Top Secret

Josh Marshall is covering the imaginary Afro-Iraqi uranium connection with panache. My favorite bit:

This was always one of the most intriguing elements of the White House's defense. Because they seemed to be referring to intelligence so top-secret and rarefied that they couldn't even share it with the CIA or other members of the intelligence community. It was so top-secret that only the president's speech writers had sufficiently high security clearances to see it.

Comments

[Warren]

Haa! That one got coffee to come out my nose.

[joe]

This raises the question: just what WAS Saddam going to drop on American cities from his super-long distance balsa wood gliders?

The Niger story wasn't the only lie in that speech.

[Croesus]

Fred App,

I can't wait to hear the audio tapes that Taylor sends out; seems like every thug the US "eliminates" has an audio-tape industry.

[joe]

Cro, if I read you right, that the Bin Laden and Saddam tapes have been faked, you are an effing looney.

[jacob dreyer]

^almost a "cro"magnon!

sorry, i am a pun man.

[Croesus]

joe,

Actually, no, my statement was not meant to imply that they were faked; my statement was meant to make fun of the US military's inability to catch these guys. Which is why I put qoutation marks around the word "eliminates," because they never seem to be able to do that.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Why don't you go catch them, if it's so easy.

[Fred App]

The Bush Administration has pretty much dropped the fiction that we went to war against Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat. Now they say it was worth going to war because Saddam was an evil man. And, sure: Saddam was (and, still is, an evil man) and perhaps that did justify the war. But it certainly wasn't the justification they used when trying to sell the war to the American public -- maybe because they knew the American public wouldn't buy it.

At what point do we declare war on Liberia because Charles Taylor is an evil man?

[joe]

Oh, my bad.

[Eric Deamer]

Bush said in his speech that British Intelligence belives that Saddam sought uranium in Niger. Nothing about that statement is untrue. This is what British Intelligence said. Whether you think that should have gone into a state of the union speech or not is a differnet matter, but there is no "fake" of any kind involved.