Bush Knew

by emptywheel

Murray Waas (hat tip Jeff) has a great new article detailing how Stephen Hadley completed a review of the claims Bush made and the intelligence he used to make those claims. Hadley determined that Bush had made claims that he had previously been warned were challenged within the Intelligence Community. In particular, Bush's claims about the aluminum tubes were shaky:

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

Go read Waas' story. I'd just like to point out a few implications of Waas' story, about the timing of Hadley's review,  about Judy's testimony, about the orders to leak information from the NIE, and about the SSCI report.

The Timing of Hadley's Review

Waas provides no exact date for when Hadley's review took place. He describes Rove warning White House aides they needed to insulate the President "shortly after" Hadley completed the review in summer 2003.

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

Waas then describes Hadley's review to be part of the damage control effort in response to Wilson's allegations (though Waas does not specify whether this effort started before Wilson came out publicly in July 2003).

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true.

Finally, Waas portrays the damage control assessment as being part of a three-prong effort to respond to Wilson's allegations.

The pre-election damage-control effort in response to Wilson's allegations and the broader issue of whether the Bush administration might have misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials: blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.

Nowhere in the article does Waas provide an exact date for this review. Did it happen the week of July 7?

Judy's Testimony

One of the reasons I'm so interested in the date of the review is because of an observation I made about Judy's account of her testimony. Using a bunch of narratological mumbo jumbo, I argued that anything Judy said in direct discourse was a lie, the story Libby coached her to tell, both of them knowing it was a lie.

Judy then goes on to relate--using direct discourse--what Libby said to her during [the June 23] meeting. Now, I said earlier that I think all of the times Judy uses direct discourse, she is actually relating what Libby told her to say--but knew was incorrect--rather than what Libby told her as the truth. The other examples are all pretty clearly misinformation: Valerie Flame. Victoria Wilson. And Libby the "former Hill staffer." The last of these, even Judy admitted was Libby explicitly asking her to mislead.

And the stuff Judy recounts as Libby's honest portrayal just doesn't pass the sniff test. Mostly, that's because Libby spins what we know to be the truth as lies, pretending that claims that Cheney (these are Judy's words) "embraced skimpy intelligence ... while ignoring evidence to the contrary" was (and these are Libby's) "'highly distorted'." The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), under a lot of pressure from Cheney, would beg to differ--and that's even before we get to Phase II of their investigation! Most interesting is that Libby used precisely the same formulation to describe CIA actions relating to Wilson's trip, as Tenet would in his mea culpa. The CIA "took it upon itself to try and figure out more." Tenet says they did so "on their own initiative." It appears that everything Judy wrote in her notes was talking points which Libby (and presumably Judy, although who knows how credulous she really is?) knew to be false.

So consider the implications, if I'm right. That means that all of the following direct discourse statements are simply the story Libby wanted Judy to write, not his depiction of reality:

"Was the intell slanted?"

The CIA was guilty of "selective leaking."

Their strategy was, "if we find [WMDs], fine, if not, we hedged."

Reports of Cheney embracing skimpy intelligence were "highly distorted."

The CIA "took it upon itself to try and find out more" by sending "a clandestine guy" to investigate.

"Veep didn't know of Joe Wilson ... Veep never knew what he did or what was said. Agency did not report to us."

"Wife works in bureau?"

"No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,'"

In other words, I argued, all these assertions (which Judy presented as Libby telling the truth) were really the tale that Libby asked Judy to spread.

Look at the last of these:

"No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,'"

Thanks to Waas, we now know that in October 2002, a briefer came in and said, "Mr. President, you're making claims the Intelligence Community doesn't agree on."

The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Not quite, "You got it wrong." But if Hadley had completed his review before this June 23 meeting, it may well mean that Scooter Libby was trying to plant a denial of precisely the conclusion Hadley had just reached in his review: that the President had gotten it wrong. (If Hadley did the review later, then this argument doesn't hold.)

