WaPo is still spazzin’ out over “the 16 words”

In an article entitled How Bogus Letter became a Case for War by Peter Eisner, the Washington Post is still living in the past, still beating dead horses, still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome and I guess they can’t find anything else to complain about at Walter Reed;

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous — later retracted — 16 words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush’s remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Maybe because the British intelligence community still stands by the information in the letter. The whole reason Ms. Burba thinks the letter is a forgery is because it mentions Niger sending 500 tons of uranium to Iraq every year. She claims it would take every truck in Niger to move that much uranium – and it may, I’m in no position to argue that with her.

But Hussein, in 2000, when the letter was allegedly written, had every reason to believe that the sanctions against him would be lifted – afterall everyone thought that Gore was going to be our next President, and you know damn well he’d have lifted the sanctions with the help of Hussein’s cronies in the Oil for Food scandal, Russia and France.

If the Washington Post thinks they can discount this whole story because some journalist “googled” the available truck tonnage in Niger, they really ought to think again. We found tons of mortar and artillery shells that Hussein had trucked from Jordan after the sanctions were imposed in 1990 buried in Kuwait. When the criminals of the world smell money, means are of little concern to them. I know it’s hard for the Washington Post and Peter Eisner to understand that.

So let’s have Christopher Hitchens explain it to them;

To summarize, then: In February 1999 one of Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear goons paid a visit to Niger, but his identity was not noticed by Joseph Wilson, nor emphasized in his “report” to the CIA, nor mentioned at all in his later memoir. British intelligence picked up the news of the Zahawie visit from French and Italian sources and passed it on to Washington. Zahawie’s denials of any background or knowledge, in respect of nuclear matters, are plainly laughable based on his past record, and he is still taken seriously enough as an expert on such matters to be invited (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to Hans Blix’s commission on WMD. Two very senior and experienced diplomats in the field of WMDs and disarmament, both of them from countries by no means aligned with the Bush administration, have been kind enough to share with me their disquiet at his activities. What responsible American administration could possibly have viewed any of this with indifference?

Exactly. What RESPONSIBLE administration could have ignored it? And just because the WaPo think that the “16 words” are the sole reason we went to Iraq doesn’t mean rational, thinking humans can’t mention a few more reasons.

Category: Media, Politics, Terror War