In case you missed this:

http://www.alternet.org/story/21704


Who Forged the Niger Documents?

By Ian Masters, AlterNet. Posted April 7, 2005.


A former counterterrorism chief claims that the now discredited documents that showed Iraq trying to purchase uranium were fabricated right here in the United States. Tools

Editor’s Note: This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Ian Masters with Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, which aired on the Los Angeles public radio KPFK on April 3, 2005.

Ian Masters: You’ve been following President Bush’s commission’s report that came out this week, featuring fairly much, in terms of the press coverage, questions about “Curveball,” apparently a very appropriately named agent that the German intelligence was working. And, apparently his intelligence was heavily relied upon as a justification for going into war, particularly a lot of his claims ending up in the speech that Colin Powell made before the U.N.. And apparently, though, from the very beginning, the Germans were letting our side know that the guy was a fabricator and was, in fact, crazy. First of all, I didn’t think the CIA relied that heavily upon foreign intelligence. I thought there was a kind of professional sense that our taxpayers give us $30 billion dollars a year, we should be able to do this on our own and not rely on others. First of all, address that, sort of, cultural question if you will.

Well, I think in the case of Iraq, there were special circumstances, because the CIA does not have a good network of Iraqi sources in place, even though Iraq had become the forefront of U.S. policy all the way back to the Gulf War in 1991. So there was a dearth of information coming from CIA’s own sources. Secondly, there was an awful lot of so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily Ahmed Chalabi’s INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to have a very receptive audience in some areas of the government, particularly at the Defense Department and at the vice president’s office. These were reports that tended to support the preconception of the administration that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and the primary reason for doing that was that he was in imminent possession of weapons of mass destruction, which could be turned against the United States of America or its allies.

So in that kind of environment — where there’s a tremendous policy need for information and you don’t have a great deal of source information that’s proprietary — then that’s how information that seems to be comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is overemphasized.

Well, in this case, the Germans had told the CIA’s head of the European desk on the operations side, Tyler Drumheller, who I spoke to, but he wasn’t comfortable going on the radio. He was told by Curveball’s handlers in Germany that the guy was crazy and a fabricator and the real question, I guess, is he passed this information on to the top people inside the agency, the Deputy Director McLaughlin and the Director George Tenet, both of whom are now — well, I don’t know about McLaughlin. He works for CNN. But, I believe George Tenet says he doesn’t remember the conversation.

Well, I think there’s no question that there’s a sequence of events that still remains a bit clouded, mainly because the report itself indicts the whole incident as an egregious example of a failure of intelligence.

To put it in some perspective, Curveball was an Iraqi chemical engineer, who allegedly defected and showed up at a refugee camp in Germany. He was then being exploited by German intelligence for information. Allied countries to the United States had all been alerted to the U.S. need for information on Iraq and on weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq. And so the Germans exploited this information.

But the first cut of the information was passed to the DIA, not to the CIA. That’s the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence collection unit. And that information then was disseminated by DIA to the CIA. So the CIA never had any direct access to Curveball, a codename provided by the Germans to this defector source. The interesting thing to me is that the only DIA analyst who ever met with Curveball — who went to Germany and was given access to him — came back with an assessment which was very, very negative.

The problem was: what happened to his assessment? It didn’t get reported up through the senior levels of DIA — and therefore it didn’t get disseminated to CIA — until the Germans were directly queried by CIA on Curveball. That’s when they said, “Look this guy may be a fabricator, don’t trust any of his information.” His information had already gotten into the system, because it had been disseminated by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. And it had been distributed through our government, where of course in some sectors — particularly the Defense Department policymakers civilian policy makers and at the vice president’s office — it found an extremely receptive audience.

It was believed because it fit the preconceptions of those policy makers. Now, why did the CIA — which ultimately was responsible for putting the National Intelligence Estimate together in 2002, which was the most critical assessment of any intelligence report that the U.S. government has to offer — put the information in there and play a part in its key judgment of alleged WMD programs by Saddam Hussein? And that’s the question which is still not answered. We do know that some of the analysts at CIA were very suspicious of the Curveball information, as well as information provided by other so-called Iraqi defectors in exile. But that information, that assessment, was reported up through the chain of command at CIA, but apparently nothing was done about it.

So nothing was done to dampen down the expectations of some of the senior policymakers that this was genuine information. And it got into, as we know, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations Security Council — with disastrous results, because the information was totally false. At the time, some analysts that I spoke to were very critical of the information, but they were not able to impress senior leadership, meaning George Tenet and John McLaughlin, his deputy, with their doubts. Their doubts were never reflected, either in Colin Powell’s speech, or in the National Intelligence Estimate itself.

The importance of the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, is that that was the document upon which the senators made that vote — and of course, the most fateful vote of all was John Kerry’s vote — to support the war, or to authorize the use of force.