Leaking the NIE

And Hadley's review may have contributed to the orderly leakage of the NIE. What better way to insulate Bush against charges that he ignored the one-page NIE summary then by leaking the passages of the full NIE that support Bush's claims? Again, this raises the question of timing, since Bob Woodward says he was given details of the NIE in June (and Fitzgerald says Libby testified to leaking details in June).

I have four pages of typed notes from this interview, and I testified that there is no reference in them to Wilson or his wife. A portion of the typed notes shows that Libby discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, mentioned "yellowcake" and said there was an "effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02." This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger.

But it also returns us to the question of which superiors ordered Libby to leak classified information.

First, we learn from this that the intent of the July 8 conversation--the one where Judy had to come to DC for breakfast at the St. Regis? Well, the stated reason for that meeting was so Libby could leak the classified contents of the NIE to Judy. Now, apparently Libby "was authorized to dislcose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors." (6) Hmm. Libby is the Chief of Staff to the VP. Who are his superiors. Hold on, I know!! Dick Cheney! George Bush!

I don't really know whether Bush is the one who ordered Libby to leak this. In a previous column, Waas said,

The public correspondence does not mention the identities of the "superiors" who authorized the leaking of the classified information, but people with firsthand knowledge of the matter identified one of them as Cheney. Libby also testified that he worked closely with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in deciding what information to leak to the press to build public support for the war, and later, postwar, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence.

Cheney, definitely (no surprise there). And Hadley and Rove--both mentioned prominently in today's article--were involved.

I may be going too far in speculating about the implications of Waas' article, but I'm guessing that the NIE leakage was a direct response to Hadley's report, an attempt to inoculate Bush against charges that he ignored the NIE Summary he received in October 2002.

The SSCI Report

One final point that Waas makes, returning to his earlier reporting on Addington's and Libby's efforts to withhold information from the SSCI.

As National Journal first disclosed on its Web site on October 27, 2005, Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Saddam's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among those documents was the President's Summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

In July 2004, when the Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on its investigation of prewar intelligence by the CIA and other agencies, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in his own "Additional Views" to the report, "Concurrent with the production of a National Intelligence Estimate is the production of a one-page President's Summary of the NIE. A one-page President's Summary was completed and disseminated for the October 2002 NIE ... though there is no mention of this fact in [this] report. These one-page NIE summaries are ... written exclusively for the president and senior policy makers and are therefore tailored for that audience."

In short, this NIE Summary, the one that proves Bush knew that he was making dodgy claims, was among the material that Addington and Libby refused to turn over to the SSCI. And they refused to turn it over even while Durbin insisted that only the Summary would reveal what Bush knew and when he knew it.

They deliberately refused to turn over the evidence that Bush knew the intelligence was dodgy.

But it's not too late. It seems to me this NIE Summary is precisely the kind of thing the Phase II investigation needs to have to be able to determine whether BushCo politicized the intelligence. C'mon, Senate Whitewash Intelligence Committee, Murray Waas has done your work for you. Tell us again, did President Bush politicize the intelligence?

Update: Check out eRiposte's November 2005 catch from the Robb-Silberman report describing the contents of the NIE Summary.

Comments

[RonK, Seattle]

And was Sen. Pat Roberts complicit in the non-acquisition of key documents?

This is grist for a special select committee of the Senate ... not an Intel Subcmte.

[John Casper]

Thanks emptywheel, great post and of course, the relevance to the Intelligence Committee is brilliant in its practicality.

[DemFromCT]

Gee, good thing Sen. Roberts waited before moving to Phase II. Now he has some data. He's something, that Roberts. Always doing the right thing.

[emptywheel]

RonK

You and what army.

Here's a passage from a post I wrote in response to Waas' first article on this withheld summary:

Then, they went after the White House.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Sunday that President Bush's aides had pledged to provide "every document" they have been denying the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

Sounds like Roberts has those SAOs bowed down in terror, huh? Until you finish the sentence, that is.

but the White House replied with a noncommittal statement.

