Yellow narrative: uranium, Wilson, and wingnuts

Ann Coulter off the rails and scientifically illiterate

Coulter is an idiot. Her piece on Ambassador Joseph Wilson and cable news media, "Yellowcake and Yellow Journalism", is terribly confused and amounts to blithe assertions, exactly what she accuses others of using.

She doesn't even know the difference between "yellowcake" and "enriched uranium." In reference to the 2002 trip to Niger by Wilson, she makes it sound like yellowcake = bomb-ready uranium:

Wilson's unwritten "report" to a few CIA agents supported the suspicion that Saddam was seeking enriched uranium from Niger because, according to Wilson, the former prime minister of Niger told him that in 1999 Saddam had sent a delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" with Niger. The only thing Niger has to trade is yellowcake. If Saddam was seeking to expand commercial relations with Niger, we can be fairly certain he wasn't trying to buy designer jeans, ready-to-assemble furniture or commemorative plates. He was seeking enriched uranium.

Wrong. We've always known that Coulter is scientifically illiterate, as here she again demonstrates.

Yellowcake is slightly processed ore, containing uranium that still has natural isotope concentrations. Enriched uranium for fission reactors (low enrichment) or bombs (high enrichment) has enhanced U-235 concentration. Enriching uranium is a technically difficult process. Niger does not produce enriched uranium. Coulter's whole piece is written using this incorrect terminology. But it sounds good enough to make wingnut media and blogs run with gleeful diarrhea.

Rightist bloggers commenting on the Coulter piece crow, "Coulter = money again" because her unimpeachable telling of true history "smacks the revisionist historians of the left square across the nose with a rolled up newspaper, eliciting the chorus of now familiar yelps of collective pain from the angry, exposed left." Coulter's brilliance has once and for all, as she puts it, slapped down the "nut-cable stations...'reportage'" consisting of "endless repetition of arbitrary assertions, half-truths and thoroughly debunked canards" where "the passionate left is allowed to invent a liberal fable without correction."

Meanwhile, Brit Hume and Jim Angle of Fox Noise are beating on the long-standing "Wilson is a liar" drum. Now that the forged Niger documents and Joseph Wilson's role in exposing the deceits of the president is the underlayment of the Libby trial, they have to trot that out again. See http://mediamatters.org/items/200702090007 for a good analysis.

Let’s briefly go back over what all the fuss is about. The whole Libby matter arose because Vice President Cheney felt that Ambassador Wilson had been disloyal in publishing a New York Times commentary entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Evidently from Cheney’s point of view, Wilson had revealed too much truth about the propaganda thrust behind the war. Therefore, Wilson had to be punished and made an example of—through his wife. Cheney’s brand of discipline led to Valerie Plame Wilson’s status as a covert CIA operative being publicized, a career ender.

Coulter and the wingnuts either entirely miss or willfully ignore the most important truths revealed by Wilson. Coulter should actually read the July 2003 Times piece. Wilson points out what has never been disputed in any media, wingnut or otherwise: "It would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq" and "there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired."

But the president had gone ahead and highlighted "uranium from Africa" as an element of the threat from Iraq in his January 2003 State of the Union address. The claim turned out to be based exactly on what was initially an October 2001 intelligence report—absolutely false as it turned out—concerning an actual "transaction" between Iraq and Niger. Forged documents later appeared to support the transaction, but as Wilson clearly stated in his 2003 piece, they never were shown to him. The crux of the matter, never disputed by anyone, was Wilson’s correct report in 2002 and public statement in 2003 that such a transaction would have been next to impossible. This public revelation by a former diplomat, supposedly loyal to the empire, that was totally at odds with the president's speech is what so angered the vice president.

It is obvious why the "uranium from Africa" canard was used, even though it was known to be false. The administration had decided it was going to take Iraq by force and it was willing to use the thinnest tissue of over-amplified lies and half-truths to build and maintain public consent for the conquest. To generate noise now, the likes of Coulter can point back to real information, also reported by Wilson, concerning past diplomatic and commercial contacts between Iraq and Niger—speculatively involving Iraq "seeking" uranium in 1999—to cover for Bush’s rhetoric.

The image of a truthful president sincerely believing his own faulty narrative about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irresistible for Coulter and the wingnuts. However, Bush's falsehood was in insistent elevation of a non-existent threat, obviously known by responsible people in US intelligence to be non-existent, partly due to Wilson's trip. Minute parsing of the word "sought" does not change that.

So, let's go on to Coulter's use of what she calls the "massive investigations" embodied by the 2004 "bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee" report. No report has been more misused by media wingnuts than this one. I wrote a highly illustrative post on this in November 2005. In that, I quoted media mouthpiece Tony Snow on HBO's Real Time (before he spun through the revolving door from Fox Noise to the Whitehouse), speaking to the 2004 SSI report:

SNOW: Yeah, that's right. ... The wife is the one who arranged for Joe Wilson to go over to Niger. What's interesting is that the people that really smeared Joe Wilson were the people who looked into his charges, the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said, "You know what, Joe? All that stuff you said in the New York Times, was lies. You're wrong!'' ... [to audience] Read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. I know it's uncomfortable, because it's a view you don't want to hear. But if you're going to call "bullshit,'' at least read it, and then get back to me. Sorry, go ahead.