Absolutely. The NIE is considered [the] most important intelligence analysis that the U.S. government produces. It’s supposed to reflect the collective wisdom of the intelligence community on a particular issue. And that’s why, while it is supervised by a member of the National Intelligence Council, which is at the CIA, all the intelligence community members play a role in contributing to it. And in this case, the minority opinions of some agencies, such as the Department of Energy, Department of State, were relegated to minor footnotes, which really didn’t capture the attention of the reader of the NIE itself. So, yes, the NIE — which as we know now was corrupted by false intelligence and in some cases fabricated, deliberately fabricated, information — it played a critical role in getting the U.S. Senate to vote in favor of war with Iraq.

At the time, you were quoted in some articles as saying that you had heard of dissent within the agency and people that were being, sort of, steamrollered by the administration. Give us some sense of what was happening at the time. Having spoken, again, with the key guy in the agency, Tyler Drumheller, he said, he understood that on the analysis side, there were people that actually either were fired or who quit. Not so much on the operations side that he was a part of, but on the analysis side there was some real frustration apparently.

Well, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the analysts and even though the Silberman-Robb report dismisses political pressure on the process—they were not given that as an assignment by the president—they weren’t allowed ...

Well, that wouldn’t ... you couldn’t ... we shouldn’t be surprised by that.

No, we’re not surprised by it. But, the point is that it’s being taken as conventional wisdom that there really wasn’t any pressure by policy makers on the analytical process itself. And that’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true because analysts, generally, are like anyone else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures. Many of them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting opinion against the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it’s going to affect their careers. There was a chilled environment in which to express any kind of opposite opinion.

Not only that, there wasn’t very much of a receptiveness at the senior levels of the CIA — at George Tenet’s level, for example, because he was a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting along with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, who really didn’t want the CIA playing a large role in the intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George had a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he had to play along. And “playing along” really meant to sustain the conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent danger.

To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents.

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.

It was SISME, yeah. ...

[D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...

I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...

If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?

You’d be very close . . .

Well, again, Vincent Cannistraro, the feeling you get is that, from going back to, let’s agree that 9/11 is the greatest intelligence catastrophe since Pearl Harbor, and then the WMD catastrophe that followed it. These are two huge embarrassments and it seems to be that the way the White House has handled it’s as though you have a car accident. And instead of blaming the driver, you are blaming the car here. So, do you believe that, you know, that this process — whether it was the intention or not — it’s certainly worked out in such a way to exonerate the White House and to lay the blame with the wrong . . .

I think that’s certainly the objective. To lay it off to the intelligence community. But, it’s very disingenuous. It’s like saying, OK, the intelligence community that we whipped into a frenzy in order to provide information to sustain our policy conclusions that Saddam had a WMD program and that he was an imminent danger — that intelligence community provided information that now turns out not to be correct. And that’s why we were misled into saying what we did say, and doing what we did do. That’s very disingenuous, because that’s not the case at all.

The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the U.S. government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the intelligence, and not the other way around. And that’s, of course, the reverse of the process. You had a lot of people who played along to get along, and they understood that in that kind of administration, you couldn’t say exactly what it is that you really believed.

Now, having said all that, it’s not to exonerate the intelligence community, because, clearly, there were major gaps. And I think the major gap was the failure of, specifically, the CIA and the DIA to develop their own proprietary Iraqi sources that could be in a position to give them the kind of information they really needed — rather than having this dependence on foreign sources that you did not have direct access to. There’s nothing wrong in dealing with a liaison and sharing information. But, to be utterly a hundred percent — not 100 percent, let’s say, but 98 percent — dependent on such sources is a telling criticism of the American intelligence community for having failed to recognize that this was a priority that they needed to develop sources on. They had plenty of time to do it. They didn’t do it. And, again, you see some of this married in some of the other intelligence failures, such as 9/11 and the failure to penetrate al Qaeda. The problem really began when there was no appreciation for what al Qaeda was. That it was a threat. And I think that’s the same rationale that drove the Iraqi programs as well.

This particular White House coined the phrase “the axis of evil,” naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and it’s worth noting that we didn’t have any diplomatic relations with all three of those countries Then, Iran, where there’s rumors of war, in terms of some pre-emption against their developing nuclear weapons. North Korea, estimates are that they had maybe two, now since they’ve been reprocessing fuel rods for plutonium, they have up to six. Again, we don’t have any representation. So, isn’t that the heart of the problem, that you’ve got all the overhead collections from the satellites, but, unless you have people on the ground, you’re flying blind. And it gets to the real question, which is why do we have this foreign policy rigidity here, where we don’t recognize these countries. I mean, couldn’t you just recognize these countries just for the sake of getting people in there?

Well, I mean, it’s a good point. The question is the areas where we are very deficient on in terms of understanding the societies and understanding the policy decisions that are being made in those societies are areas where we have no official representation. We have no real official dialog. And that is part of the problem. In that kind of absence of contact, you’re really susceptible to people who have their own agenda, primarily exiles.

