The Senate Committee on Intelligence is well aware of these
discrepancies between the "real" forgeries and the transcriptions received via
whomever, and if the much-vaunted
second "phase" of their investigation into prewar intelligence doesn't cover
this topic in public hearings or even closed sessions we'll know there's a
bipartisan cover-up in progress.
Once we lift this rock, I can guarantee you it won't just be a
bunch of Italian con artists and their enablers in SISMI who scuttle away
and Scooter Libby won't be the only U.S. government official in
prosecutors' sights. This may be an incentive
for the Democrats, but there are plenty of issues here that may also make them
wary. I won't go into that now, but for a hint of what I'm talking about,
check out Julian
Borger's piece on the Office of Special Plans.
According to La Repubblica, it was this mysterious entity which,
as
Seymour Hersh says, called itself only
half-mockingly "the cabal" that reportedly funneled the Italian
transcriptions to Washington policymakers. Borger, like Karen
Kwiatkowski and Robert
Dreyfuss, makes the connection to a certain
foreign intelligence agency, and from this my readers are free to draw their
own conclusions as to why the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are not
too eager to uncover the real source of the Niger uranium
forgeries.
November 14, 2005 |
Don't Blame
the Italians They didn't
forge the Niger uranium documents |
by Justin Raimondo |
Cornered by their critics,
overwhelmed by massive
antiwar sentiment, and pursued by the relentless Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the
War Party is in full retreat, hiding behind the ramparts of an elaborate
edifice of lies. The
administration's defenders are shooting blindly, averring per Norman
Podhoretz that, since "everybody"
believed what the administration was claiming
about Iraq's alleged WMD prior to the invasion, we're all living in the
same alternate universe. In the Bizarro World of the
neocons, if we all believe a lie, that makes it true. Or, rather, that
makes the whole idea of truth irrelevant, and we should all "move on," as
the Clintonites used to say.
Ken Mehlman was on Meet the Press Sunday
morning, invoking the Select Senate
Committee Report [.pdf], the Silbermann-Robb report,
and laughably the Butler report
as evidence that we should all move along, there's nothing to see here.
The argument from authority is a favorite debating tactic of the neocons,
second only to smearing their
opponents as "anti-Semites." You
have to dig deep down in the
archives and retrieve news articles as well as the texts of these
various official and definitive-sounding "reports" to realize that they
say no such thing and that, furthermore, an explicit political
decision was made in the case of the SSCI report and the
Silbermann-Robb whitewash
not to address the question of manipulated intelligence. No
ordinary American has the time or inclination to do that kind of research,
however, and that is what they are counting on just as they counted on
this same conceptual lethargy to deliberately create the widespread
impression that Iraq was behind 9/11.
We are supposed to believe that critics of the war who see a pattern of
deception in the administration's pre-invasion pronouncements
are deluding themselves into believing a "conspiracy
theory," as the Weekly Standard's new blog puts
it. In an effort to calm the "frenzy" created by my piece unmasking
the authors of the Niger uranium forgeries, they cite the FBI's detrmination
that "financial gain, not an effort to influence U.S. policy, was behind
the forged documents." Why the two motivations financial gain and a
desire to manipulate the making of policy are mutually exclusive is a
mystery known only to the editors of the Weekly Standard. As we
have seen, neocons have been experts at profiting from the policies they
advocate: the name of Richard
Perle comes to mind. In any event, the efforts of the Italians to cash
in don't quite measure up in terms of entrepreneurial acuity. As one
ex-CIA officer put it to me: "If the objective was to make money, it's
curious that the documents were dumped on Panorama after the
request for a payment was refused."
The boys over at the Standard are real sensitive to jabs from us
on this issue because the Niger uranium forgeries are, for the Peace
Party, the gift that never seems to stop giving. This is the weakest link
in the chain of deception forged by the neocons in the run-up to war, and
it is visibly falling to pieces as news of yet another break in the story
of Niger-gate blows in on an Italian wind.
