President George W Bush (43) and top members of his staff have been caught in so many deceptions, selective intelligence leaks, and outright lies many of you may wonder why I keep coming back to the false 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union speech.
Of all of Bush's deception's, even I will admit these are hardly the most consequential by many measures. Unless, we can prove that when he spoke these exact 16 words, President Bush was intentionally and knowingly deceiving Congress.
In which case, this may be the best and most likely grounds for impeachment. A case, originally advanced by Representative Maurice Hinchey and 40 other Representatives in a September 15, 2005 letter to US Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. (See below)
Our constitutional framers intentionally set the bar for impeachment high to avoid misuse for political purposes. So while we have heard dozens of broad and compelling arguments that enrage passions and indignation of Democrats, to close the deal, we need a specific "high
crime" and compelling smoking gun" evidence that meets the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard of evidence to Republicans as well.
False 16 Words In 2003 State Of The Union Speech Our Best Case To Start HJC Hearings?
I believe have now reached and exceeded the threshold of evidence required for the House Judiciary Committee to vote to initiate Articles of Inquiry to begin collecting and organizing the compelling evidence that President George Bush knowingly and willingly misled Congress with the his false Niger Uranium claims in his 2003 SOTU speech.
I therefore, ask John Conyers to update and resubmit HRC 635, 636, and 637.
With this in mind, consider the latest evidence Prosecutor's Fitzgerald's court filings brought to our attention, April 17, 2006 by Jason Leopold State Department Memo: '16 Words' Were False in TruthOut.
Eleven 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.
Substantial evidence already has established that both Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor, and George Tenet, CIA Director were aware of the dubious nature of the Niger Uranium claims. The remaining link for proving an impeachable offense is to show that one or both informed President Bush of these doubts prior to the 2003 speech.
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.
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," the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.
Secretary Of State Colin Powell Refuses To Cite False Uranium Claims Before United Nations
Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reasons 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 and win support for a possible strike against Iraq.
"After considerable back and forth between the CIA, the (State) Department, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association), and the British, Secretary Powell's briefing to the U.N. Security Council did not mention attempted Iraqi procurement of uranium due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement," the memo further states.
Hinchey Argues The Administration's False And Fraudulent Uranium Claims Arguably Violated Criminal Laws Concerning Communications With Congress
Last September 15, 2005, Representative Maurice Hinchey and 40 of his colleagues from the House, sent a letter to Prosecutor Fitzgerald asking him to expand his investigation into PlameGate, which he has apparently done. Selected Excerpts From Representative Maurice Hinchey Sept 15, 2005 Letter
Hinchey reminds us that:
The criminal statute, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001, prohibits knowingly and willfully making false and fraudulent statements to Congress in documents required by law.
The two uranium claims in the State of the Union Address and the report to Congress concerning Iraq were false and fraudulent, and are in documents that the White House submitted to Congress.
See House Document 108-1 and House Document 108-23. The law required the president to give such reports. Article II, Section 3 of the constitution requires presidents to give State of the Union Addresses.
Section 4 of Public Law 107-243, which is the Congressional resolution authorizing the war against Iraq, requires the president to give reports to Congress relevant to the war resolution and the president submitted said report on Iraq pursuant to that law.
Thus 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001 was evidently violated.
The criminal statute, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 371, prohibits conspiring to defraud the United States and is applicable since the Supreme Court in the case of Hammerschmidt v. United States, 265 U.S. 182, 188 (1924) held that to "conspire to defraud the United States means primarily to cheat the government out of property or money, but it also means to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest."
Senior Administration officials arguably violated Section 371 because their uranium claims had the effect of obstructing or interfering with the function of Congress to reconsider its war resolution and to allow further time for U.N. weapons inspections.
If the whole truth had been told, Congress may well have withdrawn the war resolution or delayed the start of the war to allow further U.N. weapons inspections, which would have shown what we now know; that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not sought the uranium.
