July 18, 2003
Some folks who listen to the BBC pronounce it Nie-zhare, but that’s because the British are French. This is why they fed us that dumb intelligence that CIA Director Tenet fell for after we instructed him to. The facts weren’t wrong; they were just
British. Or French. Which is why we took it out of one of the President’s speeches. But then we had to put it somewhere, so we put it in the State of the Union. It didn’t seem like it would bother anybody over there. You don’t go looking for accuracy there—it’s more of a general “feeling of the state of things” thing.
People say it was uncorroborated, fabricated information. Now why would we want to corroborate fabricated information? That would deceptionistic. We didn’t want to do that.
Cheney sent Joseph Wilson over to Africa, which is where Niger is kept, to investigate the story, back in February of ’02. He failed to verify that it could be verified. But the British were moving ahead on it; Tony Blair had several projects that were in support of our values and our efforts to build a coalition of the willing to be bought, and he had intelligence projects, and he had to maintain his alliance with the indispensable nation, which is us, while continuing with his Europe project, and no one’s sure now Which Blair Project will win out. Because Europe wants to challenge us, and spend their euros on oil from Iraq, which of course they can’t do because the Iraqis now have freedom, which is to say, the dollar.