La Repubblica writers Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo are
back with another
scoop, unraveling a particularly thorny knot in the Niger uranium
forgery mystery that has, until now, proved most baffling. The mystery is
this: how is it that the U.S. government was taken in by such crude
forgeries?
After all, names of Niger officials who were supposed to be overseeing
the transaction with Iraq were flat out wrong, as were certain dates and
other telling details. That's why it was only a few
hours before International Atomic Energy Agency scientists had
unmasked the original documents as fraudulent. So
how come the U.S. government with so many intelligence analysts,
experts, and other resources at its command was so easily fooled? The
answer is that the "intelligence" supposedly contained in the forgeries
was filtered laundered through various foreign intelligence agencies,
including the Italians and the British.
The Italians approached the U.S. in 2001
and 2002 in an effort capped by a personal visit to Washington by
Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian military intelligence, who met with
then-Assistant National Security Adviser Stephen J.
Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002 at precisely
the moment the issue of Iraq's nuclear program became paramount.
Now comes the story from La Repubblica that on the second
attempt to pass off the forgeries as authentic, the Italians or someone
corrected the errors in their transcription of the original
documents, and that's what made its way to policymakers. So what happened
to the original
forgeries? A partial answer is on pages 58-59 of the SSCI report
[.pdf]:
"On October 16, 2002, INR [the State Department] made copies of the
documents available at the NIAG [Nuclear Interdiction Action Group]
meeting for attendees, including representatives from the CIA, DIA, DOE
and NSA. Because the analyst who offered to provide the documents [who had
already determined they were of a dubious nature] was on leave, the
office's senior analyst provided the documents. She cannot reveal how she
made the documents available, but analysts from several agencies,
including the DIA, NSA and DOE, did pick up copies at that meeting. None
of the four CIA representatives recall picking up the documents, however,
during the CIA Inspector General's investigation of this issue, copies of
the documents were found in the DO's CPD vault. It appears that a CPD
representative did pick up the documents at the NIAG meeting, but after
returning to the office, filed them without any further
distribution.
"The CIA told the Committee its analysts did not seek to obtain
copies of the documents because they believed that the foreign government
service reporting was verbatim text and did not think it would advance the
story on the alleged uranium deal. One analyst noted that, at the time,
the CIA was preparing its case [redacted] on reconstitution and since the
uranium reporting was not significant to their argument, getting the
documents was not a priority."
The U.S., prior to the surfacing of the forgeries themselves, had only
been seeing reports filtered via Italian intelligence. When the forgeries
themselves turned up, they were locked away at Langley. The Americans were
being spoon-fed transcriptions forgeries of a forgery! via their
Rome-to-Washington conduit, which, according to La Repubblica and
my own sources,
was Michael
Ledeen and the Office
of Special Plans. But there was something awfully suspicious about
these transcriptions, as The Left Coaster who has been all over this
story points out, indicating that
"Someone was clearly, deliberately passing on information from
forgeries and correcting some information to keep the fact that they
were forgeries, hidden."
We often refer to the "Niger uranium forgeries," but there were two
sets of documents the original copies of the
forgeries, and the transcriptions. La Repubblica traces their
circuitous path from Rome to Washington:
"SISMI [Italian military intelligence] is familiar with the
spectacularly phony dossier on the Niger uranium, assembled 'by private
motivation for lucre' by three characters on the SISMI's payroll (Rocco
Martino, Antonio Nucera and La Signora, who worked at the Embassy). SISMI
is aware of the information contained [in] the dossier. SISMI 'doctors'
the mistakes and absurdities contained in the documents. It does not
entrust the dossier to the CIA but instead to a 'field officer' of the
Agency stationed in Rome, who is permitted to 'view' the documents. The US
agent scribbles a few notes resulting in the first report drafted in
Washington. When the (false) news that Saddam is moving to acquire the
bomb causes consternation (or joy) in the US intelligence community,
Nicolò Pollari's SISMI prepares a second report confirming the first, this
time with the inclusion of a transcription of the Niger-Iraq agreement
confirming 'the credibility of the source (La Signora).' With a
third cable comes notification that finally, '500 tons of uranium have
already been shipped to Iraq.'"
