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Once more, with feeling Hadley Takes the Blame. (For Now.)By Rick Horowitz
"Ask me for the secret to all great humor." "OK, what's the se-- " "Timing."
So: Don't you feel pity pangs for those unfortunate souls who handle important matters for our president? Poor dears -- there they were, all ready to offer up Explanation & Apology No. 1083 for The Sixteen Words, and The Who Knew What and When about the famous (if fictional) uranium from Africa. And can you imagine? The day they picked to announce their latest version of the truth turns out to be the very day that the even more famous Jessica Lynch was scheduled to have her homecoming parade back in West Virginia. Not to mention -- when it rains, it pours, doesn't it? -- the very last day on this earth for Saddam Hussein's bad boys, Flopsy and Mopsy, whose sudden demise was bound to attract some attention, too. All of which meant that good old No. 1083 might have been overlooked in the rush of events -- and wouldn't the White House have been sorry to see that happen? Right. But you're in luck! Reporters still cover the White House, even on busy days, and while their stories about the latest uranial flip-flops may have not have made the front pages or the top-of-the-hour headlines, they certainly made for entertaining reading and listening -- entertaining in a Demolition Derby kind of way. So I figured I'd help spread the word. Just consider it a public service, my little contribution to the greater dissemination of knowledge and stomach acid. The man of the hour -- actually, it was an hour and a half -- was one Stephen J. Hadley, whose face you or I wouldn't recognize if he came to our doors selling magazine subscriptions, but whose job description is a fairly interesting one under the circumstances: He's President Bush's deputy national security adviser. That puts him one step below the president's full-fledged national security adviser. That puts him pretty much in the middle of things. And Stephen Hadley's account of how the words that never should have been uttered made it into the president's State of the Union address? Let me put it in non-technical language for you: "Oops -- I forgot." Forgot, that is, about the two memos the CIA had sent to the White House in October of 2002, just months before the State of the Union, expressing strong doubts about any claim that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa. Forgot, too, about the phone call Hadley had received during that same period from the CIA director himself, George Tenet, who was trying to make sure that an allegation about Iraq and African uranium would be removed from a major speech the president was scheduled to give in Cincinnati on October 7. And the line was removed. But then came January of 2003, and the draft of an even bigger speech, and wouldn't you know it? There's that line again -- Iraq and Africa and uranium. Only this time, it stays! Oops. "I should have recalled" at the time of the speech, says Mr. Hadley, "that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue." That's such a nice way to put it. "There was controversy associated with..." the uranium issue. Like "there was money associated with" the Enron issue. Hard to overlook, don't you think? Especially if Mr. Hadley has, as one story said, "a reputation for fanatical attention to detail." It gets better. One of the two CIA memos, Mr. Hadley now admits, was sent to him and to Michael Gerson, the chief White House speechwriter. The other memo went to Mr. Hadley and to Mr. Hadley's boss: Condoleezza Rice. Condoleezza Rice, who just days ago was trying to blame the unsinkable sentence on inaction by the CIA director. Whose White House colleagues have lately been arguing that the CIA's concerns, such as they were, had had nothing to do with the quality of the evidence, but merely its sourcing. Who herself had insisted as recently as June 8 to Tim Russert and the American public that "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." Must be some pretty tight circles. Getting tighter all the time. Posted 7/24/03. Has
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Rick Horowitz
