81^st in continuing blog series on the administration push to war. Through friendly media outlets, the White House and the Office of the Vice President launch what will be almost their last hurrah in the campaign to claim the existence of Iraq weapons of mass destruction: the WMD were destroyed and/or removed at the last minute. This one, unlike the running story of the supposed Iraq-Niger uranium deal, does not last long.
April 21-22, 2003:

Apr. 21, 2003 – New versions of the story on what happened to the Iraqi WMD begin to come out, as in this Judith Miller front-page article in the New York Times:

 
“A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.  

They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.

The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.

The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants.” (“Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War; An Iraqi Scientist is Said to Assert”)

The bold but ridiculous claim that caches of weapons of mass destruction, theoretically secreted around Iraq, were somehow spirited out of Iraq into Syria by a fleeing Iraqi army whose top officers were probably bought over, is given entirely too much credence by some U.S. media outlets, though only temporarily.

 
Needless to say, this story if believed might support an assault against Syria, another longtime goal of neo-cons in the administration.

Apr. 21, 2003 – Judith Miller is interviewed by Fox News to support the claims that Iraq WMD were spirited out of the country at the last minute:

 
“BAIER: By all accounts, the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has not been productive so far. Although today "New York Times" reporter Judith Miller embedded with the U.S. team trying to hunt down WMD said an Iraqi scientist was providing information, telling the U.S. scientist scientists were ordered to destroy all of the chemical weapons they were working on just days before the war started.  

In an interview with Fox today, Miller talked about the importance of the information the scientists provided.

 
JUDITH MILLER, "NEW YORK TIMES": If in fact he turns out to be correct, is that international inspectors could have searched from now till doomsday and probably not found have this, quote, "smoking gun."”

Apr. 22, 2003 – Judith Miller is interviewed by telephone on PBS Television's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:
 

“RAY SUAREZ: The task of finding that definitive proof falls in part to specialized teams within the U.S. Military. New York times" correspondent Judith Miller is reporting on the search conducted by units of the 75th exploitation task force. And she joins us now by phone south of Baghdad. Judith Miller, welcome back to the program. Has the unit you've been traveling with found any proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

JUDITH MILLER: Well, I think they found something more than a "smoking gun." What they've found is what is being called here by the members of MET Alpha-- that's Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha-- what they found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand, and who has led MET Team Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions that have kind of challenged the American intelligence community's under... previous understanding of, you know, what we thought the Iraqis were doing.

RAY SUAREZ: Does this confirm in a way the insistence coming from the U.S. Government that after the war, various Iraqi tongues would loosen, and there might be people who would be willing to help?

  
JUDITH MILLER: Yes, it clearly does. I mean, it's become pretty clear to those of us on the ground that the international inspectors, without actually controlling the territory and changing the political environment, would never have been able to get these people to step forward. I mean, you can only do that when you know there is not going to be a secret policeman at your door the next day, and that your family isn't going to suffer because you're talking. And that's what the Bush administration has finally done. They have changed the political environment, and they've enabled people like the scientists that MET Alpha has found to come forth. Now, what initially the weapons hunters thought they were going to find were stockpiles of kind of chemical and biological agents. That's what they anticipated finding. We now know from the scientists that, in fact, that probably isn't what we're going to find. What they will find, and what they have found so far, are kind of precursors; that is, building blocks of what you would need to put together a chemical or a biological weapon. But those stockpiles that we've heard about, well, those have either been destroyed by Saddam Hussein, according to the scientist, or they have been shipped to Syria for safekeeping . . .”

 
This ridiculous story proves short-lived, even with the best efforts of Fox News.

 
Apr. 22, 2003 – Seymour Hersh brings out “Niger, Lies and Uranium” in the British magazine Prospect. The article, republished after earlier appearance in the New Yorker magazine, includes a devastating critique of intelligence on the purported Niger documents:

“It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated 10th October 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger minister of foreign affairs, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the president of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior IAEA official said, that "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the internet."

    The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's "yellow cake" comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. "Five hundred tons can't be siphoned off without anyone noticing," another IAEA official told me.       

This official told me that the IAEA has not been able to determine who prepared the documents. "It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger foreign ministry, in Niamey. We just don't know," the official said. "Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted." Some IAEA investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February 1999. They also speculated that MI6 had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the ambassador's return to Rome.  

    . . . ElBaradei's disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei's report, dismissed the subject by saying, "If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved." A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the US government had anything to do with the forgery. "It came from other sources," Powell testified. "It was provided in good faith to the inspectors."        The forgery became the object of bitter questions in Europe about the credibility of the US. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On 8th March, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, "We fell for it."        

     . . . The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior CIA officials were aware that the documents weren't trustworthy. "It's not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can't be 'sort of' bad, or 'sort of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud-it was useless.”