Back in August I sketched together an outline of Nine Incredible Days that tried to piece together the events surrounding the Plame leak.
Now that some of the missing pieces have come into place, I'm listing out most of my original post with some updates.
Hopefully this helps those of you who are following this closely.
Please feel free to note any corrections or additions.
Day 1
Sunday, July 6, 2003
An angry
Ambassador Joe Wilson publishes a scathing article in the New York Times, implicating the Bush Administration in the strongest terms for going to war on manipulated evidence.
Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
Read the full article
Day 2
Monday, July 7, 2003
Colin Powell and President Bush leave on Air Force One for a 5-day trip to Africa. Traveling along are Dan Bartlett, Ari Fleischer and, possibly, Condi Rice. (Need help confirming Condi's attendance.)
During the flight, a memo marked Secret was faxed to Powell, who shared it with those aboard who had high-level security clearance. The memo is the first to mention the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame/Wilson.
There used to be a great LA Times story the Place case that had the information on this flight. If anyone can find that link now, let me know and I'll post it here.
Also during the flight, Ari Fleischer holds a press briefing:
Q Can you give us the White House account of Ambassador Wilson's account of what happened when he went to Niger and investigated the suggestions that Niger was passing yellow cake to Iraq? I'm sure you saw the piece yesterday in The New York Times.
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, there is zero, nada, nothing new here. Ambassador Wilson, other than the fact that now people know his name, has said all this before. But the fact of the matter is in his statements about the Vice President -- the Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger. The Vice President's office was not informed of his mission and he was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent press accounts -- press reports accounted for it.
So this was something that the CIA undertook as part of their regular review of events, where they sent him. But they sent him on their own volition, and the Vice President's office did not request it. Now, we've long acknowledged -- and this is old news, we've said this repeatedly -- that the information on yellow cake did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.
Read the whole briefing
Day 3
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
The President visits Senegal and holds a brief press meeting. Naturally the questions are about Liberia, which was in a near-coup situation at the time.
Read the briefing
The president seems intent on getting ECOWAS involved, an organization I'm not that familiar with.
And, yeah, there's a pipeline involved
Day 4
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Now in South Africa, Bush holds press conference:
QUESTION: Yes, Mr. President. Do you regret that your State of the Union accusation that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa is now fueling charges that you and Prime Minister Blair misled the public? And then, secondly, following up on Zimbabwe, are you willing to have a representative meet with a representative of the Zimbabwe opposition leader, who sent a delegation here, and complained that he did not think Mr. Mbeki could be an honest broker in the process?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I think Mr. Mbeki can be an honest broker, to answer the second question.
The first question is, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind. And so there's going to be a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I am absolutely confident in the decision I made.
Read the whole press conference
Day 5
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Powell is interviewed by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
QUESTION: We'll talk more about those issues later. What do you say to criticism that the United States is using this visit as a PR exercise to save face after going unilaterally into Iraq?
SECRETARY POWELL: It's nonsense. Why would we want to do that? We don't need to save face. We have not lost any face. We went to Iraq and we removed an awful person from power. We removed a dictator, and now we are seeing the mass graves being opened up. We are seeing what he did to the infrastructure of his country. We have seen how he has suppressed the Shias in the south.
This was a terrible, tyrannical regime and we have not lost any face and we have no apologies to make for working with likeminded nations in pursuit of authority with authority in UN Resolution 1441, and so we did not come as a PR exercise. The President came here to demonstrate his commitment to the future of Africa.
Africa is an important place in the American agenda, on the American priority list. The President has felt that way from the very beginning of this administration. That's why he has pursued expansion of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the HIV/AIDS program that he is pushing, the Millennium Challenge Account -- all of these are not PR exercises. We are taking hard-earned American taxpayer money and using that money to invest in the future of Africa; and not just aid for aid's sake, but aid to help Africans develop their infrastructure, educate their people, make themselves more attractive to outside investment so that trade will then follow.
And so we have a great deal to be very, very proud about and of with respect to our relationship with South Africa and other countries in Africa. We want to do more. And that's why the President is here. This is not a PR exercise by any stretch of the imagination.
Read the full briefing
Day 6
Friday, July 11, 2003
Back in America, in a now infamous incident, Time reporter Matt Cooper speaks to Rove by phone. Rove says he can't speak long, but he tells Cooper that Wilson's wife is a CIA operative. The thrust of what he tells Cooper is that Tenet didn't OK Wilson's trip to Niger, but that his wife had authorized the trip. This was apparently to imply that Wilson was essentially freelancing and that therefore the administration wasn't ignoring its own evidence.
On the same day, Powell is interviewed by Larry King:
POWELL: Frankly, Larry, I think too much is being made out of this single statement in the State of the Union address. The fact of the matter is that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, continued to develop weapons of mass destruction throughout the '90s during the period of time when U.N. resolution after U.N. resolution told him that it had to stop and he had to come clean and he ignored all of those resolutions.
