A False Remark

A lie is a false remark intended to deceive. So when the White House says President Bush's assertion that American intelligence had discovered Iraq had been negotiating to buy uranium from an African nation was false, is that proof that he was lying to make the case for a war he had already decided to wage? Or did he base his decision on information that was incomplete and inaccurate? It's time once again to play: What Did the President Know and When Did He Know It?

President Bush made the Iraq-uranium connection in his State of the Union speech laying out his case for going to war. It was an explosive revelation that made Americans worry that Saddam Hussein might be closer to getting the Bomb than we had previously suspected. The polls reflected that support for the war grew after the President's speech, and we all know what happened next.

Now we learn that the very intelligence agencies Mr. Bush cited as the source of his information had serious doubts about it and were shocked to hear the President recite it as fact. And along comes one Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the Central Intelligence Agency, at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney, sent to the central African nation of Niger to check out these Iraq-uranium reports, to say that he found no evidence to support them and that he told his handlers at the CIA so when he got back. He says he also told officials in the State Department and in the Vice President's office.

The White House makes the incredible claim that Mr. Cheney never heard of Mr. Wilson's mission until he read of it in the papers. Presumably, the Vice President is also reading in the papers that the intelligence community accuses the White House of making inflated claims about Iraq's much-rumored chemical and biological weapons program.

Mr. Wilson is an international business consultant and a career foreign service officer whom the CIA obviously trusted to give it a straight answer to a serious question. It is a measure of the gravity of the situation that such a man should be moved to go public in the New York Times to say: "If... the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."

If the President knew of Mr. Wilson's report, then he lied to the nation in front of Congress about a matter of life and death importance. This would be a much more serious lie than the one that led to the impeachment of the last President, who could truthfully say that nobody died as a result of his lie. If the President did not know the information was false, then shouldn't he fire the underlings who allowed him to make a fool of himself, up to and including the Vice President?