North Korea is an example where we don’t know in the U.S. government how many weapons they may have. There are estimates which range from four — which is the last one I’ve seen at the CIA — to 14, which comes out of DIA. That’s a huge disparity in estimate. And it just really tells you that we just don’t have solid information. And when you don’t, how do you devise a rational policy to deal with those countries. And I think the one spin-off from the Silberman-Robb report — as well as other reports that were made by the Senate and the National Commission on Terrorism — will be to cast doubt on the basis of any aggressive policies that the Bush administration takes against Iran, in particular, over the next few years.

Ian Masters is the host of the radio programs Background Briefing (Sundays from 11am - 12 noon) and Live From the Left coast (Sundays from 12 noon - 1pm), heard on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles. The full transcript and mp3 audio of the Vincent Cannistraro interview is available at IanMasters.org.


Posted by: Stolentime on Apr 7, 2005 5:00 PM [Report this comment]

This development should come as no surprise. Amidst a plethora of non-neocon pundits and bloggers it was a common belief, during the lead up to the war, that the Bush Administration and the Dept of Defense was cherrypicking information because the agenda was policy based rather than reality based. Many stories have been published which chronicle the data mining operations which took place to amass data which substantiated the Bush Administrations insistance that military intervention was the ONLY option with respect to Iraq. Most amazing is the example presented here with respect to the entire intel community knuckling under to the pressure of the Administration. The same self delusory behavior was rampant throughout the Mainstream Media as well. Even the vote for the enactment of the Patriot Act stunk of the odious cowardice of both the House and the Senate with respect to not wanting to be perceived as unpatriotic in our Nations great moment of pain. The entire neocon agenda has been based on misdirected policy construed utilizing questionable intel, rather than the impartial assimilation of intel being scrutinized and then utilized for the development of rational policy. The Rovian manipulation of propaganda has perverted the tenuous balance of power intended by the framers of the Constitution. So pervasive is the reliance upon the carefully crafted talking points of the administration that the truth is no longer even pertinent since disinfo repeated loudly and often enough is generally taken to be truth even in the face of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. So... the Senate, The House, the Intelligence community, and now we are witness to the assault on the last barrier to the tyrannical rule of the Majority, that being the Judiciary. May God provide strength to muster the courage for the few, who, in these times are willing to point out that the Emporor truly has no clothes.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

October 19, 2005

Niger Uranium Forgery
Mystery Solved?
The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction
by Justin Raimondo

Amid all the brouhaha over whether I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, or any number of Bush administration insiders had a hand in leaking the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, the essential crime at the core of the investigation – and its probable starting point – often gets lost in the shuffle. The "outing" of Plame was not an end in itself: the outers didn't just one day decide that they were going to go after her and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, her husband, because they were in a vindictive mood. They were out to get them because Wilson drew attention to the provenance of the infamous "16 words" uttered by President Bush in his 2003 state of the union address, in which Bush claimed that Iraq had sought out uranium in "an African country" in order to make a nuclear bomb. Perhaps without knowing it, Wilson – in taking an interest in this subject – was getting too close to the enormous fraud at the center of the War Party's propaganda campaign.

The African country Bush spoke of is Niger, where much of the world's uranium is mined under the watchful eye of a French consortium – and where it would be extremely difficult, if not close to impossible, for the Iraqis to walk off with the tons of uranium required to produce weapons-grade materials. This accountability issue was no doubt a major reason for the skepticism the Niger uranium story engendered in Ambassador Wilson, who was sent to Niger by the CIA to check out the facts – and came back with a negative report. Wilson was therefore shocked to hear the president reiterate a claim that had been previously and definitively debunked, and went public with his mission and its results – but not before the source of that claim had been brutally and publicly refuted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In early October 2002, Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, a writer for Italy's Panorama magazine, delivered some documents to the U.S. embassy in Rome: a cache of letters and other papers purporting to be correspondence between officials of the Niger government and the Iraqis relating to the acquisition of uranium "yellowcake." The documents soon found their way to Washington, D.C., where key administration officials were quick to incorporate them into their "talking points" for war with Iraq – and into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 speech.

When the IAEA asked to see evidence of the administration's contentions, they were put off, until finally the Niger uranium documents were handed over. It took IAEA scientists just a few hours to demonstrate that the documents were not only forgeries, but were particularly crude ones at that – an amateur could have debunked them using Google. As the Washington Post reported, one administration official's response was "We fell for it."

And how! – but that wasn't the end of it, by any means. After all, someone had deliberately set up the American government with false information and badly embarrassed George W. Bush, who had taken the Niger uranium canard and run with it in a very public way. An investigation was launched just as Robert Novak's column outing Plame appeared – mid-July 2003. Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries?

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the "arms for hostages" scheme by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

Franklin, we now know, was busy spying for Israel during this period, handing over classified information to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman: he has been indicted and has turned state's evidence: the trial is set to begin in January. To this day, Franklin maintains he was just trying to get AIPAC's assistance in moving a more pro-Israel agenda in policymaking circles.

Rhode is an ideologue of a similar coloration. Together with Franklin, Rhode helped set up the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans, which stove-piped phony "intelligence" provided by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and hyped the case for war. Rhode and Franklin worked hand in hand with Chalabi, and, as United Press International intelligence correspondent Richard Sale reports, they had certain interests in common:

"According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, 'Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmed) Chalabi's office.' This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, 'Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel,' and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was 'mind-boggling,' this source said. It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said."

