Those Sixteen Words

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
-President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address (January 28, 2003)

Those are the words that will continue to haunt President Bush for the remainder of his time of his time in office. Those are the words that launched a war... Of course, those words were not true and evidence has been trickling out in the past couple years shows that the President was more aware than he claims of that pesky fact. Joseph Wilson was the first to expose this, leading his opponents in the White House to leak his wife's secret CIA status. See how all these scandals connect?

The National Journal's Murray Waas has been covering this story extensively (see past entries). Now he has a new article up focusing specifically on what the President knew about the Saddam claim before he made the speech and the lengths to which Karl Rove went to cover that up before the 2004 election.

As always, a recommended read-

PREWAR INTELLIGENCE- Insulating Bush

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...

On insulating the President from the ensuing scandal he notes-

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

That's all that mattered to them. Winning the election. Holding onto power.

And what did the President know? Quite a lot; many concerns were aired to him-

In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002 President's Summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.

Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.

The President made the claim publically anyway (not just at the State in the Union), likely believing that the war would go well and no one would therefore care enough to dig into all of this. His mistake.

Booman Tribune has an excellent, detailed breakdown of the article.

The more we learn about this war, the more it stinks. But we knew that already. As Josh Marshall notes in his analysis, "The cover-up on this one is deep. Really deep. And much of it has yet to be uncovered. "

[PS- Rep. John Conyers wants the Hadley memo made public:
Release the Hadley Memo]