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forgeries appearing in Bush's PDBs a lot earlier, on 12/19/2002 (highlighted below), and that Condi was the driving force behind putting them there and keeping them in all important documents Bush saw and what was repeated in public statement. This is from an article by Roger Morris in Common Dreams. It's probably the very best timeline, and a must-read for anyone who wants the context behind these recent developments in both the Plamegate and Larry Franklin OSP-AIPAC prosecutions.
Published on Thursday, July 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
www.thewe.cc/contents/more/ archive2005/july/condoleezza_rice.htm
The Source Beyond Rove — Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
by Roger Morris
July 2002: Concerned at the potential opposition to the war, and to coordinate policy and media relations for the coming attack on Iraq, a special White House Iraq Group (WHIG) is set up, chaired by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and composed of Rice, Rove, Libby, Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley, and media strategists Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide, Mary Matalin and others.
The WHIG is to plan and control carefully all high-level leaks and public statements on Iraq and related issues.
“Everything, I mean everything, was run through them and came out of them,” a ranking official will say of the group.
“It was understood, of course, that Condi or Hadley would clear everything from a policy point of view, Rove and Libby would do the politics, and the rest would handle the spin.”
August 26, 2002: “Now we know,” Vice President Cheney tells the VFW convention, “Saddam Hussein has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” Rice routinely clears this speech.
September 2002: Several months earlier, the US and UN embargo of Iraq has seized a shipment of high strength aluminum tubes, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State and Energy Departments duly identify as designed solely for launch tubes for conventional artillery rockets.
Despite those expert findings, Rice now claims publicly that the tubes are “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”
Apparently reflecting the original rumors of the Iraq-Niger deal and the subsequent dubious documents handed the Italians thirteen months before (copies of which have reportedly been given to MI6 British intelligence by an Italian journalist), a British Government White Paper on Iraq released in September mentions that Baghdad “had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Pressed on the issue by the CIA (on the basis of its now-several reports debunking the story) to drop that statement as inaccurate, the British claim they have sources for the assertion “aside from the discredited letters,” but never identify them.
Rice is fully briefed on all these exchanges.
(Eventually, British intelligence officials will admit the 2002 White Paper statement on uranium from Africa was “unfounded.”
Meanwhile, however, much of official Washington is aware of the CIA-MI6 squabble over the Niger uranium and questionable letters.
“The Brits,” a Congressional intelligence committee staffer will later tell the New Yorker’s Sy Hersh in discussing the issue, “…placed more stock in them than we did.”)
It’s also that September, in answer to a question in a CNN interview about what evidence the White House has of Iraqi nuclear weapons, that Rice makes her infamous quip, a line first authored by Mary Matalin — “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
September 26, 2002: In closed-hearing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (with a transcript closely reviewed by Rice), Powell refers to “reports” of an Iraqi purchase of Nigerien uranium as “further proof” of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
October 2002: Seizing on the British White Paper, despite the documented disagreement of the CIA as well as the State and Energy Departments, the Office of Special Plans inserts in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, apparently one of the few documents Bush reads in this sequence, a reference to the British report of an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction.
Though the NIE at CIA insistence notes “different interpretations of the significance of the Niger documents,” and that the State Department judges them “highly dubious,” the reference to Nigerien uranium is listed among other reasons to conclude that Iraq poses a danger to American national security.
“Facing clear evidence of peril,” Bush says in a speech in Cincinnati that October, “we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Behind the scenes, an earlier draft of the October speech has also contained a reference to an Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium from Niger, the now-revived claim from the discredited documents of fifteen months before.
CIA Director Tenet urges that the White House take out that reference, and though the Pentagon’s Special Plans office is pushing for inclusion of the reference, Rice’s deputy (and eventual successor) Stephen Hadley, after two memoranda and a phone call from Tenet, finally agrees to drop the passage.
Rice is fully briefed on all this.
December 19, 2002: As preparations are hurried for the attack on Iraq, a State Department “Fact Sheet,” cleared by Rice, asks ominously, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?”
The assumption of the Niger-Iraq uranium connection now begins to appear regularly in the President’s Daily Brief, the CIA intelligence briefing which is now also drafted under the influence of the Office of Special Plans.
January 23, 2003: In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” Rice refers prominently to “Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.”
January 28, 2003: "The British government,” Bush says in his State of the Union litany on the dangers of Iraq, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Rice and her staff, of course, have as always laboriously worked and reworked the national security passages of the speech.
In readying the address, Rice’s NSC Staff assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley, a ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the “uranium from Africa” passage, which obviously refers to the old Niger issue.
Foley says the CIA doubts the Niger letters and connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it would be “technically accurate” to say that the British had in fact issued such a report on Iraq, however mistaken.
With the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage stays, becoming a major piece of “evidence” in the case for war.
February 5, 2003: In his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, a factor in silencing many potential dissenters in Congress, Powell pointedly omits any reference to the Nigerien uranium. The story “had not stood the test of time,” he says later.
That February, too, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as part of his own propaganda for war, issues a Ten Downing Street paper called “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” which includes a reference to the Nigerien uranium.
Thought to be drawn from authoritative MI6 intelligence, the paper is soon widely ridiculed, eleven of its sixteen pages found to be copied verbatim from an old Israeli magazine.
March 7, 2003: In response to a request four months before, the State Department finally hands over to the IAEA copies of the Niger letters, which UN experts promptly dismiss as “not authentic” and “blatant forgeries.”
“These documents are so bad,” a senior IAEA official tells the press, “that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”
A former high-level intelligence official tells The New Yorker, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”
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