At last, the Democrats are moving on the let’s-investigate-how-they-lied-us-into-war front, with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) homing in on what Waxman describes as a “fabricated claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.” Waxman’s Government Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena to Condi Rice: apparently the California congressman isn’t just grandstanding — he means business.
The Niger uranium mystery has always seemed to me to be the Achilles heel of the War Party: here we have the President of the United States uttering those fateful 16 words based on a cache of documents that turned out to be forgeries. And not even good forgeries, but pathetically crude renditions of purported “correspondence” between Saddam Hussein and the President of Niger. A simple Google search, plus a modicum of common sense, would have convinced the most eager-to-believe to dump this “intelligence” in the trash. Yet, somehow, it passed muster — in spite of George Tenet’s militant misgivings — and went into Bush’s 2003 state of the union speech to buttress the claim that Iraq was actively pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Some questions:
Who was pushing this phony “intelligence”?
How did they manage to get around the vetting process?
And, most intriguingly: who forged the documents?
We’ve been asking these questions at Antiwar.com for some time now, and come up with some tentative answers, while calling for a congressional investigation. It will be interesting to see if the Waxman committee digs as deep as it needs to in order to get at the truth.
UPDATE: This just in:
“Condoleezza Rice said Thursday she has already answered the questions she has been subpoenaed to answer before a U.S. congressional committee and suggested she is not inclined to comply with the order.”
This is a mistake, but then again this administration never learns. The last time she tried to pull this, she wound up relenting. Now she is “hinting” once again that she’s going to go into her diva act. Stay tuned ….