So, the point that in 1998 when the inspectors were learning even more, he created a set of conditions that forced the inspectors out, requiring President Clinton to go and bomb these facilities that were believed at that time by the previous administration to be facilities designed to produce even more weapons of mass destruction.
The international community believed, as a community, that he had such weapons and I'm quite confident that as we go forward with the investigations and the searches that are under way in Iraq now, more evidence will be found to show to the world that he was guilty as charged of possessing these weapons.
And so, to single out this one statement having to do with an intelligence picture that wasn't entirely clear with respect to what he might have been trying to do with respect to acquiring uranium in Africa, I think is quite an overstatement and quite an overreaction to this one line. The president wasn't in any way trying to mislead.
It was information that got into the speech. Whether it should or should not have been in the speech is something we can certainly discuss and debate, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt on the part of the president to either mislead or exaggerate. That's just ridiculous.
Read the full interview
Also on the same day, Rice and Fleischer also hold a press meeting on Air Force One:
Q Dr. Rice, there are a lot of reports, apparently overnight, that CIA people had informed the NSC well before the State of the Union that they had trouble the reference in the speech. Can you tell us specifically what your office had heard, what you had passed along to the President on that?
DR. RICE: The CIA cleared the speech. We have a clearance process that sends speeches out to relevant agencies -- in our case, the NSC, it's usually State, Defense, the CIA, sometimes the Treasury. The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.
Now, the sentence in question comes from the notion the Iraqis were seeking yellow cake. And, remember, it says, "seeking yellow cake in Africa" is there in the National Intelligence Estimate. The National Intelligence Estimate is the document the that Director of Central Intelligence publishes as the collective view of the intelligence agencies about the status of any particular issue.
That was relied on to, like many other things in the National Intelligence Estimate, relied on to write the President's speech. The CIA cleared on it. There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared.
Now, I can tell you, if the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question. What we've said subsequently is, knowing what we now know, that some of the Niger documents were apparently forged, we wouldn't have put this in the President's speech -- but that's knowing what we know now.
The President of the United States, we have a higher standard for what we put in presidential speeches. The British continue to stand by their report. The CIA's NIE continues to talk about efforts to acquire yellow cake in various African countries. But we have a high standard for the President's speeches. We don't make the President his own fact witness, we have a high standard for them. That's why we send them out for clearance. And had we heard from the DCI or the Agency that they didn't want that sentence in the speech, it would not have been in the speech. The President was not going to get up and say something that the CIA --
Q Dr. Rice, it sounds as if you're blaming the CIA here.
DR. RICE: No, this is a clearance process. And a lot of things happen. We've said now we wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now. This was a process that we've followed many, many times. But I can just assure you that if -- and I think -- maybe you want to ask this question of the DCI, but we've talked about it. If the DCI had said, there's a problem with this, we would have said it's out of the speech.
For whatever reason -- and I'm not blaming anybody. The State of the Union -- people are writing speeches, a lot is going on. But I can assure you that the President did not knowingly, before the American people, say something that we thought to be false. It's just outrageous that anybody would claim that. He did not knowingly say anything that we thought to be false. And, in fact, we still don't know the status of Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire yellow cake. What we know is that one of the documents underlying that case was found to be a forgery.
Q Dr. Rice, given that, does the President -- given that the CIA cleared the speech, does the President remain confident in the CIA's Director?
DR. RICE: Absolutely. The CIA Director, George Tenet, has been a terrific DCI and he has served everybody very, very well. And we have a good relationship with the CIA. We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false; I'm sure they wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false. In this case, this particular line shouldn't have gotten in because it was not of the quality that we would put into presidential speeches, despite the fact that it was in the NIE --
Q But, Condi, it's apparently the case that the CIA didn't even check the documents, didn't even discover the forgery until after the speech. And now there's a report that in September of '02 -- if I have this correct -- the Post is saying the CIA was encouraging the British to back off of that claim. So I'm trying to understand the sequencing here. Are you saying -- so my question is, in hindsight, would you say that the CIA did not properly vet this alleged sale?
DR. RICE: David, this was a complicated matter of a sale. There were other reports, as well, about Saddam Hussein trying to acquire yellow cake. It was not this Niger document alone. There are even other African countries that are cited in the NIE, not just Niger.
We also knew, let's remember, that this is the context of a nuclear program in which the seeking of yellow cake is only a small piece of the story. It includes training of nuclear scientists; it includes rebuilding certain infrastructure that had been associated with nuclear weapons; it includes a clandestine procurement network. Things that we're finding out now -- for instance, that the scientist buried uranium -- I'm sorry, centrifuge pieces in his front yard. So one thing that you have to do is to put this piece about seeking yellow cake in the broader context of what was known to be an active effort by the Iranians to try and reconstitute their program.