Or read further.

"I have talked with very top White -- or almost the top, you know, White House official, and he has promised that," Roberts said. "Every document we want will be made available."

That would be a remarkable concession by the White House, which has long resisted yielding internal records to Capitol Hill, even about matters less sensitive than war planning. The White House later issued a statement after Roberts's appearance that stopped far short of the commitment he described.

[snip]

"While the committee's jurisdiction does not cover the White House, we want to be helpful," the statement continued. "We will continue to talk to and work with the committee in a spirit of cooperation."

Roberts sounds like a manly man, huh?

And don't forget that Fristie threatened to shut down the Senate if the SSCI pushed for these things. They had a confrontation not dissimilar to the one they recently had on the NSA spying program.

Ought to be a tip-off that OVP is trying to cover up crimes again.

[emptywheel]

I'm going to reiterate my suspicion that that Judy direct discourse is tangible evidence of this campaign: The entire conversation matches the campaign Waas describes:

blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.

[&y]

I find it curious that any internal dissent at all remained in the presidential summary. I mean, after hacking the collected analyses of the intelligence agencies on Iraq down to 90 pages (a footnote of dissent on the tubes, right?), then further cutting that document into a single-page summary.... it just seems odd that any lingering hints of doubt remained. How does stuff that gets chucked into a footnote at one level of summary reclaim prominence at a deeper level of summary?

My cynical hunch is that this classified presidential summary was not so much a summary of (the summary of) the intelligence agencies' findings, but rather a report on how well the NIE intelligence had been fixed. Instead of actual summary wording like, "INR disputes that the tubes are for centrifuges because...," my guess is that it's more along the lines of, "There is a continued risk that the INR dissent over aluminum tubes may come back to bite us on the ass."

[John Casper]

Jane Hamsher just posted this at FDL: "I’m very excited to announce that on June 9, 2006 we’ll be having a panel at the Yearly Kos convention to discuss the CIA leak investigation. I’ll be moderating, and the panel members will be:
. Christy Hardin Smith, former prosecutor and blogger at Firedoglake
. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame and author of The Politics of Truth.
. Marcy Wheeler, who blogs as "emptywheel" at The Next Hurrah
. Larry Johnson, former CIA official and blogger at No Quarter
. Dan Froomkin, whose column "White House Briefing" appears at the washingtonpost.com"

[Sally]

Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby, Hadley, Rice, Roberts and company have all the attributes I associate with the Devil.

[emptywheel]

This comment is a response to William Ockham, who wondered whether Tenet is the source for this article (I thought I'd put it here and hope he sees it). If this story is sourced to Tenet, it's rather interesting, because this article asserts something the CIA had tried to refute in the past. Today's claim:

Behind the scenes, the White House and Tenet had coordinated their statements for maximum effect. Hadley, Libby, and Rove had reviewed drafts of Tenet's statement days in advance. And Hadley and Rove even suggested changes in the draft, according to government records and interviews.

The claim of some leaker who appears to know Rove and Libby well:

Back at the White House, Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had been at work all week, along with Ms. Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, helping to craft a statement that was issued on Friday by George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. Mr. Tenet did precisely what the White House needed: he took responsibility for the inclusion of the 16 words on uranium in the president's speech, and he made clear that Mr. Cheney had neither dispatched Mr. Wilson to Niger nor been briefed on what he found there.

The claim of a "former senior CIA official":

On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

In other words, today's story seems to support the Libby-Rove version of how Tenet's mea culpa got written.

[will]

so is this new story part of the Plame indictment wars? so soon after the leak of Rove's "cooperation" with Fitzgerald seems kind of convenient timing to me....

[Mimikatz]

I always figured that Tenet dealt with Hadley but hadley dealt with Rove and Libby, with or without Tenet's knowledge. No wonder Hadley thought he would be indicted--he should be. The "former senior government official" was either Tenet or Fleischer.