When the actual forgeries turn
up at the U.S. embassy in Rome, on Oct. 9, 2002, courtesy of
Panorama magazine reporter Elisabetta
Burba, they are sent to the CIA and locked up in a vault, while the
transcriptions corrected for obvious errors are filtered to the White
House and other policymaking agencies. The CIA, which sat on the
"authentic" forgeries, nevertheless made a strong
bid to delete the uranium claims from the president's 2003 State of
the Union address
and earlier presidential pronouncements. Langley clearly knew they were
forgeries if some bloggers can go to the trouble to compare the Italian
transcriptions with the "authentic" forgeries, does anyone imagine the CIA
neglected to do so? Yet, as The Left Coaster points out:
"In a mysterious twist to the CIA's earlier position on the 'uranium
from Africa' claim, between Oct. 2,
2002, and Oct. 6, 2002 prior to the CIA's ostensibly seeing
the forged documents top players in the CIA (including the Deputy
DCI and the DCI) personally made efforts to try and dissuade the White
House, and strongly so, from including the 'uranium from Africa' claim in
speeches. Clearly, this raises the question as to what the CIA knew even
before they ostensibly received a copy of the forged documents, that
changed their minds regarding the 'uranium from Africa' claim. (Remember,
the CIA kept claiming that they did not know the documents were forgeries
until after the IAEA exposed them in March 2003.) And why, despite the
above, did the Bush State of the Union claim on 'uranium from Africa'
persist?"
By comparing
what the Senate report says about the transcriptions with the actual
forgeries, we can see that the errors are cleaned up. But who were the
janitors? A key signature, substituting the name of one Niger official for
another, was forged: but who were the forgers? Who suppressed the evidence
that the Niger uranium claims were based on forgeries, and who made sure
that the doctored transcriptions were given the most weight? The Italians
were pushing this story for all it was worth, but who on the inside
greased the skids? Was it, perchance, the same crew
that channeled Ahmed
Chalabi's fabrications,
and those
of his fellow "heroes
in error," into administration policy papers and the front page of the
New York Times? The same cabal
that went
after Ambassador Joe Wilson and
his wife, CIA agent Valerie
Plame, because they were drawing too much attention to the Niger
uranium scam.
The big-but-overlooked story of the past few months has been how much
of the phony "intelligence" that corrupted U.S. intelligence-gathering
mechanisms is being sourced back to our foreign "allies." The Brits, after
all, took the brunt of the credit or blame in the beginning when a
compromise was reached between the contending factions in the
administration, who were fighting over the veracity of the Niger uranium
claims. In the end, it was decided to attribute the African uranium claim
to the Brits
who, it
turns out, had received the same "intelligence" via the Italians. Yet
this cacophony of "reports" coming from the Brits and the Italians
consisted only of echoes reverberating from the original source, which
remains hidden, though not for long. Because whoever corrected the errors
in the "authentic" forgeries and passed them on for American consumption
is at the very center of the conspiracy to lie us into war.
The Senate Committee on Intelligence is well aware of these
discrepancies between the "real" forgeries and the transcriptions received
via whomever, and if the much-vaunted
second "phase" of their investigation into prewar intelligence doesn't
cover this topic in public hearings or even closed sessions we'll know
there's a bipartisan cover-up in progress.
Once we lift this rock, I can guarantee you it won't just be a bunch of
Italian con artists and their enablers in SISMI who scuttle away and
Scooter Libby won't be the only U.S. government official in
prosecutors' sights. This may be an incentive for the Democrats, but
there are plenty of issues here that may also make them wary. I won't go
into that now, but for a hint of what I'm talking about, check out Julian
Borger's piece on the Office of Special Plans. According to La
Repubblica, it was this mysterious entity which, as Seymour
Hersh says, called itself only half-mockingly "the cabal" that
reportedly funneled the Italian transcriptions to Washington policymakers.
