The January 24 Document

by emptywheel

Of course! Don't you get it? Grover's Mill, November 1, 1938 ... 30 days has September April June and, November  ... October 31, 1938 in Grover's Mill New Jersey. Orson Welles, War of the World, Don't you get it?

[My very bad transcription from memory of Jeff Goldblum's lines from Buckaroo Banzai remembering the date of the War of the Worlds broadcast]

I read Fitzgerald's latest response while jetlagged, so had totally forgotten the big mystery from it, the document mentioned in this passage, until pollyusa reminded me of in the comments:

Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials – including Cabinet level officials – were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson’s trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003.

I've got a really good idea about what that document is. I'm betting it's a draft of Bush's State of the Union address, dated after the time when Bush's speechwriter took out damaging references to Niger and amounts of yellowcake.

Bush delivered the SOTU on January 28 in 2003, just four days after the date of the mystery document. And at the core of the hullabaloo the week of July 7 were the "16 words" Bush mentioned during the SOTU. So it is very plausible they intended to declassify an early draft of the SOTU, to prove that the document did not necessarily refer to the Niger allegations.

The early drafts of the SOTU came up twice during the weeks immediately following Wilson's op-ed. First, in a botched comment in a press gaggle on July 11 in Africa, Condi admitted the following:

Q       If I could just follow up.  On that sentence, you said that the CIA changed the -- that things were done to accommodate the CIA. What was done?

DR. RICE:  Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.

Q       -- taken out then?

DR. RICE:  Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.

Q       Was "place" Niger?

Q       You won't say what place --

DR. RICE:  No, there are several -- there are several African countries noted.  And if you say -- if you notice, it says "Africa," it doesn't say "Niger."

MR. FLEISCHER:  Yes.  To be clear, the sentence in the State of the Union, just off the top of my head, stated, according to British reports, Iraq is seeking to acquire uranium from African nations or Africa.  That's the sentence that was stated. [my emphasis]

Condi effectively admits that an early draft of the SOTU mentions Niger by name, as well as the amount alleged in the sale, 500 tons. But then she tries to backtrack to the position the White House had settled on, that the reference always referred to multiple African countries. As this post and this post explain the press corps was still trying to clarify what Condi had said the following week, on July 14.

And then, during on July 16, then-WINPAC Director Alan Foley testified to the SSCI about the content and vetting of the SOTU. The SSCI records this about Foley's testimony:

(U) On January 27, 2003, the DCI was provided with a hardcopy draft of the State of the Union address at an NSC meeting. When he returned to the CIA, he passed the draft to an executive assistant to deliver to the office of the DDI. No one in the office of the DDI recalls who the point of contact for the speech was, or if a point of contact was ever named. No one recalled receiving parts of the speech for coordination and because the speech was hand carried, no electronic versions of the speech exist at the CIA. The DCI testified at a July 16, 2003 hearing that he never read the State of the Union speech.

(U) In late January, the Director of WINPAC discussed, over the phone, the portion of the State of the Union draft pertaining to uranium with his NSC counterpart, the Special Assistant to the President for Nonproliferation. Neither individual can recall who initiated the phone call. Both the WINPAC Director and NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that the WINPAC Director's concerns about using the uranium information pertained only to revealing sources and methods and not to any concerns about the credibility of the uranium reporting. The WINPAC Director said because the Niger information was specifically and directly tied to a foreign government service, his concern was about releasing classified information in an unclassified speech. He told Committee staff that this had been the CIA's longstanding position and was the reason the CIA wanted the reference removed from the British white paper. Both the WINPAC Director and NSC Special Assistant agreed that the discussion was brief, cordial, and that they mutually agreed that citing the British information, which was already unclassified, was preferable to citing U.S. classified intelligence.

(U) The WINPAC Director and the NSC Special Assistant disagreed, however, about the content of their conversation in some important respects. First, when the WINPAC Director first spoke to Committee staff and testified at a Committee hearing, he said that he had told the NSC Special Assistant to remove the words "Niger" and "500 tons" from the speech because of concerns about sources and methods. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that there never was a discussion about removing "Niger" and "500 tons" from the State of the Union and said that the drafts of the speech show that neither "Niger" nor "500 tons" were ever in any of the drafts at all. He believed that the WINPAC Director had confused the State of the Union conversation with a conversation they had previously had in preparation for the Negroponte speech in which they did discuss removing "Niger" from the speech because of the WINPAC Director's concerns about revealing sources and methods.