However, it should be noted that Section 371 does not require proof that the conspiracy was successful.
Additionally, the Downing Street memos should be part of the investigation as to whether one of the several ways in which the Administration deliberately "fixed" the facts and intelligence on uranium included its switch of the language in the State of the Union Address to justify the war. These documents provide valuable insight into the mindset of the Administration the summer preceding the Iraq invasion.
Note that President Bush's deceptions do not have to be "technical lies," so the craft artifice of asserting "the British learned" does not protect him. Hinchey notes that the conspiracy was successful and material to the vote the Congress made and did not make in the matter of the Iraq War.
IAEA Director ElBaradei Informed NSC in December 2002 He Thought Niger Documents Were Forgeries
Just to nail down, how much awareness existed around the globe that the Niger Documents were at best dubious if not down right forgeries remember the Noble prize winning work of IAEA Director El Baradei.
Iraq's interest in the yellowcake caught the attention of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Association. ElBaradei had read a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate and had personally contacted the State Department and the National Security Council in hopes of obtaining evidence so his agency could look into it.
ElBaradei sent a letter to the White House and the National Security Council (NSC) in December 2002, warning senior officials he thought the documents were forgeries and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs.
ElBaradei said he never received a written response to his letter, despite repeated follow-up calls he made to the White House, the NSC and the State Department.
ElBaradei went public with his conclusions in a formal open letter March 7, 2003. The Bush administration ignored this most credible of the scientific conclusions and went to war with Iraq two weeks later.
Because the sad truth of the mater that is now clear from the record is that the whole issue of the possible threat from WMD was never the real reason the Bush Administration went to war. ElBaradei received the Noble Prize for his work. Time will tell if our Constitutional system of government is strong enough to hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney accountable by impeachment for their deceptions.
Latest Smoking Gun Memo Obtained By The New York Sun Under Freedom of Information Act
Given that the GOP control Congress is refusing to hold the long overdue and appropriate hearings into these legitimate questions, we must give extra credit to Joseph Wilson, the few journalists and Newspapers that are doing their best to keep progress on this investigation alive.
Monday's declassified State Department memo was obtained over the weekend by The New York Sun under a Freedom of Information Act request the newspaper filed last July. The Sun's story Monday morning, however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger documents.
The memo was drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, about a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA.
The memo had originally been drafted in June in response to Libby's questions about Wilson. But after Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times July 6, 2003, in which he disclosed that he had personally investigated the Niger uranium claims and found that they were false, Powell requested further information from his aides. Ford went back and retrieved the June memo, re-dated it July 7, 2003, and sent it to Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage.
The Sun reported that the memo contained no direct reference to Plame Wilson's CIA status being marked as "secret" despite the fact that the word "secret" is clearly marked on every page of the INR memo.
The memo does not say that the State Department alerted the White House on January 12, 2003, about the bogus uranium claims.
Who Knew What When?
This is why we need a congressional investigation now. To pin all of these witness down on exactly what they knew when, and when did they tell the President and Vice President.
But the memo's author, Carl Ford, said in a previous interview that he has no doubt the State Department's reservations about the Niger intelligence made its way to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
One high-ranking State Department official said that when the department's analysts briefed Colin Powell about the Niger forgeries Powell met with former Director of the CIA George Tenet and shared that information with him.
Tenet then told Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and her former deputy, Stephen Hadley, that the uranium claims were "dubious," according to current and former State Department and CIA officials who have direct knowledge of what Tenet discussed with the White House at the time.
White House Still Denies It Was Briefed On State Department's And CIA's Concerns On Niger Uranium Claims
The White House has long maintained that they were never briefed about the State Department's or the CIA's concerns related to the Niger uranium claims.
"I refuse to believe that the findings of a four-star general and an envoy the CIA sent to Niger to personally investigate the accuracy of the intelligence, as well as our own research at the State Department, never got into the hands of President Bush or Vice President Cheney. I don't buy it," said a high-ranking State Department official. "Saying that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was all it took, as far as I'm concerned, to convince the House to support the war. The American people too. I believe removing Saddam Hussein was right and just. But the intelligence that was used to state the case wasn't."
