I was in Cincinnati for the past few days, and thoroughly enjoyed the physical separation from my computer. I really had no intention of commenting on Jack Kelly's Saturday column; I didn't even read it until Sunday night. But the column is dishonest from beginning to end, and is just about the cynical bit of spin to appear yet this election year. Kelly continues to use the pages of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a launching pad for his pro-administration lies. While I don't like to attack newspapers for printing stuff I don't agree with, Jack Kelly's columns are so consistently filled with shabby journalism and outright falsehoods that the integrity of the editorial pages of these papers are in jeopardy.

The column begins this way:

BRITAIN'S Financial Times reported Wednesday that an official British government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq has concluded that Britain's MI-6 was correct to conclude that Saddam Hussein's regime had sought to buy uranium ore from Niger.

If so, this gives the lie to the charge that "Bush lied!" when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. "

The July 7 story by Mark Huband follows his article from the previous week, which revealed that "a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part."

Mr. Huband doesn't identify the "European intelligence service" in this or his earlier story. The scuttlebutt is that it was the DSGE, the French external intelligence service, which shared the intelligence with MI-6 only on the express condition that the Brits not share it with the United States. (Terrific allies, the French.)

That the Niger uranium story was confirmed by other, European, intelligence services, isn't new. We've known this fact for months. We have also known that these other services based their opinions on the same documents that the US used, and these documents were forged. Yes, the Niger yellow-cake story had only one source, and that source was peddling forged documents. This source was just a wise businessman and sold the same product multiple times. How do we know this? It's in the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [Note: large PDF file]. The report explicitly says: ""March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the INVO"

Does this shoot down the "Bush lied" theory? Nope, and the source for this is the same Senate report. The whole issue of Nigerian uranium sales surfaced because President Bush mentioned the sale in a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, and repeated the claim in the State of the Union address in January 2003. Both times the CIA attempted to removed the claims from the President's speeches, and both times the claim remained. And here is what the Senate report says about the incidents:

Although the NSC had already removed the uranium reference from the speech, later on October 6th, 2002 the CIA sent a second fax to the White House which said, "more on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine city by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British."

The White House was told that of the two mines that were supposedly the source of the uranium, one was flooded, and one was not under the control the Nigerians at all. That sure sounds like a lie to me.

Then, Kelly tells us this: "In fact, Mr. Wilson himself has confirmed that Iraq did indeed try to buy uranium from Niger."

No he didn't. Wilson did tell the CIA that Iran had contacted the Nigerians, but Iran and iraq are different countries . I guess knowing the difference between Iran and Iraq--two countries that speak different languages (Arabic and Farsi), have different ethnicities (Iraq is populated by Arabs, while Iranians are Persians), and are totally different in nearly every way--is too much to expect of the national security writer for The Blade.

I do have a theory how kelly made this mistake. Susan Schmidt made the same mistake in an article in The Washington Post. Possibly, Kelly just lifted the story from her article--without attribution--and wrote it into his own column without checking the facts.

The rest of his column is just as false. Remember, to this day, WMD have not been found in Iraq. That's just a fact, and one that the Bush administration agrees with. What has been found are remnants of the pre-1991 WMD programs that were dismantled in the aftermath of that war. Tests conducted by the Pentagon have confirmed that the shells found by the Poles were from that pre-Gulf War I period, and no evidence of active nuclear programs have yet been found. Throughout the 1990s, containment worked. All the evidence found in the last year confirms this. Even George Bush admitted he was wrong when Tim Russert interviewed him on Meet the Press.

In short, Jack Kelly's column is just another attempt to lie for the Bush administration, and a sad attempt to cover up his own role in deceiving the American public in the months leading to the invasion--an invasion that will cost the US 200 billion by election day, and to date has cost the lives of 1000 Coalition servicemen and women. Does anyone think his tone will change one the death toll exceeds 1,200 or 1,500? How high will the butcher's bill have to go before Jack Kelly tells us the truth?
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