Why did Tenet quit? What was the final straw?

Time for Condi to call Paul Tagliabue abput that job opening. And Bush can succeed the hapless Bud Selig as baseball commissioner, Dick can retire to an undisclosed duck blind and we can have real, sane adults at the head of our government again.

[MediaFreeze]

Jane, I think this goes a long way in clarifying the actual meaning of the Rove/Hadley email.

Cooper talks to Rove of July 11, 2003 and Rove writes the email to Hadley:

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare-reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up, he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him, I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

As we've discussed, people have been thinking this was intentionally misleading or a forgery. That is, that Rove was trying to cover his tracks by telling Hadley that he didn't "take the bait" and mention Wilson's wife. Not at all. It's an accurate update. Shorthand, but not contradictory. What Rove is saying here is that Cooper called him, Cooper and he talked about Niger, Plame and the whole story. In this sense the word "Niger" is just a shorthand for the whole story that they are trying to get out. Cooper started asking questions like "Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? But, Rove didn't take the bait.

As we learn from Murray Waas today, the primary objective was to deflect responsibility or even awareness of Wilson's Niger trip and the entire aluminum tubes business from Bush, so "not taking the bait" meant that Rove didn't fall into the trap of giving up that Bush knew anything about Niger. Likewise, Rove cautioned Cooper not to get too far out ahead on this, meaning to stay clear of Bush in his reporting.

It all fits.

More on this and what it means here and here.

[MediaFreeze]

Sorry...i meant emptywheel...

I always make some big goof-up...

Still, I'd be interested in yout thought's...

[emptywheel]

MF

It may well be. But the welfare reform reference still stinks.

[William Ockham]

emptywheel,

I disagree with your reading of today's article. I think it splits the difference on the mea culpa in very interesting ways. In the Rove-Libby version, they worked with Hadley to write the statement. They clearly imply that Tenet was just a sock puppet. In the CIA version, Hadley gets a one-day advance preview and suggests minor changes. Neither of those is really likely. In today's version, Tenet and the White House work together (days in advance), but Hadley and Rove only "suggest changes". Waas sources the "Hadley and Rove even suggested changes" to government records and interviews. That sounds like somebody showed him the paper trail. I agree that that part of the article likely didn't come from Tenet. Actually that sounds like something Andy Card is dumb enough to do (but that's speculation even ranker than my normal stuff).

The bigger picture painted in the article is one of key White House personnel covering Bush's lies through a variety of nefarious activities. I really doubt that Rove and/or Libby is behind that. In one respect, I agree with Libby's lawyers in that this has always been about the pushback from the professionals (at State and CIA) against the Cabal.

[Jeff]

There is a lot to chew on in Waas' piece. But for the moment, check this out, from Hadley and Bartlett's dramatic press conference on July 22, 2003, and look how close they came to having to deal with the apparent fact that the CIA's memo to Hadley et al two days before Bush's October 2002 Cincinnati speech dealt not only with the uranium business, but also with the aluminum tubes. Needless to say, this was a memo discovered by the CIA, not by Gerson or someone else at the White House. We pick up with Hadley speaking:

Today I learned of a second memorandum sent by the CIA on October 6. This is commenting on draft eight of the Cincinnati speech. And by this time, by draft eight, the reference to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium has already been deleted from the speech, as DCI Tenet asked me to do in his telephone request. And what the memorandum does is provide some additional rationale for the removal of the uranium reference.

The memorandum describes some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. The memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence.

This memorandum was received by the Situation Room here in the White House, and it was sent to both Dr. Rice and myself.

Q So there were two issues --

MR. HADLEY: Yes. And the other issue I think was the aluminum tubes issue. But I'm not sure. We need to check that. I was not party to those conversations, so we're going to have to find out from the agency what the second issue was. And we can get that --

Q It doesn't say so in --

MR. HADLEY: No. It just says, one of two issues.