(U) A few days after his testimony before the Committee, the WINPAC Director found the draft text of the State of the Union in WINPAC's files and noticed that it did not say "500 tons of uranium from Niger." In a follow up interview with Committee staff, he said that he still recalls the conversation the way he described it to the Committee originally, however, he believes that he may have confused the two conversations because the documentation he found does not support his version of events. The draft text of the State of the Union he found said, "we know that he [Saddam Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." The White House also told the Committee that the text they sent to the CIA in January said, "we also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." [my emphasis]

The chronology is not entirely clear here. Tenet got his vetting copy of the complete speech on January 27, the day before the speech. But that copy seems to have disappeared into the great bowels of plausible deniability at the CIA. The SSCI gets sketchier about the timing of the Robert Joseph-Alan Foley vetting conversation (I've found that, with the SSCI, when they keep something sketchy like this, it's to intentionally conceal an important fact). But it seems to be an entirely different process than Tenet's non-vetting. And it seems that, by this mysterious date in late January, Alan Foley had already received enough information on the content of the SSCI to have a phone conversation with Joseph. Fred Fleitz' testimony for Bolton's UN nomination reveals the WINPAC vetting process often focused on discrete pieces of intelligence, so it is likely that Foley was getting the drafts of individual claims as the White House made them up drafted them. The reference to the "draft text" rather than the "draft" seems to reinforce this possibility, that Foley and Joseph were discussing the Niger uranium claim as an individual piece of intelligence. In any case, a few days after his testimony (I'm guessing the following week, July 21, because NYT reporting from that weekend actually supports a much stronger claim, that Foley warned Joseph about the credibility of the Niger claim), Foley comes back to the SSCI with a document that seems to support the White House version of the story. Is this draft language from the SOTU dated January 24?

In any case, if I'm right that the third document BushCo was trying to declassify (in addition to the NIE and the CIA report from Joe Wilson's trip) to push back against Wilson, then it supports another speculation I'm developing: that Libby was misrepresenting the NIE when he was leaking it to Judy on July 8. Aha! I see eRiposte, in an update to his post on this, tells us exactly what Libby was doing:

So, when Libby was trying to mislead Judith Miller into believing that the classified document strongly supported the uranium claim unlike the unclassified white paper, he was misleading her by referring to the BODY of the NIE without mentioning the INR dissent in the ANNEX of the NIE. What we've learnt today is that Libby, Cheney and Bush appear to have been trying to mislead reporters by claiming that what was really in the BODY of the NIE (and which was rebutted in the ANNEX and which was NOT part of the NIE's key judgments), was somehow part of the key judgments. [emphasis eRiposte's]

So, Libby was presenting the body of the NIE as if it were key judgments. Libby was presenting the CIA report, written by one or two Reports Officers, as if Wilson wrote it himself. And, I'm arguing, Libby and his friends were presenting a January 24 draft (after the "Niger" and "500 tons" claims had been removed, but still early enough to appear to be a draft) as if it were the only draft.

 

Comments

[Jim E.]

Wow. Ew, along with eRiposte and pollyusa, really is linking this stuff together. I bow down to you all.

(Meanwhile, in another orbit, TM is hosting an open thread wondering how much Joe Wilson hates Jews. Nice.)

[orionATL]

how DO you keep all this stuff in your head?

have you had some sort of computer transplant the rest of us haven't heard about?

[emptywheel]

Orion,

I don't keep it in my head. It's all here in the blog. Once I figured out how to google my own posts, my Plame IQ went up 10 points.

[William Ockham]

emptywheel,

I asked eRiposte about this (in a comment to one of his recent posts) and he replied that he believes that the document in question is the DIA version of the earlier NCIS report about the mysterious West African Businessman who seemed to know all about the bogus Niger story and claimed the uranium was in Benin. This would be about par for the course since the original report was obviously bogus and had been completely debunked.

[emptywheel]

Oh, I hadn't seen that reply. I hope he does a full post on it.

[Jim E.]

Yesterday, TPM posted a transcript of a recent gaggle with McClellan. There's apparently a rumor that Scooter Libby was spotted eating lunch in the White House mess on March 30. If true, is there anything potentially significant about this? I thought Bush had banned his staff from communicating with Scooter.

[Mimikatz]

Yesterday on the News Hour David Brooks repeated the GOP talking point that the Plame mess isn't getting any traction around the country. I think that, and the headlines and news stories focusing on the "leak" authorized by Bush and whether it was classified info or not miss the real point here.

The point is that the Administration took advantage of its superior access to information to selectively release intelligence info that supported thier case for war, specifically the Niger uranium and the aluminum tubes, while actively supressing (then and still) all information and opinion from the intel services that disputed their position. They did this to create the impression that the information supporting the WMD stories was much stronger than it in fact was. They did it to preemptively disarm their critics and to stampede the country into war, with the willing assistance of a cheerleading media.

