New Yorker: Who Lied to Whom?

Seymour Hersh: “Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq?s nuclear program?”

Saying of evidence cited by George W. Bush in his speech issuing the ultamitum to Iraq which resulted in the war in which we’re currently engaged:

“Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. ‘The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents… are in fact not authentic,’ ElBaradei said.”

“One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, ‘These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.'”