Q This memorandum is classified?

MR. HADLEY: Yes.

Q Are they about to be declassified?

MR. HADLEY: That's not my call.

MR. BARTLETT: I'll try to get answers to these questions. At this time, we do not -- we'll try to give you all the information we have as soon as we get it. We'll see what we can do as far as declassification.

MR. HADLEY: I'm not being flip. I'm not part of that declassification process.

Based on these memorandum, the fact is that I had been advised on October 5 that CIA had reservations about British reporting on attempts by Iraq to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa, which I understood to involve Niger. And these reservations were reaffirmed by the CIA memorandum on October 6.

They dodged the bullet on that one, as the coverage the next day appears to have focused exclusively on the Niger uranium doubts.

[MediaFreeze]

EW

I agree it is still a puzzle. Best I've come up with on that is that Rove wasn't supposed to do his part until Novak had broken the story. He was headed out of town, so he figured he'd tell Cooper. Unlikely Time would break the story anyway, since they are a weekly. He was just letting Hadley know that he hadn't initiated the exchange with Cooper. Kinda weak but maybe it is some little white lie like that.

[emptywheel]

William

Fair enough. I was thinking just in response to your Tenet speculation. I strongly suspect McLaughlin was the source on the NYT article, or maybe Bill Harlow (or maybe both). So it's possible Tenet is taking a different approach.

Jeff

Wow, nice catch. Yes, they really did manage to avoid trouble on that one. Though the Press has always seemed to treat the aluminum tubes as insufficiently sexy for them, even if it did justify a war.

MF

I'm not saying you're wrong. It's just that the welfare reform has always come off as a real stretch...

[Pollyusa]

EW

Just read the news over at DKos. Now I may have to come. Congratulations!

I would love to see Jeff on the panel as well, best commenter on Plame on the internet. I think it might be interesting to see if Leopold would go as well.

[emptywheel]

polly

I think you and Jeff own a piece of that title. Though Jeff does put in all the hard time over at Maguire's site.

I'd love to see you there.

[Griffon]

I think &y's comment upthread is worth revisiting.

"My cynical hunch is that this classified presidential summary was not so much a summary of (the summary of) the intelligence agencies' findings, but rather a report on how well the NIE intelligence had been fixed."

A summary is not the place to reintroduce material. Unless.... it was only temporarily removed from the NIE for the purposes of misleading someone other than the president.
Maybe that someone other was the public but would they be looking that far into the future and given that the conspirators could reasonably expect the NIE to remain classified?

Or could it be because someone else who would see the NIE needed to be brought onboard?

If the summary backed up what they are saying then they would be falling all over themselves to release it. So it must be damaging.

I don't know enough about all this works but I think &y has a significant point that wararants more thought.

[SaltinWound]

Any chance Libby is Waas' source here? It reads that way to me, especially in light of the recent speculation about Rove selling Libby out.

[Griffon]

Emptywheel,
kudos for being on the dKos Convention panel.

I think it is a brilliant idea and having Joseph Wilson on it as well is nothing short of a coup.

Well if Congress won't do the job, go round 'em and do it yourself. Simply BRILLIANT!

[eriposte]

EW,

Just FYI...I reported on the Oct 2002 briefing of Bush on this very topic last year...in my WMDgate series...
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006106.php#4

[JS Narins]

This National Journal article downplays reality.

Did differing "intelligence agencies" (CIA, DoD, State, Energy) have different opinions on the meaning of the aluminum tubes? Sure.

But the _actual_ scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the actual Americans who manage/develop/refine the American uranium enrichment process, they knew that the tubes were not good for it.

We all have heard about the coatings.

But I've also heard that if these particular tubes were actually used to enrich uranium to levels required for uranium bombs... they'd split and break open!

National Journal, in treating all the intelligence departments equally (even listing Energy last, and no mention of the connection to Oak Ridge National Labs or actual scientists) does a disservice to the reading community.