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Washington, D.C. - In rare fashion, the House Committee on International Relations today kept alive a resolution Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) authored that would require the White House to present Congress with all drafts and documents related to the crafting of President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. Hinchey offered the resolution so that Congress could determine how the now infamous 16 words about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa, which turned out to be false, made it into that 2003 speech. Hinchey's measure would also require the White House to deliver to Congress all drafts and related documents surrounding an October 2002 speech that the president made in which he discussed a possible mushroom cloud from an Iraqi nuclear weapon, but did not mention an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium from Africa after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said such claims were unproven.
Hinchey said he believed the false uranium claims were inserted into the State of the Union Address because the Administration was seeking to scare the American people and Congress into going to war with Iraq even though there was no proof that country had weapons of mass destruction. The Republican chairman of the committee, Congressman Henry Hyde (R-IL), ordered a recorded vote on the measure in an attempt to kill it, but the measure tied 24-24. In an uncommon move, Hyde then gaveled the proceedings closed and said the committee would resume debating and voting on the measure next Tuesday or Wednesday. Democrats have repeatedly offered other measures before the committee to obtain information from the White House about it's pre and post-war planning and execution, but have repeatedly been shut down by Hyde and his Republican colleagues on the committee. Failure to stop Hinchey's measure today represents a victory for Democratic efforts to shed sunlight on the Administration's behavior regarding the war.
"I am very pleased that this important measure to find out the truth about President Bush's false uranium claim in the 2003 State of the Union address will live to see another day," Hinchey said. "An open and transparent government is critical to the maintenance and survival of our democracy. When it is determined that information presented by the President of the United States is untrue, as President Bush's uranium claims were, it is imperative that the Congress and the American people find out how that happened and whether it was intentional or not. To see the chairman of the House International Relation's Committee be forced to keep this measure open, when we know he wanted it to die on the spot, is extraordinary. We will work very hard to rally further support for this critical resolution so that the resolution passes when the matter is brought before the committee again next week."
In his 2003 State of the Union address President Bush said, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." It has been reported that the original draft of the State of the Union address stated that, "we know that [Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa," but after the White House consulted with the CIA, the speech was changed to refer to the British view rather than the American view.
In response to the uproar over an op-ed article disputing the uranium claims that was written by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Wilson, had her identity as an undercover CIA operative revealed to the press by members of the Bush Administration, then-CIA Director George Tenet issued a statement in which he took responsibility for the false uranium claim in the State of the Union address. Tenet did admit that CIA officials who reviewed the draft of the State of the Union Address containing the remarks on the supposed Niger-Iraqi uranium deal “raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with [White House] National Security Council colleagues” and "[s]ome of the language was changed."
On October 7, 2002, prior to the 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush delivered a speech in which he made reference to Iraq seeking nuclear weapons and urged action against Iraq, saying that the United States, "cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," a reference to the potential for Iraq to use a nuclear weapon. The president stopped short of saying Iraq had recently sought uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapon. According to the Senate Intelligence report, the uranium references remained in the speech until at least its seventh draft when the National Security Council removed it at the CIA's behest.
"This resolution would finally shed light on how and why the infamous 16 words made it into the 2003 State of the Union address and how and why similar wording was removed from another speech just a few months earlier," Hinchey said. "This Congress deserves to see every draft, every e-mail, and every memo related to the development of those two speeches so we can see their evolution and determine how a false statement about uranium, which had grave consequences, made it into the 2003 State of the Union address. Since the White House refuses to be up front and honest about how the false uranium claim made it into President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, it is up to the Congress to do the research and put together the puzzle to determine what went wrong."
The Hinchey measure to acquire the documents surrounding the State of the Union address and the October 2002 speech is considered a resolution of inquiry, which is a type of bill that seeks factual information from the executive branch. If the full Congress adopts the measure, the White House would have 14 days to present Congress with all of the requested documents.
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