Karl Rove well knew that if the bogus basis for the war was exposed, and the coverup of the bogusity of that basis was exposed, then Bush would lose the election pure and simple, because selectively misleading the American people to support a war that was far from necessary would be viewed by at least 60-70% of the people as a serious enough matter to deny him the presidency.

The crime here is not the leaking of information, classified or not. It is the undermining of democracy by denying the people critical information they needed first to evaluate the basis of the war and second to evaluate Bush's fitness for the presidency.

Bush lied, thousands died, and he doesn't deserve to be President. It really is that simple.

[orionATL]

mimikatz:

"the crime is not leaking the information....It is the undermining of democracy..."

well-said.

that's precisely the key issue

and not only on this matter either.

[Mimikatz]

I love the minutiae as much as the next person, but we have really got to keep the narrative fixed on the big picture here. Murray Waas and Greg Sargent are right--the full story hasn't been told, because they don't dare. Someone has to ferret it out, though.

[eriposte]

EW,

I posted a comment on the Jan 24 report in an earlier thread here. I think it is the DIA report that was released on that day focusing on the uranium claim. SSCI p. 64.

[emptywheel]

eR

Saw that (and noted your take on it in the DKos version of this).

I'm unsure at this point whether you're right or me. Yours definitely has the day correct, whereas mine is just a ballpark, definitely. But we're talking about something that other people were declassifying, not Libby. And there is abundant evidence that Condi and Ari were working on SOTU, whereas there is none that anyone was interested in that DIA report.

[Lisa]

Check out the new Washington Post article up. The key judgement point raised by eRiposte and elaborated on by EW is front and center.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800916_pf.html

"At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance.

In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.

Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium ore would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons." But it also said U.S. intelligence did not know the status of Iraq's procurement efforts, "cannot confirm" any success and had "inconclusive" evidence about Iraq's domestic uranium operations."

Fitz has everything and with each filing to the court, he provides the public with a little more. If Libby keeps it up with his motions, we'll have a full picture of all the lies and manipulations used take us to war by the November elections.

[John Forde]

Mimikatz: this 'big picture'; you speak of - how do we express it? Is it that Bushie knowingly used a forgery to start a war?

[TM]

TM is hosting an open thread wondering how much Joe Wilson hates Jews.

Actually, I am following up on an earlier post wondering whether Libby might have thought so.

Oh well - I normally speak quite highly of Jim E. Maybe he is upset that Kleiman smacked Wilson for gay-baiting.

[Jim E.]

TM,

Fuck you. At your blog, as you know, I specifically wrote: "I have no problem bashing anti-gay bigots like Wilson."

[p.lukasiak]

I'd like to concentrate on the word "vigorous" as in "Iraq's vigorous attempts to acquire uranium from Niger."

According to Fitz, Libby says he was authorized (by Bush, via Cheney) to use the word "vigorous" in his initial discussion with Miller on July 8 -- but Miller's notes do not reflect that.

However, Woodward has just released a statement saying that the "vigorous" phrase does appear in his notes of his conversation of June 27th with Libby.

Now, the White House is disclaiming that it gave specific authorization to Libby to leak NIE information to Miller.

But Murray Waas has pointed out that Bush gave specific permission to various White House officials to leak to Woodward for his forthcoming book -- and, I would posit, that would include Bush talking about Iraq's "vigorous" efforts to obtain yellowcake.

Conclusion -- Cheney goes to Bush and says, "we need to get this story out now....we can't wait until Woodward publishes his book." Bush says -- "well, just have Libby tell reporters the same thing he told Woodward."

White House now denies that it authorized the disclosure of any specific NIE based information upon Cheney's request via Libby to Miller --- but by authorizing the disclosure of the same info authorized for Woodward, its amounts to the same thing.

Woodward, figured this out, which is why he broke his silence....

[William Ockham]

I have an alternate theory (as usual) about this mystery document. In Woodward's "Plan of Attack" (p. 288 - 291), there is an interesting story about Libby, the NIE, the OSP and a presentation that Libby presented on Saturday, January 25, 2003. According to Woodward, the CIA sent over a 40 page document of WMD evidence against Iraq. From this document, Hadley and Libby prepared a series of questions that they presented to the CIA in person. The CIA answered back in writing. Based on those answers, the document from the 22nd, and the October NIE, Libby created his presentation, "a thick sheaf of paper". According to Woodward, Armitage described the presentation as "overreaching and hyperbole". I'm betting that Libby and Hadley wanted to declassify either the CIA answers to their questions or Libby's presentation itself.

[emptywheel]

William

Libby's presentation might be a good guess, too.