But let me just go to the point you made, David. The CIA -- I've read the reports that you've also read, that there were -- the British were told they shouldn't put this in the paper. I've read those reports. All that I can tell you is that if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence in the NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the President. The only thing that was there in the NIE was a kind of a standard INR footnote, which is kind of 59 pages away from the bulk of the NIE. That's the only thing that's there. And you have footnotes all the time in CIA -- I mean, in NIEs. So if there was a concern about the underlying intelligence there, the President was unaware of that concern and as was I.
Q You just said that the sentence, itself, was constructed reflecting some thoughts that the CIA had on the doubt. If I recall, the President said in his speech that, the British are reporting this -- about the transfer. Should we infer from that that there were some doubts within the Agency about the veracity of the claim, so that in the speech it was safer to defer to what was the British intelligence that they were confident in?
DR. RICE: The British document was an unclassified document, and so cite the unclassified document. The underlying intelligence to the British document is in the NIE, which is both talking about what a foreign service had said and talking about other attempts to acquire yellow cake. So the underlying documentation here is the NIE. The Agency cleared the speech and cleared it in its entirety.
Q If I could just follow up. On that sentence, you said that the CIA changed the -- that things were done to accommodate the CIA. What was done?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q -- taken out then?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q Was "place" Niger?
Q You won't say what place --
DR. RICE: No, there are several -- there are several African countries noted. And if you say -- if you notice, it says "Africa," it doesn't say "Niger."
MR. FLEISCHER: Yes. To be clear, the sentence in the State of the Union, just off the top of my head, stated, according to British reports, Iraq is seeking to acquire uranium from African nations or Africa. That's the sentence that was stated.
Q Dr. Rice, if the intelligence was the same used by the British government and by your government, and you had doubts about this, did you communicate to the British government at some stage that their continuing insistence -
DR. RICE: You'll have to ask the CIA what they communicated to the British government. I'm not -- I don't know --
Q But they were still wedded to this information while you, at some stage, already said, well, this is not --
DR. RICE: No, no. That's not what we said. Let's go back over what it is we've said. We've said that given subsequent information abut the Niger documents, this -- and some of the apparent uncertainty that was out there -- it doesn't rise to the level that we would put in a presidential speech. We don't say it's false. And I heartily object to headlines that say it was false, because nobody has still said that this was false. There are still reports out there that they sought materials from the DROC, that they sought materials from Somalia. In fact, there is -- if you look at what has even come back on Niger, it says that the Niger government denies that they sold it. So I'm not standing here to say to you, we know that these claims about Africa are false.
What I'm saying to you is we have higher standards for the President's speech, and that's why we have a process that we send speeches to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence Agency, and any other affected Cabinet officer.
Q What do we know about the source, or sources of the documents? Are they people -- again, without getting into anything that would compromise anybody or any operation -- are they people with a proven track record? Did that come up?
DR. RICE: There are a couple of bodies looking at this, including the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and I think they'll be able to answer those questions. We don't generally get into that kind of issue.
Q But in the back-and-forth, especially with the massaging the language to the satisfaction of the -- I mean, was there any, even casual discussion about --
DR. RICE: I'm going to be very clear, all right? The President's speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the Agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have been gone. And the Agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech.
Now, the State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things happen. I'm really not blaming anybody for what happened. But there is a fact here, in the way that we clear speeches.
Q So a week later, Colin Powell goes to the U.N., and he decides, as he told us yesterday, not to put that sentence in at all. So what was the new development in those seven days that led him to take it out all together?
DR. RICE: Well, first of all --
Q The time line seems a bit curious.
DR. RICE: He took out a lot of things. But I was with Secretary Powell when he was doing a lot of this. You will remember that it was the Secretary's own intelligence arm, the INR, that was the one that within the overall intelligence assessment had objected to that sentence, had said that they doubts about -- not to that sentence, had doubts about the uranium yellow cake story. So remember that it was the Secretary of State's own agency, the INR, that had in the consensus report, the NIE, taken a footnote to that.
Q But isn't it slightly strange that you have different agencies with different reports and different sentences? I mean, not everyone is singing from the same song sheet here.
Read the full transcript
Day 7
Saturday, July 12, 2003
As Bush returns from his trip, Tenet takes one for the team by taking blame for State of the Union speech.
See story
Day 8
Sunday, July 13, 2003
Nothing happens today.
Day 9
Monday, July 14, 2003
Robert Novak publishes his now infamous article, outing Wilson's wife.
He writes:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.
Read his column
While the crime was releasing the identity of a CIA operative to those without security clearance, the publishing of Novak's article reveals the real damage done by Rove. Plame's personal safety is jeopardized, her operations are ruined, her contacts are presumably in danger and the front company she "worked for" is exposed.
Now we here are. Years later and it turns out Bush was at least in the full loop and maybe a full instigator.
Truly incredible.