Borger, like Karen
Kwiatkowski and Robert Dreyfuss,
makes the connection to a certain foreign intelligence agency, and from
this my readers are free to draw their own conclusions as to why the
Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are not too eager to uncover the
real source of the Niger uranium forgeries.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Run, do not walk, over to David Henderson's
latest column for Antiwar.com, and check out his analysis of the
unintended consequences of U.S. military intervention. Lefties not an
inconsiderable portion of my audience, from what I can tell will learn a
few lessons in economics, as well as how one military (or other sort of)
overseas intervention leads ineluctably to
another
|
November 14, 2005 |
Don't Blame the Italians They didn't forge the Niger uranium documents
|
by Justin Raimondo |
Cornered by their critics,
overwhelmed by massive
antiwar sentiment, and pursued by the relentless Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the
War Party is in full retreat, hiding behind the ramparts of an elaborate
edifice of lies. The
administration's defenders are shooting blindly, averring per Norman
Podhoretz that, since "everybody"
believed what the administration was claiming
about Iraq's alleged WMD prior to the invasion, we're all living in the
same alternate universe. In the Bizarro World of the
neocons, if we all believe a lie, that makes it true. Or, rather, that
makes the whole idea of truth irrelevant, and we should all "move on," as
the Clintonites used to say.
Ken Mehlman was on Meet the Press Sunday
morning, invoking the Select Senate
Committee Report [.pdf], the Silbermann-Robb report,
and laughably the Butler report
as evidence that we should all move along, there's nothing to see here.
The argument from authority is a favorite debating tactic of the neocons,
second only to smearing their
opponents as "anti-Semites." You
have to dig deep down in the
archives and retrieve news articles as well as the texts of these
various official and definitive-sounding "reports" to realize that they
say no such thing and that, furthermore, an explicit political
decision was made in the case of the SSCI report and the
Silbermann-Robb whitewash
not to address the question of manipulated intelligence. No
ordinary American has the time or inclination to do that kind of research,
however, and that is what they are counting on just as they counted on
this same conceptual lethargy to deliberately create the widespread
impression that Iraq was behind 9/11.
We are supposed to believe that critics of the war who see a pattern of
deception in the administration's pre-invasion pronouncements
are deluding themselves into believing a "conspiracy
theory," as the Weekly Standard's new blog puts
it. In an effort to calm the "frenzy" created by my piece unmasking
the authors of the Niger uranium forgeries, they cite the FBI's detrmination
that "financial gain, not an effort to influence U.S. policy, was behind
the forged documents." Why the two motivations financial gain and a
desire to manipulate the making of policy are mutually exclusive is a
mystery known only to the editors of the Weekly Standard. As we
have seen, neocons have been experts at profiting from the policies they
advocate: the name of Richard
Perle comes to mind. In any event, the efforts of the Italians to cash
in don't quite measure up in terms of entrepreneurial acuity. As one
ex-CIA officer put it to me: "If the objective was to make money, it's
curious that the documents were dumped on Panorama after the
request for a payment was refused."
The boys over at the Standard are real sensitive to jabs from us
on this issue because the Niger uranium forgeries are, for the Peace
Party, the gift that never seems to stop giving. This is the weakest link
in the chain of deception forged by the neocons in the run-up to war, and
it is visibly falling to pieces as news of yet another break in the story
of Niger-gate blows in on an Italian wind.
La Repubblica writers Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo are
back with another
scoop, unraveling a particularly thorny knot in the Niger uranium
forgery mystery that has, until now, proved most baffling. The mystery is
this: how is it that the U.S. government was taken in by such crude
forgeries?
After all, names of Niger officials who were supposed to be overseeing
the transaction with Iraq were flat out wrong, as were certain dates and
other telling details. That's why it was only a few
hours before International Atomic Energy Agency scientists had
unmasked the original documents as fraudulent. So
how come the U.S. government with so many intelligence analysts,
experts, and other resources at its command was so easily fooled? The
answer is that the "intelligence" supposedly contained in the forgeries
was filtered laundered through various foreign intelligence agencies,
including the Italians and the British.