No wonder my source tells me that "Fitzgerald asked the Italians if he could share the report with Paul McNulty," the prosecutor in the AIPAC case. There are plenty of links between the two investigations: they are, in a sense, the same investigation, since many of the same people are involved. McNulty is delving into a single aspect of the cabal's activities, while Fitzgerald seems to have broadened his probe to include not only the outing of Plame, but also the origin of the Niger uranium forgeries and other instances of classified information leakage via the vice president's office.

I am hardly the first to implicate Ledeen in connection with the Niger uranium forgeries. Former CIA counterterrorism officials Vince Cannistraro and Larry Johnson have pointed the finger in Ledeen's direction. As the latter put it:

"Italy's SISME [sic] also reportedly had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome in early October 2003 [sic: should be 2002 – Ed.] that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neocon with long-standing ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain, either SISME or someone with ties to SISME, helped forge and circulate those documents which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq."

Cannistraro, asked by an interviewer if Ledeen was involved with the forgers, said "you'd be very close."

The cast of characters involved in Niger-gate is like old home week in the government scandal sweepstakes. Aside from Ledeen, whose storied (or is that checkered?) history is well-known, we have Clarridge, first head of the Counterterrorism Center set up by Bill Casey under Reagan, who deserves a column all by himself. His close relationship with Ledeen dates from his time as chief of station in Rome in the late 1970s. Clarridge was indicted for lying to prosecutors during the Iran-Contra imbroglio, but given a presidential pardon. His book, A Spy for All Seasons, was the first real "tell-all" book about the Agency. During the Reagan administration, he purportedly was the intellectual author of the notorious "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare," a CIA how-to manual instructing the Nicaraguan contras in the fine art of terrorism, including bombings, assassinations, and violence directed at noncombatants. It was Clarridge who came up with the bright idea of mining Nicaragua's harbors, which led to the unprecedented condemnation of the U.S. government's actions in the World Court. He was reportedly slated to become a top counterterrorism official in the National Security Council, but was nixed. He now lives in San Diego, Calif., and pursues a number of business and ideological interests, including Dax Resources Corp., which runs a 24-hour Global Response Center and advertises its facility at kidnap prevention and counterterrorism, noting that "we can also undertake special operations, including technical countermeasures."

The Niger uranium forgeries surely qualify as "technical countermeasures," popping up as they did just as the administration's assertions about Iraq's alleged nuclear ambitions and capability were being questioned. As Seymour Hersh pointed out, CIA director George Tenet appeared at a crucial congressional briefing, on the eve of the vote on authorizing the war, and

"Declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the CIA had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers."

The story of how the Niger uranium forgeries got past all the safeguards, how the actual documents were never seen by the CIA until after the president's 2003 speech, and who was pushing to include a reference to Saddam's alleged efforts to procure uranium in "an African nation" as one of the president's major talking points – these are all subjects of interest to a prosecutor attempting to prove charges of conspiracy to lie us into war. There must be a special law that covers government employees, including high officials, who transmit tainted information and poison the well of U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts. I'm sure Fitzgerald will have no trouble finding it.

Fitzgerald's reported interest in the Italian parliamentary report indicates just how his investigation is broadening. The forgeries, the lies fed to us by Ahmed Chalabi and his fellow "heroes in error," the leakage of vital U.S. secrets to the Iranians – all point to the existence of the conspiracy the prosecutor is tasked with uncovering. In the course of their campaign of deception, the conspirators not only outed a CIA agent who was working in the vital area of nuclear proliferation, they also passed on classified information to foreign nationals, including the Israelis and the Iranians. They committed forgery and God knows what other crimes.

Before Fitzgerald is done, we'll see the warlords of Washington hauled before a court of the people. We'll hear the whole sordid story of how a band of exiles, at least two foreign intelligence agencies, and a cabal of neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the vice president's office bamboozled Congress and the American people into going to war. As the indictments come down, so will the elaborate narrative so carefully constructed by the War Party in the run-up to war be exposed as a tissue of fabrication, forgery, and fraud.

– Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold.php?articleid=1913


July 17, 2003
Wolfowitz Committee Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims

by Jason Leopold
A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz's committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate's intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue.

The Senators and the CIA official said they could be forced out of government and brought up on criminal charges for leaking the information to this reporter and as a result requested anonymity. The Senators said they plan to question CIA Director George Tenet Wednesday morning in a closed-door hearing to find out whether Wolfowitz and members of a committee he headed misled Bush and if the President knew about the erroneous information prior to his State of the Union address.

Spokespeople for Wolfowitz and Tenet vehemently denied the accusations. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, would not return repeated calls for comment.

The revelations by the CIA official and the senators, if true, would prove that Tenet, who last week said he erred by allowing the uranium reference to be included in the State of the Union address, took the blame for an intelligence failure that he was not responsible for. The lawmakers said it could also lead to a widespread probe of prewar intelligence.

