OCTOBER 9, 2002, TEN YEARS AGO TODAY: U.S. Government Received Documents Claiming Iraq Sought Uranium From Niger, Which CIA Immediately Dismissed as "Bullsh*t"

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October 9th, 2012 2:17 PM

OCTOBER 9, 2002, TEN YEARS AGO TODAY: U.S. Government Received Documents Claiming Iraq Sought Uranium From Niger, Which CIA Immediately Dismissed as "Bullsh*t"

From Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

In Rome on the afternoon of October 7…Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for Panorama, a Milan-based newsmagazine owned by conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, sat down for lunch at an upscale restaurant with an old source: Rocco Martino, a professional information peddler…Martino took out a thick envelope and showed the journalist what it was: documents that he said proved that Iraq had signed a deal to buy hundreds of tons of yellowcake from Niger…

[Burba] said she would have to check out the documents…Burba arrived at the U.S. embassy [] October 9…Embassy officials immediately sent the copies to the State Department for review…

Eight months after Cheney had first asked about the Niger deal, the documents that had started the Niger episode—the documents that would become the most infamous forgery of recent years—were finally in the hands of the U.S. government...

Before the Burba meeting, a CIA officer who worked at the embassy had been informed of the session. But Jeff Castelli, the CIA station chief, had told his subordinate not to worry about it. We know all about this yellowcake report, Castelli had explained. "This is bullsh*t we don't have time to waste on," he had said, according to [Tyler] Drumheller, the CIA's European Division Chief.

The CIA warned the Bush administration numerous times not to say that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, including in memos to and conversations with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley. Nonetheless, during the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, George W. Bush famously claimed, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."