FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Story I broke more than a year now the subject of new Congressional probe by Waxman

From Waxman’s committee today:

Committee Seeks Niger Documents and Testimony and Instructs State Department Not to Impede Probe

Today Chairman Waxman sent a letter to Secretary of State Rice (1) informing the Secretary that the legislative affairs officials in the Department should not hinder the Committee’s inquiry into why Secretary Rice and President Bush cited forged evidence to build a case for war against Iraq; (2) advising the Secretary that the Committee will depose a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department; and (3) requesting relevant documents. Letters were also sent to the CIA, the White House, and the Department of Defense requesting relevant documents.

From Jason Leopold of Truthout.org: The article I wrote more than one year ago about the state department warning.

Again, the media is asleep at the wheel..


State Department Memo: "16 Words" Were False
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t Report
Monday 17 April 2006


Sixteen days before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa - an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war - the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a newly declassified State Department memo.


The revelation of the warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored intelligence information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq.


The memo says: "On January 12, 2003," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) "expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries."

Moreover, the memo says that the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.

Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reason that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in February 5, 2003 - one week after Bush's State of the Union address - to try to win support for a possible strike against Iraq. More on the article.