THE HOUSE OF CARDS IS WOBBLING
At last, some of the doo-doo appears to be sticking on the administration. The claims that Iraq bought uranium from the West African state of Niger were shown some time ago to have been bogus and based on forged documents. (For those of you running to your maps, Niger is a large Sahelian country located between Libya and Nigeria). But now, a CIA official is saying that the falseness of this claim had been expressed in March 2002 by a former US diplomat sent to investigate it. The conclusion, that the Iraq-Niger-uranium claim was false, was passed along to the White House well before the president included it in the State of the Union address.

So it appears one of three conclusions can be drawn:

a) The president had been informed that the claim was false but included it anyway in the speech. Personally, I think this is pretty unlikely. The president had enough other reasons that backed up, at least in his own mind, the case for war that it is unlikely he would consciously include something he knew to be repudiated by his own team.

b) The White House was informed of the diplomat's findings but didn't think it was important enough to pass along to the president. Perhaps people in the White House were deluged with so many intelligence reports that this particular one didn't stand out. At the time, the conquest of Iraq was only a twinkle in Richard Perle's and Paul Wolfowitz's eyes so perhaps they didn't think it was any consequence. By the time the march to war became obvious, perhaps they'd forgotten about the refutation or they didn't think the president would include the Iraq-Niger link in his speech.

c) The White House was informed of the diplomat's findings but never passed it along to the president because of the culture in the White House. At a certain point, it became clear the administration was resolved to conquer Iraq come hell or high water. In such a situation, people tend to find facts to fit their opinion rather than the more logical course of letting facts shape their opinion. Maybe the diplomat's findings were brushed aside because they didn't jive with the script.

Personally, my suspicion is that it's mostly c with a little of b sprinkled in. I don't hold the president in high regard but I think it's unlikely he would be brazen enough to tell such a bald-face lie before the nation and the world; the stakes were so high and the downside of getting caught wouldn't have been worth the risk. But carelessness and/or the institutional culture of the yes men seem to be more plausible explanations.

Even so, it's a troubling development. Even if the president didn't overtly lie to us, it means there was a big screw up in the intelligence/institutional processes that caused the president to state something, in his most high-profile speech of the year, that those under him knew to be untrue.

Some will say that it's irrelevant. We got rid of Saddam, so the rest doesn't matter. That it doesn't matter if the president sent other people's sons and daughters into battle based on wrong information. Others, like Sen. Rick Santorum, say that the administration admitted the Iraq-Niger claim was wrong along time ago so we should just forget about it and keep smiling and waving our flags.

Yesterday, Secretary of War Donald Rumsfled testified before Congress that the coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11.

So we launched our pre-emptive invasion based on old evidence. Perhaps this is why senior sources in the British bureaucracy have "virtually ruled out the possibility of finding the weapons [of mass destruction]," according to the BBC. The senior officials "believe they did exist - but were hidden or destroyed by Saddam Hussein before the war."

This is certainly plausible in the light of Rumsfeld's admission about the lack of compelling NEW intelligence. If the weapons were destroyed or put "beyond use," then they hardly constituted a threat to national security, the prime justification for the invasion.

Why does this matter? Ari Fleischer says we got rid of Saddam and it's up to the administration's critics to prove that Saddam really didn't have WMDs (a nice reversal of the burden of proof).

Here's why. First, we can't account for the weapons of mass destruction that were, we'd been assured, as common as sand in Iraq; this was the centerpiece of the case for war. Then, the Iraq-Niger claim fell apart. Then senior officials believe the WMDs will never be found because they were destroyed or hidden before the war, thus undermining their destructive potential. Now, we know the Iraq-Niger claim had been debunked long before the president included it in the State of the Union. At what point does the house of cards collapse?

Even if everything was done in good faith, even if you give the president and his entourage the benefit of every doubt, it's still not reassuring. The administration has made "pre-emptive" conquest of random countries for arbitrary reasons (or whatever euphemism they want to use) into our new national "defense" strategy. It seems that such a strategy absolutely demands sound intelligence and effective communications as its bases.

Everyone is happy that Saddam Hussein is gone. But if the president is stating things known to be untrue, even if unintentionally, if he doesn't know what his intelligence people know, then how can we trust him the next time he wants to make the case for a pre-emptive invasion?