What Snow, and Coulter, forget to tell you is that what really provides the wingnut narrative on Wilson's credibility in the 2004 SSI report was a hack job appended by Pat Roberts, Kit Bond and other Republicans then interested in carrying water for the Whitehouse. The Democrats refused to endorse that section of the report.

If you do want to click through stuff on that November 3, 2005 post of mine (and you should), here is the correct link to that very instructive Larry Johnson item:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/19/142419/59

Coulter also forgets to tell you that the bottom line in the real part of the 2004 SSI report on "Former Ambassador", as stated above, says that Wilson's report upon return from Niger in 2002 was in fact exactly what he wrote in his July 2003 NYT piece:

Niger's former Minister for Energy and Mines (REDACTED), Mai Manga, stated that there were no sales outside of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) channels since the mid-1980s. He knew of no contracts signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of uranium. He said that an Iranian delegation was interested in purchasing 400 tons of yellowcake from Niger in1998, but said that no contract was ever signed with Iran. Mai Manga also described how the French mining consortium controls Nigerien uranium mining and keeps the uranium very tightly controlled from the time it is mined until the time it is loaded onto ships in Benin for transport overseas. Mai Manga believed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange a special shipment of uranium to a pariah state given these controls.

(U) In an interview with Committee staff, the former ambassador was able to provide more information about the meeting between former Prime Minister Mayaki and the Iraqi delegation. The former ambassador said that Mayaki did meet with the Iraqi delegation but never discussed what was meant by "expanding commercial relations." The former ambassador said that because Mayaki was wary of discussing any trade issues with a country under United Nations (UN) sanctions, he made a successful effort to steer the conversation away from a discussion of trade with the Iraqi delegation."

Then, Republican staffers make a big deal about a supposed discrepancy about when Wilson actually saw or heard about the details of the forged documents. Sure, there is a point of confusion about what Wilson told them, possibly on their part (but not about what he wrote). This has endlessly been beaten to death by the right. And herein lies the danger of relying too much on the Republican-dominated 2004 report. Granted, it is an essential document with volumes of significant pieces of the story of the weapons of mass destruction ruse. But it also is ladled with Republican talking points that "snow" under an uninformed audience.

Taking up Tony Snow's challenge to actually read the 2004 SSI report, it becomes clear that Coulter seems to have missed the whole section dealing with Niger in general outside the part about the "Former Ambassador". She writes, "Indeed, the United States didn't even receive the 'obviously forged' documents until eight months after Wilson's trip to Niger!"

So what? The "eight months" may be true, but as Wilson accurately wrote, the trip was based on an "intelligence report" about the existence of an actual uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger.

The 2004 SSI report says, "Reporting on a possible uranium yellowcakes sales agreement between Niger and Iraq first came to the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) on October 15, 2001." It goes on to describe that this "possible sales agreement" was "very limited and lacking needed detail", but that suddenly in February 2002, "the CIA's DO issued a second intelligence report [DELETED] which again cited the source as a '[foreign] government service.' Although not identified in the report, this source was also from the foreign service. The second report provided more details about the previously reported Iraq-Niger uranium agreement and provided what was said to be 'verbatim text' of the accord."

Much later it turns out, these were the "forged documents" that led to Wilson's trip, exactly as Wilson wrote in 2003, "While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."

Could he be clearer that he did not in fact "see" the forged documents? Coulter wrote her piece without even reading Wilson's.

Of course, in March 2003, the documents were exposed as fraudulent by Mohamed ElBaradei,

Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents — which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger — are, in fact, not authentic.

As early as March 22, 2003, Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung noted in a Washington Post story that even the CIA had its doubts "about the evidence backing up charges that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa." This busts up the wingnut version, which has all intelligence prior to the war in a solid front, where "everyone agreed" that Saddam had WMD at his disposal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The whole story of how those fraudulent Niger documents came into being in the first place is very interesting. It's too long to go into here, but it has been investigated by Seymour Hersh in "The Stovepipe") and Josh Marshall (hard to get his whole story in one neat piece, but
you can refer to [this search result].

And now with the Libby trial, hard evidence that the concocted "uranium from Africa" threat was a rouge job based in Cheney's office has come to light. Larry Johnson had a critical post on this just last weekend, where he explains "we now know that Dick Cheney received a preliminary brief from the CIA and the the Senate Intelligence Committee, in its 2004 report, covered up this fact."

This documentary evidence, totally supportive of Ambassador Wilson, ought to be at the top of Coulter's sources for her apology note to Wilson. It'll never happen. An unethical writer like Coulter, whose work barely is good enough to provide wingnuts with entertainment, likely will continue to peddle bullshit while indicting real reporters for doing in fact what she herself is doing.