Jason Leopold: "Democrats Have Proof Pre-War Intel Was Manipulated"

From truthout.org:
-----
Senate Democrats have dug up additional explosive evidence over the past week that they say will help prove the Bush administration deliberately manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence that was used to convince Congress and the public to support a pre-emptive strike against the Middle East country in March of 2003.

Specifically, Carl Levin, the senior Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is interested in permanently debunking the administration's assertion that it "mistakenly" included the 16-word reference in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address claiming that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium - the key component to building an atomic bomb - from Niger. Levin's aides said the administration knew months before that the veracity of the allegations was dubious because it was based on forged documents.

Many critics of the war cite those 16 words in the State of the Union address as the silver bullet that convinced Congress and the American public to back the war against Iraq. The Niger uranium allegations are also at the heart of a federal probe into the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was the envoy sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate the uranium rumor and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to it. The leak of Wilson's wife's identity and undercover CIA status was an attempt to muzzle Wilson, a vocal critic of the war, who had accused the Bush administration of citing the phony Niger uranium documents to dupe Congress into supporting the war.

The probe has so far resulted in a five-count criminal indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who resigned from his position last month following the indictment for lying to prosecutors about his role in the leak.

Since Libby's indictment, the Bush administration has launched a full-scale public relations campaign to shore up Bush's sagging poll numbers. In doing so, senior officials at the White House and the National Security Council have publicly attacked Democratic critics of the war, as well as the bipartisan investigation into pre-war intelligence, claiming Democrats saw the exact same intelligence as those in the White House and voted in favor of military action.

On Wednesday, Cheney called critics of the war "dishonest" and "reprehensible" and said Democrats accusing the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence were "opportunists."

But aides to Sen. Levin rebutted that, saying they have smoking-gun proof that they were lied to by Bush and Cheney about not only the existence of weapons of mass destruction but also claims that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger.

In building their case against the administration, Levin, with the help of Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has obtained the December 2002 letter sent to the White House and the National Security Council by Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warning that the Niger claims were bogus and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs.
-----
[Read more.]