http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15383Saving Condy's rear
Stephen Hadley, Rice's top deputy, says he's to blame for Nigergate. Is he?
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From his days as a energetic young staff member with the Tower Commission investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Stephen Hadley knows from scandals. Now, he's is in the middle of one.
On Tuesday, July 22, at a White House off-camera briefing with White House communications director Dan Bartlett at his side, Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's top deputy, took partial responsibility for the unfounded claim in President Bush's State of the Union address that Iraq had gone uranium shopping in Africa. "I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue," said Hadley. The New York Times described Hadley as "a critical behind-the-scenes player in the Bush White House."
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Like many other pre-war relatively unknown administration staffers -- Had you ever heard of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, before the Iraq invasion? -- Stephen Hadley played an important supporting role in marketing the invasion of Iraq to the American people. The New York Times reported on November 4, 2002 that Hadley, together with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, would work closely with the newly established Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The Committee, with such high-powered members as former secretary of state George P. Shultz, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), was to be "modeled on a successful lobbying campaign
to expand the NATO alliance." From the outset, however, the Committee's goal was clear: the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq.
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* He also may have written the bulk of the Tower Commission report that exonerated Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Headed by Sen. John Tower, Sen. Edmund Muskie, and Brent Scowcroft, the Tower Commission was appointed by President Reagan in December, 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra Affair, the administration's authorization of the sale of arms to Iran (only a few years after it kidnapped and held American hostages) and the diversion of the profits to illegally fund the Contras (a CIA-sponsored terrorist band) in Nicaragua.
Whether he wrote the bulk of the Tower Commission Report or not, Hadley was an "extremely able and prolific contributor" to the Commission's work, said W. Clark McFadden, General Counsel for the Commission. In a phone interview, McFadden said that Hadley "was a major drafter of the chronologies that were set forth in the report and drafted other parts as well. It was a very small staff and lots of people helped edit the report. He was absolutely excellent, first rate, a gifted writer and enormously conscientious."
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