At issue is a secret committee set up in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the Office of Special Plans, which was headed by Wolfowitz, Abrum Shulsky and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, to probe allegations links between Iraq and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and whether the country was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass destruction. The Special Plans committee disbanded in March after the start of the war in Iraq.

The committee's job, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs that has been disputed. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans, according to the CIA official and the senators, routinely provided Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat, much of which was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney and some of which was called into question by the CIA.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program, evidence that would have helped the White House build a solid case for war in Iraq.

In an article in the New York Times last October, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the Office of Special Plans to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

The CIA official and the senators said that's when Wolfowitz and his committee instructed the White House to have Bush use the now disputed line about Iraq's attempts to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger in a speech the President was set to give in Cincinnati. But Tenet quickly intervened and informed Stephen Hadley, an aide to National Security Adviser Rice, that the information was unreliable.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine in May that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the President. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."

Lang said the CIA and Office of Special Plans often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Wolfowitz.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the author of a May New Yorker story on the Office of Special Plans, reported, "former CIA officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. George knows he's being beaten up," one former officer said of George Tenet, the CIA director. "And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he's been forced to do things their way." Because the CIA's analysts are now on the defensive, "they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what's going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want."

"They see themselves as outsiders," a former CIA. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people, told Hersh. He added, "There's a high degree of paranoia. They've convinced themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool."

By last fall, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, which failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans

Hersh reported that the Special Plans Office "developed a close working relationship with the (Iraqi National Congress), and this strengthened its position in disputes with the CIA and gave the Pentagon's pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the INC to officials in the White House."

In a rare Pentagon briefing recently, Office of Special Plans co-director Douglas Feith, said the committee was not an "intelligence project," but rather an group of 18 people that looked at intelligence information from a different point of view.

Feith said when the group had new "thoughts" on intelligence information it was given; they shared it with CIA director Tenet.

"It was a matter of digesting other people's intelligence," Feith said of the main duties of his group. "Its job was to review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policy makers, to help us develop Defense Department strategy for the war on terrorism."

Is it Roger Stone? Who probably forged the real document about Bush being AWOL and passed the other one along?
Did he also forge this?
How about Karl Rove?

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j100303.html


L'AFFAIRE PLAME
It's about more than 'outing' a CIA officer. It's about treason….
by Justin Raimondo




L 'affaire Plame is about breaking the law, about arrogance, about the ordinary viciousness that suffuses the corridors of power – but its real significance is overlooked in the frenzy to find the perpetrator and tie him or her to the White House. The problem with this theory is that George W. Bush is the biggest victim of this incident.

After all, it was the President who was made to look like a fool when, in his State of the Union speech, he referred to the now-discredited story about Iraq seeking to purchase "yellowcake" uranium to build a nuclear bomb. When Joe Wilson's op ed piece appeared in the New York Times, describing his trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA, and the complete lack of any real evidence for Bush's contention, it must have occurred to Team Bush that they'd been set up, bigtime. Remember, the sole "evidence" supporting the Niger uranium angle had been a set of papers that turned out to be crude forgeries.

"These documents are so bad," a senior IAEA official told the New Yorker, "that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking." A "former high-level intelligence official" interviewed by the New Yorker is sure it was an inside job (via Gary Leupp):

"Somebody deliberately let something false get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up."

Never mind, for the moment, who spilled the beans on Plame. The real question is: who set up the President of the United States by feeding him forged documents and passing them off as authentic? Because the answer to both questions is likely to be the same.

The big mystery of the Valerie Plame affair is: why did they do it? What possible motive could a top U.S. government official have in "outing" a CIA officer engaged in the essential work of nuclear nonproliferation?

In the context of Robert Novak's column, which caused all the ruckus to begin with, it looks like they were trying to discredit Wilson by implying he got the assignment on account of nepotism: Plame is Wilson's wife. But the primary effects of naming her were two-fold, neither of which had much to do with questioning Wilson's credentials: it ended her career as an undercover operative, and warned off anybody else thinking of going public with evidence that the War Party had twisted intelligence estimates to make the case for war in Iraq. Punish, and deter.

But what, exactly, were they trying to deter? What was it about Wilson's mission to Niger that provoked such extreme retaliation? They clearly knew what they were doing was illegal, and high risk: outing a CIA operative is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. So why take the chance?

The answer is because it throws the spotlight on an even bigger crime, the Niger-uranium forgeries – and links them to the office of the Vice President.

In his op ed, Wilson pointed to Cheney and his staff as the source of the phony intelligence. It was those guys over in the Executive Office Building who made repeated trips to CIA headquarters, pushing "intelligence" that seemed to confirm the neoconservative case for war. Greeks bearing gifts, as it turned out….

The War Party built the case for war by doing an end run around the CIA, the DIA, and the established intelligence structure. They set up their own intelligence operation, the "Office of Special Plans," described by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker:

"They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal – a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. … By last fall, the operation rivaled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."

