Now, I'm pretty new to this issue. But even I can spot that Stephen Rademaker works for Robert Joseph. And that's the same Bob Joseph who was charged with muscling the CIA into letting President Bush use the Niger bamboozle in the 2003 State of the Union address. And he actually managed to get it done, even after the Alan Foley and others at the CIA told him repeatedly they didn't think it was true. So he certainly speaks with a lot of credibility on this issue.
Remember Robert Joseph from PlameGate and the "16 words" in Bush's SOTU? Robert Joseph was the force behind the inclusion, winning out over the CIA's Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (and Valerie Plame's boss.)
When the State of the Union speech was being prepared, NSC official Robert Joseph faxed a paragraph on uranium from Niger to CIA official Alan Foley. Foley told Joseph that the reference to Niger should be taken out. Joseph insisted that a reference remain in the speech, so they compromised: Niger was changed to Africa; they did not include any specific quantity; and the source was attributed to the British rather than to U.S. intelligence. [33] Thus there was high level doubt about the wisdom of including the dubious claim about Niger in the president's State of the Union message, particularly since the same claim had been deleted from the president's October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati.
[33] Matthew Cooper, "Pinning the Line on the Man," Time (28 July 2003), p. 31. See also Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, "U.S. Had Uranium Papers Earlier," Washington Post (18 July 2003), p. 1, A12.
