NATIONAL JOURNAL: Insulating Bush (03/30/2006):
As the 2004 election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq.
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“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.”
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In the end, the White House’s damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president’s knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush’s re-election.
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Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he — unlike others in the Bush administration — had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe that Iraq’s procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.
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Responding, Rice said: “I’m saying that when we put [Powell’s speech] together … the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did…. The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view.” Rice added, “Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me.”
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In fact, contrary to Rice’s statement, the president was indeed informed of such doubts when he received the October 2002 President’s Summary of the NIE. Both Cheney and Rice also got copies of the summary, as well as a number of other intelligence reports about the State and Energy departments’ doubts that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program.
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Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the President’s Summary that informed him that both State’s INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose.(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary, Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified, according to an account provided by an administration official.)
The snippets are from a longer article, worth reading in full. The bottomline is that the pretext for the war was bogus, and the military establishment of the world’s only superpower has been misused to both further the business agenda of a coterie of this president’s cronies and to settle a personal score over the attempted assassination of Bush 41.