This is another
version of the Italian connection to the Niger documents, and who got them into
Cheney’s office. What’s notable is
that it appears in Pat Buchanon’s new flagship, The American Conservative. The author, as noted below, is a
former CIA officer.
By the way, in
advance of his visit to Washington next week, the Italian PM is suddenly
distancing himself from the Niger documents as a casus belli, saying he tried to persuade Pres. Bush not to
go to war*. I also heard that now that the Libby
indictment revealed a coordinated effort to discredit Wilson’s public challenge
of the forged document, there might be interest in the UK for a new review of
Blair’s involvement.
Michael
Leeden, referenced below, a longtime neocon war hawk, is supposed to have said,
““Every ten years or so, the United States
needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the
wall, just to show the world we mean business.” He is
now a contributing editor for National Review online and wrote Creative Destruction, how to wage revolutionary war
in September 2001.
The
circumvention of authorized channels to analyze foreign intelligence is what
Brent Scowcroft was so angry about in his ‘breaking ranks’ interview in the New
Yorker last week. This bad intel went
straight to then NSA Rice and her deputy Hadley, as well as straight into the
VP’s office, putting the entire national security infrastructure at risk, as we
know all too well now, all too conveniently.
A new
Washington Post-ABC News poll taken Friday night and Saturday found that “55 percent of the public believes the
Libby case indicates wider problems "with ethical wrongdoing" in the
White House, while 41 percent believes it was an "isolated incident."
And by a 3 to 1 ratio, 46 percent to 15 percent, Americans say the level of
honesty and ethics in the government has declined rather than risen under Bush.”
Forging
the Case for War
Who was behind
the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi, The American Conservative, November 21, 2005 Issue Online 10/29/05
From the beginning,
there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA
officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an
attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear,
but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to
revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up
the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium
from Niger.
What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details
of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald
has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press,
most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on
the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.
Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents
were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service.
It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence
stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in
the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war
against Iraq.
The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a
nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime
Minister Silvio
Berlusconi and his
newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza
Militare (SISMI), Nicolo
Pollari, made an
official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression
and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam
Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was
likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under
pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be
vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush
administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA
officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy
uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s
MI-6.
But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from
the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it was
“lacking in detail” and “very limited” in scope.
In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington
with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson
visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the
information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in
Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978
for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian
sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners,
knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who
had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the
liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who
had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the
obstruction coming from the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the
administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the
same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by
providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged
that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between
Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the
meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for
$10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed
over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD
dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for
money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the
documents.
Panorama, perhaps not
coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S.
Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA
Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to
Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the
NSC and the Vice President’s Office.
On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and
State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in Pres. Bush’s
State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from
the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s
International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after
Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.
President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President
Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence suggests
that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s Office of
Special Plans.
In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Documents
were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently connected to, among
others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian
investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally
created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were
managing the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about unauthorized
mining. Martino has
since admitted to the Financial Times that both the Italian and American
governments were behind the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part
of a disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched
with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy
stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to establish
the authenticity of the forgeries.
At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated,
though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to
present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House.
But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any
connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in
co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was
both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily
been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant
for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.
It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to
explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an
unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.
The possible forgery of
the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the
attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York
Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest
into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign
against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned
about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Philip Giraldi, a
former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international
security consultancy.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html
* via J Marshall @ Talking Points Memo to The Age, Australia http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/I-warned-Bush-about-Iraq-Italys-PM/2005/10/30/1130607134051.html
For another
version of this story, please see
Laura Rozen, La Repubblica’s Scoop Confirmed, in American Prospect. http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10506.
The original comes from La Repubblica http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/bodv/bodv.html\
Leeden, Creative Destruction
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen092001.shtml
White House Ethics, Honesty Questioned: 55% in Survey Say Libby Case Signals
Broader Problems
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901223.html
