sybert's Journal: Uranium in Niger

How long can everyone continue to miss the central point in the uranium dispute? The key point in Joe Wilson's original 7/6/2003 New York Times article (archive) was that Niger's operational mines were secure.

Niger's uranium business consists of two mines.... If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

We would not find out until a year later that Wilson's was looking in the wrong place. In Mark Huband's 6/28/2004 article in the Financial Times (archive) we learn that the uranium was to be smuggled from abandoned mines.

Intelligence officers were convinced that the uranium would be smuggled from abandoned mines in Niger, thereby circumventing official export controls.

The difference is between operational and abandoned uranium mines. The British intelligence behind the "16 words" was that uranium would be acquired from abandoned mines while Wilson checked the security of operational mines. Wilson's trip did not debunk anything, nor was what he wrote in his article a lie. The problem with the "16 words" is that apparently neither Wilson, the CIA, or the Administration, or journalists knew what was behind the British intelligence at the time, and did not know what to look for in Niger. This is why the 16 words should not have been included in the State of the Union.