Well before President George Bush said in 2003 that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, a high-level state department intelligence assessment deemed the deal ”unlikely” for several reasons, The New York Times said on Wednesday.
The document cast doubt on the alleged purchases as France controlled the uranium industry in Niger and could block the sale. The document said Niger was avoiding actions that risked it losing US and other foreign aid, and moving tonnes of uranium by truck across the border would be very difficult to do and easy to detect.
The March 2002 memo was distributed at senior levels, but a White House official would not say whether Bush had seen it before his State of the Union address in January 2003, in which he cited the uranium deal as a sign Iraq was secretly developing nuclear weapons, the daily said.
Known as the infamous ”16 words,” the charge was pivotal in justifying the US-led invasion of Iraq two months later. The White House has since admitted it was based on faulty intelligence and should have been struck from the speech.
While the state department’s intelligence assessment has been mentioned in past media reports and by a bipartisan commission that last year analysed intelligence failures in Iraq, it was never disclosed in its entirety.
The memo was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, which provided The New York Times with a copy.
Judicial Watch director Chris Farrell said the analysis was ”a very strong, well-thought-out argument that looks at the whole playing field in Niger, and it makes a compelling case for why the uranium sale was so unlikely”.
Italian intelligence officials recently concluded that some of the documents supporting the alleged Iraq-Niger-uranium link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy. – AFP
