[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17911]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         QUESTIONS CONCERNING IRAQI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the White House has been backtracking on how 
it was that fraudulent intelligence information was included by the 
President in his January State of the Union address delivered in this 
Chamber. Specifically, the statement by President Bush was that Iraq 
had sought to buy processed uranium for weapons of mass destruction 
from Niger, Africa. That information was wrong. Indeed, the documents 
involved appear to contain forged signatures of leaders from those 
nations who are no longer in office. How could this kind of information 
be placed in a State of the Union address?
  The current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. George 
Tenet, over the weekend has claimed publicly that he will take 
responsibility for this serious statement that misled Congress, misled 
the American people and indeed the people of the world about Iraq's 
intentions and capabilities relative to nuclear weaponry. The real 
question about this revelation is who exactly knew what and when did 
they know it? And who is responsible for these words being included in 
the President's State of the Union address, an address of such major 
proportion that preceded the invasion?
  At the same time as I ponder these questions as I know the American 
people are, I am in receipt of a letter from an intelligence officer. I 
have read it and reread it and reread it again. In the letter and in my 
dealings with intelligence officers, I have been told that they are 
trained to triple-check, to verify significant intelligence 
information, triple-check. So when a statement is made in the State of 
the Union address of such consequence, I ask myself, was it triple-
checked? Who really knew what and when did they know it? Surely 
someone, more than one person in that White House and other places 
checked and rechecked and then checked again every word and every 
sentence in the speech.
  I know the President practiced the speech before coming here. All 
Presidents do. So who knew what and when did they know it?
  A retired intelligence officer from the Marine Corps wrote me this 
letter just a few months ago, but his words have been coming back to 
me, and I reread this after these revelations this weekend, and I want 
to share some of it with my colleagues. He says he is a retired United 
States Marine Corps officer with over 30 years of active and reserve 
service. Upon his retirement from the Marine Corps, he has worked in 
domestic intelligence and law enforcement in our country at a senior 
level.
  He basically informs me, in starting his letter, that his 
intelligence background is operationally based. But he says in the 
letter, first of all, there is no such thing as an intelligence 
failure, Congresswoman. Intelligence is a command function, just as 
operations is a command function, just as logistics is a command 
function. If a commander decides to do something that is not supported 
by intelligence, then that is a command failure, not an intelligence 
failure.
  He wrote to me that in his opinion the evidence of Iraqi weapons of 
mass destruction had not been vetted through the intelligence 
community, and he adamantly believes that that process is absolutely 
critical to an adequate analysis of the question. I thought about those 
words a great deal.
  He says in his letter, look at the decision to go to war in Iraq. Our 
Commander in Chief decided to go to war, he planned for an operation, 
and nobody was about to give him any information to the contrary.
  I ask myself, even if they had that information? Who had the 
information? Who knew what and when did they know it? We have a 
responsibility to the Constitution, to this country and to the people 
of the world. We ought to get to the bottom of who knew what and when 
did they know it.

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