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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." So said President Bush on January 28th, outlining the case for war with Iraq in his State of the Union address. It was perhaps the most chilling moment of the speech, for it raised the spectre of nuclear weapons in the hands of a dictator who had proved himself capable of terror, invasion, and genocide.
To many listeners, the attribution of this sensational piece of information to the British served only to emphasize its reliability. The President might as well have gone on to say, "And you can take that to the bank, because MI6 doesn't mess around." We now know that if the Administration had been playing it straight there would indeed have been a follow-up line, but it would have been something like this: "The C.I.A., however, believes that this so-called fact is almost certainly untrue."
Indeed, four months earlier, in October, 2002, the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, had personally intervened to remove from a Presidential speech an assertion that Iraq had tried to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. That "information" was a fantasy backed by a set of forged...
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