Run by Strauss scholar and author Abram Shulsky, and presided over by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, a militant neocon and supporter of Israel's Likud party, the OSP was the nerve center of the War Party inside the U.S. government. Feith was a co-author, along with Richard Perle, of the seminal 1996 paper "A Clean Break," that prefigured the invasion of Iraq. This paper, written for then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argued that Syria is the main danger to Israel – and that the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.

This crew pressed for including the alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in Colin Powell's pre-war presentation to the UN, but Powell refused to do so when the CIA vetoed the story as discredited. The OSP also pushed the alleged Al-Qaeda connection, a case built on a very slender reed. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the Niger uranium story also came from this crew? I'm not alone in my suspicion.

But the real source of the OSP's pervasive influence was the patronage of high administration officials. Julian Borger, writing in the Guardian, nabs the Vice President:

"The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more 'forward-leaning' interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results."

Another Cheney link is OSP overseer William Luti, a former Cheney advisor. Luti came out for war with Iraq early on, and is also head of the Defense Department's post-war Iraq planning group. As Jim Lobe of Interpress News Service writes:

"In some cases, NESA [Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP even prepared memos specifically for Cheney and Libby, something unheard of in previous administration because the lines of authority in the Vice President's office and the Pentagon are entirely separate. 'Luti sometimes would say, 'I've got to do this for Scooter', said [former NESA employee Karen] Kwiatkowski. 'It looked like Cheney's office was pulling the strings.'"

The Vice President's DNA imprint is all over the OSP, and the Niger uranium fiasco. NESA is headed up by his daughter, Elizabeth. Those infamous sixteen words that got into the President's State of the Union – the single most important speech on our chief executive's calendar – had to be retracted by a White House that rarely admits error. Somebody is going to pay, and my guess is it's going to be the Vice President and/or Libby.

Libby has already been implicated as the Spy-gate leaker by Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who worked with Ms. Plame while she was in training. As Marc Rich's lawyer for 15 years, Libby has some interesting connections. The fugitive billionaire who renounced his U.S. citizenship rather than face prosecution for fraud and tax evasion secured his pardon due to an extraordinary campaign engineered, in large part, by Libby. Intense pressure was brought to bear on then President Clinton, who was heavily lobbied by Ehud Barak and American Jewish leaders. This campaign was motivated, at least in part, by services Rich reportedly rendered to Israeli intelligence.

Libby's links to the pro-Israel, pro-war network in the U.S. government, and the OSP, point to him as the linchpin of a sophisticated con game, with the President being spoon-fed flat-out false information. The American government, and the American people, were neo-conned into war. And now there is hell to pay.

But Libby and his minions are just the front men for the main operation. After all, they didn't forge the Niger-uranium papers themselves, but somebody did. We are supposed to believe, as ABC News "reported," that the Niger uranium forgeries were authored by "an underpaid African diplomat who was stationed in Rome." He "created bogus documents, which he then sold to the Italian secret service."

But that doesn't jibe with the known facts. The trail begins with a January 2001 break-in at Niger's diplomatic mission in Rome: the place is riffled, files are scattered about, no serious damage done. Police theorize that the purpose was to gain official seals and other information essential to forging documents. A few months later, the Niger-uranium documents show up. Do you suppose that maybe – just maybe – these two events are somehow connected?

The story that an "underpaid" African diplomat peddled these bogus papers to Italian intelligence turns out to have been itself bogus. The Italian intelligence agency denies playing any role: it turns out that an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, of Panorama magazine, brought them to the U.S. embassy, after declining to publish an article about them because she doubted their authenticity. She got the papers, she says, from a "usually reliable source."

The break-in, the forgery, the mysterious circumstances that permitted a fraud to go undetected at the highest levels of our intelligence-gathering apparatus: all point to a well-coordinated scheme to drag us into war, a state-sponsored covert operation that succeeded all too well. As Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon analyst, testifies:

"Kwiatkowski said she could not confirm published reports that OSP worked with a similar ad hoc group in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office. But she recounts one incident in which she helped escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals, from the first floor reception area to Feith's office.

'''We just followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast.'

"When the group arrived, she noted the book which all visitors are required to sign under special regulations that took effect after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks. 'I asked his secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in'? She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in.' ' It occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not wanted to maintain a record of the meeting."

Robert Dreyfuss, writing in The Nation, cites a highly placed former intelligence official who points the finger directly at Israel:

"According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's – and which has not previously been reported – prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad – which prides itself on extreme professionalism – had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official."

But how did they get taken seriously enough to be included in the President's State of the Union speech?

It may well be treason, as many people say, to expose an undercover U.S. intelligence officer. So what do we call funneling disinformation to the President on behalf of a foreign power – high treason?

If Libby is implicated as having anything to do with Plame's "outing," then that, in turn, implicates Cheney, who must take responsibility. The Vice President's resignation, under these circumstances, is a distinct possibility. Will we soon hear an announcement that he's retiring "for health reasons"? There could soon be an empty spot on the national Republican ticket.

