Monday's declassified State Department memo was obtained over the weekend by The New York Sun under a Freedom of Information Act request the newspaper filed last July. The Sun's story Monday morning, however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger documents.
The memo was drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, about a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA.
The New York Sun article by Josh Gerstein indicates that nothing in the July 7 memo to Colin Powell by a deputy indicates that Valerie Plame's role at the CIA was secret. But as Leopold points out, Gerstein misses the part of the memo that says that Carl Ford's agency had concluded as of March 1, 2002 that the "sale of uranium to Iraq" by Niger was "unlikely," "highly dubious," and that the NIE positing that Iraq was seeking enriched uranium was as wrong as those Nigerian documents were forged.
Further, Ford notes that the Nigerian yellowcake data was seen as so dubious, that on January, 12, 2003, INR "expressed concernes to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Irag-Niger deal were forgeries," and that after "considerable back and forth between the CIA (State) Department, the IAEA and the British," Collin "Powell's briefing to the U.N. Security Council did not mention attempted Iraqi procurement of uranium ... due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information..."
Somehow, though, those 16 words about Iraq, uranium and Africa wound up in the president's State of the Union address. And once Joe Wilson began to speak out about the trip outlined in the Ford memos, it appears Vice President Cheney went after Wilson in order to discredit and silence him. And then, cue the Plame leak.
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
