Yellowcake forgery

In the push for the 2003 war with Iraq, Bush administration officials, including President George W. Bush himself in his State of the Union 2003 speech, cited evidence that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from the African nation of Niger.

However, Mohamed ElBaradei of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) looked at the evidence and stated that it was obviously forged, although a year earlier, the CIA found the evidence to be unreliable. [1][2]

Events

Seymour M. Hersh of the The New Yorker Magazine wrote: [3]

"Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. 'The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,' ElBaradei said."

"One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told [Hersh], 'These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.'" [4]

"Congressmen Henry A. Waxman, who approved Bush's war initiative, expessed concern that such a mishap could have occurred. 'It is hard to imagine how this situation could have developed,' he stated in a letter to the President. 'The two most obvious explanations — knowing deception or unfathomable incompetence — both have immediate and serious implications.' Waxman added, 'These facts raise troubling questions. It appears that at the same time you, Secretary Rumsfeld, and State Department officials were citing Iraq's efforts to obtain uranium from Africa as a crucial part of the case against Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials regarded this very same evidence as unreliable. If true, this is deeply disturbing: it would mean that your Administration asked the U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the American people to rely on information that your own experts knew was not credible.'" [5]

The Bush administration has failed to provide adequate explanation for this situation, and the national media has failed to pursue the matter.

On March 14, 2003, Senator John Rockefeller asked the FBI to investigate the origin of the documents. Rockefeller expressed concern that the forgeries "may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

"If ... you want one piece to bring you fully up to date on the Niger forgery flap, check out Neil Mackay's "Niger and Iraq: the war's biggest lie?" in the Glasgow Sunday Herald ("One senior western diplomat told the Sunday Herald: 'There were more than 20 anomalies in the Niger documents -- it is staggering any intelligence service could have believed they were genuine for a moment.'"). --TomDispatch.com, July 2003.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Bush administration leaks: The Lies that Led to War
• Bush's 16 words
• cooked intelligence
• Intelligence Community
• Joseph C. Wilson IV
• Karl Rove: Outing Valerie Plame
• Plamegate: Beyond Karl Rove
• Rathergate: Sumner M. Redstone, George W. Bush & CBS
• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
• Valerie Plame
• weapons of mass deception
• weapons of mass destruction investigation

External Links

Related Articles

• "Yellowcake Forgery" in the Wikipedia.
• "Yellowcake forgery" (with redirect to "Niger uranium" in the dKosopedia.
• Paul Kerr, "Iraq-Niger Uranium Chronology (to March 2003), Arms Control Association, undated.

Documents

• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 7, 2004 (521-page pdf).

Articles & Commentary

• Seymour M. Hersch, Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?, The New Yorker Online, Posted March 24, 2003.
• Joseph C. Wilson IV, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," New York Times, July 6, 2003.
• "The Niger connection," The Observer/UK, July 13, 2003.
• Robert Novak, "Mission to Niger," Townhall.com, July 14, 2003.
• "Niger upset by uranium slur," BBC, July 14, 2003.
• "Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg," FAIR, July 18, 2003.
• Howard Dean, "President Bush Must Set the Niger-Uranium Story Straight," Common Dreams, July 21, 2003.
• Eric Margolis, "The lies that led to war," Canoe Network, August 8, 2004.
• Meldread, "Follow the Yellowcake Road," Democratic Underground, July 4, 2005. Timeline of events starting in February 2002.