl Rove and probably Lewis Libby from Dick Cheney’s staff leaked Valerie Wilson’s identity to at least two reporters and then may have lied to a federal grand jury about it, the White House is now defending its decision not to fire Rove immediately by insisting that he would only remove a member of the administration if they were involved in a crime.

This dramatic shift in the basis on which someone would be removed from the administration says plainly that either Bush just realized that maybe his dear friend did leak classified information to the press in a time of war for political reasons, or that he just realized maybe they weren’t going to get away with any longer.

Either way, the President’s credibility falls flat. Can we really believe him on any issue? First, he insisted that no one was involved and that they would be fired if they were. Now, he is admitting someone was involved but they won’t be fired unless proven to have committed a crime. In other words, the only way someone who leaked classified information to the press is going to get in trouble with Bush is if they are about to be led away in shackles to federal prison.

Talk about standing by your man.

On the other side of this whole scandal is the real purpose for which Rove leaked classified information to the press. Rove intended to discredit an article published in the New York Times by Joe Wilson, a former diplomat, who had traveled to Niger at the behest of the CIA in order to investigate the question of whether or not Iraq tried to by uranium from that country.

Wilson took his trip in February of 2002. He met with the US ambassador there who told him that she didn’t believe the rumor about Iraq and had told Washington so. Wilson checked with his sources in the government and in the uranium mining industry there. He interviewed various officials and returned satisfied that indeed Iraq had not tried to purchase uranium.

He reported his findings to the CIA and to other departments. He essentially argued that uranium could not have been moved out of Niger in any meaningful quantity to Iraq or anywhere else without the companies who owned the mines knowing or without the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN’s watchdog on such matters) knowing about it. Certainly, the Niger government, without these two entities knowing beforehand, could not have officially sanctioned the transfer of the material.

The following September, just as the administration sought to bring a resolution before Congress authorizing war and with mounting opposition in Congress to war without further evidence of Iraq’s danger to the US, the Bush administration began to talk of 'mushroom clouds' over US cities or those of our allies.

Whatever opposition to war existed soon faded as the administration claimed to have evidence that Iraq tried to buy 500 tons of uranium ore from Niger between 1999 and 2001 – not 500 pounds or even 5 tons, but 500 tons (1 million pounds). (The administration didn’t even have to claim that they had succeeded.) The evidence was a memo and some letters containing the signatures of several Niger officials seeming to show that such a transaction had been authorized. Blair in Britain followed the claim with a report that supported Bush’s charges. Secretary of State Colin Powell, then the administration’s most credible spokesperson, guaranteed the authenticity of the contention to the Senate.

That December, after an authorization for military action had been secured from Congress under this premise, Bush again used the claim that Iraq tried to buy the uranium form Niger to pad more threats of action.

Again, in the State of the Union speech in late January, just weeks before the war, Bush swore to the American people that we could trust him on how dangerous Iraq was, citing the uranium purchase as a main example.

But then, the findings made by Wilson in his Niger investigation suddenly surfaced as the uranium story crashed to the ground. IAEA head Mohammed El Baradei denounced the documents that the administration used as evidence for their claim as a patent counterfeit and not a very good one either.

After examining the documents, it became obvious that one was signed by at least one official who was not in office at the time the purchase was supposed to have been made. One signature on another document had obviously been forged. It was apparent to the people at IAEA that any intelligence agency worth its salt would have spotted these errors.

I don’t imagine the CIA missed the errors, unfortunately.

This astounding revelation took place less than two weeks before Bush ordered the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. Instead of reexamining the issue, instead of the US media demanding answers for having been lied to, the Bush administration dismissed the meaning of the forgery and went ahead with their war. The media raised nary a peep.

Less than four months later, Joe Wilson pops up with his article in the New York Times. I told them all along that the uranium story wasn’t true, he says.

To discredit, attack, and rebut a critic, the administration leaked Wilson’s wife’s name to the press.

When it became clear the leak may have come from inside the administration, Bush promised to fire whoever was found to be involved. Now, this promise is inoperative.

Just like the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, we find the President’s word to be worthless as a three-dollar bill or a Niger memo.

A real investigation into who made the forgery is clearly needed. An investigation into who in the CIA and the White House knew it was faked but continued to cite the obvious forgery as evidence would also seem pertinent.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.