A spokeswoman for Tenet said Monday that the former head of the CIA wouldn't comment on the newly declassified document but promised that Tenet would tell the "full story" about how the infamous 16 words wound up in Bush's State of the Union address in Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm," expected to be published in late October.
Many career State Department officials interviewed Monday said they were upset that the so-called "16 words" made their way into the State of the Union address and they are pleased that the INR memo has been declassified so as to prove that their colleagues sounded early warnings about the dubious Niger intelligence.
A State Department official who has direct knowledge of the now declassified INR memo said when the request came from Cheney's office for a report on Wilson's Niger trip it was an opportunity to put in writing a document that would remind the White House that it had been warned about the Niger claims early on.
The Motivation For The Attacks On Joseph Wilson
Many other State Department officials believed that the existence of a memo that would, in essence, disagree with the White House's own assessment on Niger would eventually hurt the administration.
"This was the very first time there was written evidence - not notes, but a request for a report - from the State Department that documented why the Niger intel was bullshit," said one retired State Department official.
"It was the only thing in writing, and it had a certain value because it didn't come from the IAEA. It came from State. It scared the heck out of a lot of people because it proved that this guy Wilson's story was credible. I don't think anybody wanted the media to know that the State Department disagreed with the intelligence used by the White House. That's why Wilson had to be shut down."
Other Excerpts Of Representative Maurice Hinchey's Letter
Selected Excerpts From Representative Maurice Hinchey Sept 15, 2005 Letter
President Bush made two uranium claims, one in his State of the Union Address to Congress and another in a report that he submitted to Congress concerning Iraq, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made three other uranium claims. We request that you investigate whether such claims violated two criminal statutes, 18 U.S.C., Sec. 1001 and 18 U.S.C., Sec. 371, that prohibit making false and fraudulent statements to Congress and obstructing the functions of Congress.
The uranium claims were also fraudulent because although some in the American intelligence community (including the C.I.A.) may have agreed at the time with the British opinion that Iraq had sought uranium, numerous people within the Administration did not tell the whole truth consisting of the contrary views held by the best informed U.S. intelligence officials. C.I.A. Director George Tenet told the White House in October 2002 that C.I.A. analysts believed the reporting on the uranium claim was "weak" and thus the Director told the White House that it should not make the claim. Later that same day, the C.I.A.'s Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence sent a fax to the White House stating that the "evidence [on the uranium claim] is weak." The National Security Council (N.S.C.) believed in January 2003 that the nuclear case against Iraq was weak. Secretary of State Powell was told during meetings at the C.I.A. to vet his U.N. speech of February 5, 2003 that there were doubts about the uranium claim and he therefore kept it out of his speech for that reason. The U.S. government told the U.N. on February 4, 2003 that it could not confirm the uranium reports.
Representative Hinchey has submitted 9 requests to subpoena the drafts of the 2003 SOTU and Representative Henry Waxman 4, all killed by various GOP dominated Congressional subcommittees.
However, in the last attempt Republican Jim Leach crossed over and deadlocked the House Committee On Government Reform 22-22 for a week before Chairmen Henry Hyde could rally the troops to kill it.
Furthermore, the original draft of the State of the Union Address stated that "we know that [Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa," but after the White House consulted with the C.I.A., the White House changed the speech to refer to the British view rather than the American view. The final draft stated that the "British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The parties involved stated that they had no discussions about the credibility of the reporting and the reason for the switch was to identify the source for the uranium claim.
However, in response to the uproar over the op-ed article by Ambassador Wilson, C.I.A. Director Tenet issued a statement in which he admitted that C.I.A. officials who reviewed the draft of the State of the Union Address containing the remarks on the Niger-Iraqi uranium deal "raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with [White House] National Security Council colleagues" and "[s]ome of the language was changed." Tenet stated that "[f]rom what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct - i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."
