-Caveat Lector-
http://truthout.org/docs_03/031503D.shtml
Editor's Note: Another brick in the wall here. After
Powell's use of a plagiarized British dossier, and after Hans
Blix's refutation of virtually every piece of 'evidence' offered by
the United States regarding Iraqi weapons, there is now this.
Decide for yourself how solid the case for war is at this point. -
wrp
FBI Probes Fake Evidence of Iraqi Nuclear Plans
By Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post
Thursday 13 March 2003
The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of evidence
linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the
possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign
to foster support for military action against Iraq.
"It's something we're just beginning to look at," a senior law
enforcement official said yesterday. Officials are trying to
determine whether the documents were forged to try to influence
U.S. policy, or whether they may have been created as part of a
disinformation campaign directed by a foreign intelligence service.
"We're looking at it from a preliminary stage as to what it's
all about," he said.
The FBI has not yet opened a formal investigation because it
is unclear whether the bureau has jurisdiction over the matter.
The phony documents -- a series of letters between Iraqi and
Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in equipment that could be
used to make nuclear weapons -- came to British and U.S.
intelligence officials from a third country. The identity of the
third country could not be learned yesterday.
The forgery came to light last week during a highly publicized
and contentious United Nations meeting. Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the
Security Council on March 7 that U.N. and independent experts had
decided that the documents were "not authentic."
ElBaradei's disclosure, and his rejection of three other key
claims that U.S. intelligence officials have cited to support
allegations about Iraq's nuclear ambitions, struck a powerful blow
to the Bush administration's argument on the matter.
To the contrary, ElBaradei told the council, "we have to date
found no evidence or plausible indications of the revival of a
nuclear program in Iraq."
The CIA, which had also obtained the documents, had questions
about "whether they were accurate," said one intelligence official,
and it decided not to include them in its file on Iraq's program to
procure weapons of mass destruction.
The FBI has jurisdiction over counterintelligence operations
by foreign governments against the United States. Because the
documents were delivered to the United States, the bureau would
most likely try to determine whether the foreign government knew
the documents were forged or whether it, too, was deceived.
Iraq pursued an aggressive nuclear weapons program during the
1970s and 1980s. It launched a crash program to build a nuclear
bomb in 1990 after it invaded Kuwait. Allied bombing during the
Persian Gulf War in 1991 damaged Iraq's nuclear infrastructure. The
country's known stocks of nuclear fuel and equipment were removed
or destroyed during the U.N. inspections after the war.
But Iraq never surrendered the blueprints for its nuclear program,
and it kept teams of scientists employed after U.N. inspectors were
forced to leave in 1998.
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