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It's the kind of thing that makes pondering motives and proving what another person's thinking or not thinking.
"So why did Bush say Saddam was trying to buy it from Niger, when he already had a stockpile of it? More proof of Bush's guilt for Bugliosi's case?"
(1) The Niger connection was lurking in the background. It's why Wilson was sent there in the first place: The rumor was that the Iraqi trade representatives had asked for increased trade, but wasn't interested in goats and baskets. That left the inference that the Iraqis were after U. The Niger government later backtracked, and said that while this might be true, the inference is, at best, weakly supported, and they no longer thought it true--in fact, they rather thought the initial inference was simply wrong.
(2) The famous 16 words didn't include "Niger". It's what was everybody understood it to mean, and most people honestly believe "Niger" was explicitly mentioned. There are other African sources for uranium, and a few people have suggested that the British report was referring to someplace other than Niger.
(3) The yellowcake that Saddam had was under IAEA seal, everybody knew how much was there (granted, the IAEA was caught off guard, but they hardly ever make mistakes that are caught early on). Now, if you assume that Saddam was secretly reconstituting his enriched-uranium program, what do you need to show? That he has uranium that everybody knows about? Well, if he touches it or it vanishes or gets swapped out for some similarly colored non-U bearing mineral, everybody knows that he's reconstituting his nuclear program, or at least trying to; if he's not, he has a pile of questions to answer, and pissed-off people asking them. That might have bad consequences. So, if he's trying to do it secretly, as everybody assumes he'd want to try to do if he wanted such a program, he'd have to acquire some more yellowcake, secretly. Right? So having a load of yellowcake that he doesn't touch is irrelevant to the claim that he was or wasn't secretly reconstitution a nuclear weapons program.
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