The Italians approached the U.S. in 2001
and 2002 in an effort capped by a personal visit to Washington by
Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian military intelligence, who met with
then-Assistant National Security Adviser Stephen J.
Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002 at precisely
the moment the issue of Iraq's nuclear program became paramount.
Now comes the story from La Repubblica that on the second
attempt to pass off the forgeries as authentic, the Italians or someone
corrected the errors in their transcription of the original
documents, and that's what made its way to policymakers. So what happened
to the original
forgeries? A partial answer is on pages 58-59 of the SSCI report
[.pdf]:
"On October 16, 2002, INR [the State Department] made copies of the
documents available at the NIAG [Nuclear Interdiction Action Group]
meeting for attendees, including representatives from the CIA, DIA, DOE
and NSA. Because the analyst who offered to provide the documents [who had
already determined they were of a dubious nature] was on leave, the
office's senior analyst provided the documents. She cannot reveal how she
made the documents available, but analysts from several agencies,
including the DIA, NSA and DOE, did pick up copies at that meeting. None
of the four CIA representatives recall picking up the documents, however,
during the CIA Inspector General's investigation of this issue, copies of
the documents were found in the DO's CPD vault. It appears that a CPD
representative did pick up the documents at the NIAG meeting, but after
returning to the office, filed them without any further
distribution.
"The CIA told the Committee its analysts did not seek to obtain
copies of the documents because they believed that the foreign government
service reporting was verbatim text and did not think it would advance the
story on the alleged uranium deal. One analyst noted that, at the time,
the CIA was preparing its case [redacted] on reconstitution and since the
uranium reporting was not significant to their argument, getting the
documents was not a priority."
The U.S., prior to the surfacing of the forgeries themselves, had only
been seeing reports filtered via Italian intelligence. When the forgeries
themselves turned up, they were locked away at Langley. The Americans were
being spoon-fed transcriptions forgeries of a forgery! via their
Rome-to-Washington conduit, which, according to La Repubblica and
my own sources,
was Michael
Ledeen and the Office
of Special Plans. But there was something awfully suspicious about
these transcriptions, as The Left Coaster who has been all over this
story points out, indicating that
"Someone was clearly, deliberately passing on information from
forgeries and correcting some information to keep the fact that they
were forgeries, hidden."
We often refer to the "Niger uranium forgeries," but there were two
sets of documents the original copies of the
forgeries, and the transcriptions. La Repubblica traces their
circuitous path from Rome to Washington:
"SISMI [Italian military intelligence] is familiar with the
spectacularly phony dossier on the Niger uranium, assembled 'by private
motivation for lucre' by three characters on the SISMI's payroll (Rocco
Martino, Antonio Nucera and La Signora, who worked at the Embassy). SISMI
is aware of the information contained [in] the dossier. SISMI 'doctors'
the mistakes and absurdities contained in the documents. It does not
entrust the dossier to the CIA but instead to a 'field officer' of the
Agency stationed in Rome, who is permitted to 'view' the documents. The US
agent scribbles a few notes resulting in the first report drafted in
Washington. When the (false) news that Saddam is moving to acquire the
bomb causes consternation (or joy) in the US intelligence community,
Nicolò Pollari's SISMI prepares a second report confirming the first, this
time with the inclusion of a transcription of the Niger-Iraq agreement
confirming 'the credibility of the source (La Signora).' With a
third cable comes notification that finally, '500 tons of uranium have
already been shipped to Iraq.'"