Many people have compared Spy-gate to the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, and the parallels are certainly striking. Watergate, too, started in a small way, with a petty, even quite stupid slip-up: a bungled break-in at Democratic party headquarters. In Spy-gate, as in the Watergate scandal, a towering hubris, a vindictive mindset, and the attempted cover-up will be the conspirators' undoing.

As the scandal metastasizes, and threatens to engulf the White House, one might hope this administration would learn the lesson of history. Before the Democrats can take hold of this, and use it, George W. Bush must launch a preemptive strike against the cancer eating away at the vitals of his presidency.

Ditch the neocons, Mr. President, and get us out of the quagmire they created – before it's too late.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6826


August 1, 2005
Taking Down the Neocons
Federal probes will be their downfall
by Justin Raimondo
The War Party is facing disaster on a number of fronts, both foreign and domestic: in Iraq, the stubborn defiance of the insurgency and squabbling political factions underscores the failure of the occupation and its unraveling into an all-out civil war. Under the guise of "federalism," the split-up of Iraq into three separate states – the Shi'ite south, the Kurdish enclave, and the no-man's-land of the Sunni Triangle – proceeds apace. Iranian influence is growing, and the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari is already calling for an American withdrawal, albeit not a precipitous one.

In Europe, the price of our Iraqi "victory" is being extracted from the English, as evidenced by the London terror bombings, and even former Prime Minister John Major concedes that this is blowback from the Iraq invasion.

It is in the United States, however, that the neoconservatives – the vanguard of the War Party – have suffered the biggest reverses and are in the greatest danger. It is one thing to have your policies discredited – and quite another to wind up behind bars because of them. The outcome of multiple investigations into their activities on the home front in the run-up to war may very well result in the latter. As I wrote last summer:

"Oh, some of the neocons have a future, alright – wearing one of those cute little orange jumpsuits and making some tattooed bruiser named Butch very happy. It's not legal to out CIA agents, feed forgeries to U.S. intelligence, and employ methods that, if used by any other nation on earth, would certainly be judged as war crimes."

We're still working on the war crimes charges, but the others – outing CIA agent Valerie Plame and passing off the Niger uranium forgeries as credible intelligence – are now the subjects of at least two legal proceedings that could very well end just as I predicted last year. Or perhaps I wasn't so much predicting as hoping that the truth would come out. In the case of the Plame investigation, my keeping hope alive, as the Rev. Jackson would say, paid off in the end, and it appears that yet another one of my great expectations has been at least partially fulfilled, one expressed in December 2001, as I was writing about Carl Cameron's famous exposé of Israeli covert activities in the U.S.:

"In the months preceding 9/11, a secret war was being waged on American soil, a silent struggle from coast to coast – not an undercover battle between us and Muslim terrorists, but one pitting U.S. law enforcement agencies against one of our closest allies. Make of that what you will. For until the U.S. government comes clean, and Congress investigates, we'll never even have a chance to start asking the right questions."

Now it appears that someone is starting to ask the right questions, and, indeed, has been doing so all along. Israeli spying in the Pentagon has become the subject of an investigation by the office of U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, in the Eastern District of Virginia, which led to the indictment [.pdf] of Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin. Two other defendants – Steve Rosen, a longtime top official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and his aide, foreign policy director Keith Weissman – are expected to be indicted shortly. The charges involve passing top-secret information to the government of Israel: word is out that American law enforcement wants to talk to any Israeli diplomats who may have been involved with these transactions or may have knowledge of them. It's no secret that the Israeli diplomat directly involved is Naor Gilon, chief political officer at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, who has been mysteriously recalled just in time to avoid having to claim diplomatic immunity.

The original thread of the Franklin investigation predated 9/11, as Richard Sale of UPI reported in December 2004:

"Franklin was caught quite by accident last summer as part of a larger investigation, these sources said.

"In 2001, the FBI discovered new, 'massive' Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. The FBI began intensive surveillance on certain Israeli diplomats and other suspects and was videotaping Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, who was having lunch at a Washington hotel with two lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. Federal law enforcement officials said they were floored when Franklin came up to their table and sat down."

They were videotaping Gilon in the course of an investigation – for what purpose? The original subject of this inquiry, apparently undertaken by the FBI's counterintelligence unit, is not at all clear, but Sale's wouldn't be the first reference to "massive Israeli spying operations" on the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey. Longtime readers of Antiwar.com read about these activities as they were reported in the foreign and domestic media at the time. The Franklin investigation and subsequent indictment clearly branched off from the original probe into a much broader, overarching matter.

The FBI is now taking a fresh interest in Franklin's other extracurricular activities, paramount among them his interactions with a group of neocons actively trying to push America into a confrontation with Iran. As Joshua Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris report in The Washington Monthly:

"The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.

"Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith's office, a polyglot Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have been pushing for a hard-line policy of 'regime change' in Iran, against other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach."

