In April, the Washington Post published an article that could be a smoking gun. The article,
A 'Concerted Effort' to Discredit Bush Critic, said the National Intelligence Council wrote a memo debunking the uranium claim in late January. Did Bush see the memo?
From the article
At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.
In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.
Okay, so we have Cheney down as lying there.
And as reported in this National Journal article, right in the NIE doubt was cast on the uranium claim
Reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells."
But White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, addressing the same issue, Bartlett said, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."
And now we have Bush down as a cherrypicker whom is either lying or is too incompetent to read his intelligence briefings. If it's 'so hard for Bush to read footnotes in a 90-page document,' would it have been that hard to ask his advisers to point out any doubts found in the NIE?
Back to the WaPo article
the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not?
/snip
The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.
That, right there, could be our smoking gun. Did Bush see the memo debunking the uranium claim before the 2003 SOTU? More importantly, did Bush see the memo before we went to war?
My thoughts are, most likely he did! The National Intelligence Council is the body that made the NIE. Bush saw the NIE, so why would he not see another important memo written by the same group? In addition, as the article says, there were officials who saw the memo reach the White House.
Colin Powell probably saw the memo, because he didn't include the uranium claim in his February 6, 2003 presentation to the UN on Iraq WMD. If the SEC of State saw such a memo, why would the President of the United States not?
We ought to demand a statement from Bush on whether or not he saw the NIC memo. Write to your Representatives and Senators and tell them you want an investigation into whether or not Bush saw the memo (1) before the SOTU, and (2) before the invasion of Iraq began.