When the actual forgeries turn
up at the U.S. embassy in Rome, on Oct. 9, 2002, courtesy of
Panorama magazine reporter Elisabetta
Burba, they are sent to the CIA and locked up in a vault, while the
transcriptions corrected for obvious errors are filtered to the White
House and other policymaking agencies. The CIA, which sat on the
"authentic" forgeries, nevertheless made a strong
bid to delete the uranium claims from the president's 2003 State of
the Union address
and earlier presidential pronouncements. Langley clearly knew they were
forgeries if some bloggers can go to the trouble to compare the Italian
transcriptions with the "authentic" forgeries, does anyone imagine the CIA
neglected to do so? Yet, as The Left Coaster points out:
"In a mysterious twist to the CIA's earlier position on the 'uranium
from Africa' claim, between Oct. 2,
2002, and Oct. 6, 2002 prior to the CIA's ostensibly seeing
the forged documents top players in the CIA (including the Deputy
DCI and the DCI) personally made efforts to try and dissuade the White
House, and strongly so, from including the 'uranium from Africa' claim in
speeches. Clearly, this raises the question as to what the CIA knew even
before they ostensibly received a copy of the forged documents, that
changed their minds regarding the 'uranium from Africa' claim. (Remember,
the CIA kept claiming that they did not know the documents were forgeries
until after the IAEA exposed them in March 2003.) And why, despite the
above, did the Bush State of the Union claim on 'uranium from Africa'
persist?"
By comparing
what the Senate report says about the transcriptions with the actual
forgeries, we can see that the errors are cleaned up. But who were the
janitors? A key signature, substituting the name of one Niger official for
another, was forged: but who were the forgers? Who suppressed the evidence
that the Niger uranium claims were based on forgeries, and who made sure
that the doctored transcriptions were given the most weight? The Italians
were pushing this story for all it was worth, but who on the inside
greased the skids? Was it, perchance, the same crew
that channeled Ahmed
Chalabi's fabrications,
and those
of his fellow "heroes
in error," into administration policy papers and the front page of the
New York Times? The same cabal
that went
after Ambassador Joe Wilson and
his wife, CIA agent Valerie
Plame, because they were drawing too much attention to the Niger
uranium scam.
The big-but-overlooked story of the past few months has been how much
of the phony "intelligence" that corrupted U.S. intelligence-gathering
mechanisms is being sourced back to our foreign "allies." The Brits, after
all, took the brunt of the credit or blame in the beginning when a
compromise was reached between the contending factions in the
administration, who were fighting over the veracity of the Niger uranium
claims. In the end, it was decided to attribute the African uranium claim
to the Brits
who, it
turns out, had received the same "intelligence" via the Italians. Yet
this cacophony of "reports" coming from the Brits and the Italians
consisted only of echoes reverberating from the original source, which
remains hidden, though not for long. Because whoever corrected the errors
in the "authentic" forgeries and passed them on for American consumption
is at the very center of the conspiracy to lie us into war.
The Senate Committee on Intelligence is well aware of these
discrepancies between the "real" forgeries and the transcriptions received
via whomever, and if the much-vaunted
second "phase" of their investigation into prewar intelligence doesn't
cover this topic in public hearings or even closed sessions we'll know
there's a bipartisan cover-up in progress.
Once we lift this rock, I can guarantee you it won't just be a bunch of
Italian con artists and their enablers in SISMI who scuttle away and
Scooter Libby won't be the only U.S. government official in
prosecutors' sights. This may be an incentive for the Democrats, but
there are plenty of issues here that may also make them wary. I won't go
into that now, but for a hint of what I'm talking about, check out Julian
Borger's piece on the Office of Special Plans. According to La
Repubblica, it was this mysterious entity which, as Seymour
Hersh says, called itself only half-mockingly "the cabal" that
reportedly funneled the Italian transcriptions to Washington policymakers.
Borger, like Karen
Kwiatkowski and Robert Dreyfuss,
makes the connection to a certain foreign intelligence agency, and from
this my readers are free to draw their own conclusions as to why the
Democrats, as much as the Republicans, are not too eager to uncover the
real source of the Niger uranium forgeries.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Run, do not walk, over to David Henderson's
latest column for Antiwar.com, and check out his analysis of the
unintended consequences of U.S. military intervention. Lefties not an
inconsiderable portion of my audience, from what I can tell will learn a
few lessons in economics, as well as how one military (or other sort of)
overseas intervention leads ineluctably to
another
|
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