What this tells us is that although Administration officials, informed by the highest ranking members of our own intelligence operation, knew that the claim of Niger uranium going to Iraq was "weak" and could not be confirmed, they were still determined to use it in the president's address to Congress and fell back on the dubious language of the British report. The Administration clearly sought to cover up their own officials' doubts about Iraq's nuclear capabilities and hide those doubts from the Congress and the U.S. public.
...
Motive
A motive for making such false and fraudulent uranium claims would have been to thwart Congressional and U.N. efforts to delay the start of the war. Pending at the time that the Administration made its uranium claims in January 2003 was a Congressional resolution, H.Con.Res.2, submitted by five members of Congress on January 7, 2003, which expressed the sense of Congress that it should repeal its earlier war resolution to allow more time for U.N. weapons inspectors to finish their work. On January 24, 2003, a few days prior to the State of the Union Address, 130 members of Congress wrote to the president encouraging him to consider any request by the U.N. for additional time for weapons inspections. On February 5, 2003, 30 members of Congress submitted another resolution, H.J.Res.20, to actually repeal the war resolution.
Had it not been for the uranium claims in the State of the Union Address, which sought to squelch congressional concern over the impetus for the pending war, the number of sponsors for H.J. Res. 20 would have been far greater. The influence of the uranium claims can be seen in the fact that 130 members of Congress signed the letter before the State of the Union Address, but only 30 sponsored H.J. Res. 20, which was introduced after the speech. The Administration's uranium claims thwarted the congressional efforts to delay the start of the war since the Administration used the claims to allege that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program -- despite the failure of the U.N. inspectors to find such a program -- and thus falsely assert that Iraq posed an immediate threat that needed to be nullified without further delay.
Concerning the importance of the uranium claims, the report Iraq On The Record, produced by the Minority Staff of the House Committee on Government Reform, states: "Another significant component of the Administration's nuclear claims was the assertion that Iraq had sought to import uranium from Africa. As one of few new pieces of intelligence, this claim was repeated multiple times by Administration officials as proof that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program." A nuclear-armed Iraq was a key reason, if not the most important reason, used by the Administration to justify the need for a preemptive war against Iraq. Rather than allow the U.N. inspectors to finish their inspections, the results of which might have fueled further congressional efforts and resolutions to stop the war, the Administration commenced the war in March 2003.Conclusion
The above matters are clearly related to your current investigation. Ambassador Wilson's op-ed article focused on the uranium claim made in the 2003 State of the Union Address and he concluded that "intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." You are investigating whether any laws were violated when Administration officials - in order to discredit Wilson's claim and/or to retaliate against him - leaked to the press the fact that his wife was a CIA agent. As set forth in this letter, Wilson's original charge that the Administration "twisted" the evidence concerns matters that are just as criminal as the Administration's attempts to discredit Wilson and his charge by revealing the identity of Mrs. Wilson as a CIA operative.
Justice Department officials in Washington certainly have the same type of conflict of interest in this matter as they did in the CIA leak case, which resulted in current your assignment. (See 28 CFR, Sec. 45.2(a) prohibiting Department employees from matters in which they have a conflict of interest).
Thank you for your attention to this request. We look forward to your response.
We need to have formal investigations of these and the many other credible claims of impeachable offenses committed by the Bush Administration.
The pros and cons of the Bush Adminstration is going to be debated for decades. At the very least we need to get the evidence into the public record for the sake of history. And Congressmen need to debate it and take a public stand on way or another for the sake of justice.
Please consider thanking Representative Maurice Hinchey and Henry Waxman for their courageous and peristent efforts in this regard.
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) Strikes Again! 9th Demand For Articles of Inquiry Against Pres. Bushby HoundDog Sat Dec 10, 2005 at 01:20:08 PM PDT
U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey's Official Congressional Website
U.S. Representative Henry Waxmans Official Congressional Website