Present at the first meeting, which took place in Rome, in December 2001: Franklin, the spy for Israel; Rhode, the administration's liaison with Ahmad Chalabi and his noble band of "heroes in error" who fed us a steady diet of fabrications via Judy Miller and various Iraqi "defectors"; and Michael Ledeen, of Iran-Contra fame, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a neoconservative guru. On the Iranian side: Ghorbanifar and a former senior leader of the Revolutionary Guards proffering information about support for regime change in Iran from within the security services. Also present: Nicolo Pollari, head of Italian military intelligence, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, who, among other honors, is vice-president of the Italian Friends of Israel. Ledeen, according to Rozen, was the chief organizer of the meeting.

Ledeen's role as the go-between in the arms-for-hostages scheme, serving as the middle-man or broker in coordinating the transfer of the arms via Israel, with links to Ghorbanifar, has gone down in the annals of American political scandals as one of the big ones of the modern era, right up there with Watergate. Yet he may have outdone himself in the current instance.

The Plame investigation, as I have asserted in the past, involves more than merely the outing of a CIA officer operating under deep cover. Regular readers of Antiwar.com and watchers of this space will not be surprised at the recent news that the investigation is widening:

"The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

"Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

"In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed."

Standing behind the investigation into who outed Valerie Plame there has always been the much larger specter of treason. Much of the "evidence" of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" that figured prominently in the decision to take us to war turned out to be bogus, but surely the smoking gun was the Niger uranium documents. These phony letters and memos, purporting to be the record of a transaction between Iraq and the African nation of Niger, where much of the world's uranium is mined and refined into "yellowcake," turned out to be forgeries – and crude ones, to boot, which it took IAEA personnel all of a few hours using Google to unmask as fraudulent. Yet these incompetently produced fakes wound up in the president's 2003 State of the Union speech, in the form of those now infamous "16 words" in the course of which the Niger uranium claim was made.

The clear import of the Niger uranium forgeries is that, far from being a "mistake," the intelligence was fixed.

Who fixed it? Who coordinated the effort to lie us into war? These questions are being raised by multiple investigations into illegal activities at the highest reaches of this administration.

The cruel debunking of the president's assertion about African uranium, and the way critics took out after the White House shortly afterward, stung the administration to the quick – and launched an investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries that appears to be ongoing, and getting hotter. The people in the administration who were out to get Plame – and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, former ambassador to Gabon who blew the whistle on the Niger uranium claims in a New York Times op-ed piece – were furious that Wilson had exposed the intramural fight that preceded the Niger uranium fiasco. The outing of Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, who supposedly got him his mission to Niger as an act of nepotism, was their revenge. At the root of their fury, however, was a real need to cover their trail, because it leads directly to the root question in all this tangled thicket of plots and counterplots: Who forged the Niger uranium documents?

The effort to smear Wilson and exact vengeance on him via his wife was and is an effort to cover up something a lot more serious than violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a silly law that should never have been enacted and has only been successfully prosecuted on a single occasion. If Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now making inquiries into how those 16 words got into Bush's speech, and is now busy tying this effort into those who planted information about Plame in the media through journalistic "cutouts," then he is also homing in on the essence of the matter – who were the forgers?

I don't claim to know the answer to that question, but I do have my suspicions, and these were given at least some corroboration in a recent radio interview [.mp3] by Antiwar.com's own Scott Horton with Philip Giraldi, a former military intelligence and CIA counterterrorism official now with Cannistraro Associates. In the course of a general discussion about the interconnections between various espionage investigations and the prosecution of Plame-gate, Horton asked Giraldi the same question I've been asking ever since the Niger uranium hoax was debunked, barely a month after the President's address: Who forged the Niger uranium documents? Giraldi's answer:

"A couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy."

The forged documents, students of the Niger uranium mystery will recall, first surfaced in Italy, via the enigmatic Rocco Martino and an Italian journalist who works for the Berlusconi-owned Panorama magazine.

Scott then named Ledeen as the aforementioned "well-known neoconservative" with Italian connections, and Giraldi did not deny it, while averring that "there are issues involved in raising someone's name." Giraldi went on to say that the forgers

"Also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."

According to The Washington Monthly, Ledeen worked as a consultant to Feith's Pentagon policy shop – the same department that, as the Franklin investigation shows, has been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. In addition, Laura Rozen reports that Ghorbanifar told her

"He has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen '4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents' concerning Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East, 'material no one else has received.'"

Of the thousands of pages of "sensitive documents" that passed from Ghorbanifar to Ledeen, how many wound up in the files of the Office of Special Plans, where Ledeen protégé Harold Rhode and others of that circle labored mightily to provide "talking points" for the administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Were the Niger uranium forgeries among them? I don't know, but surely investigators will want to be asking these questions of "a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy," and other less well-known neocons who have close connections with him.

If we look at the pattern of methods and sources utilized by some in this administration to deceive Congress, the American people, and even the president (on one memorable occasion) with bogus "intelligence," this practice of subcontracting out seems to have served the neocons well. When they couldn't get the professionals to go along with doctoring the intelligence, they simply did an end-run around the mainline agencies – the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department's INR – and set up their own rogue operations, just as they did in Contra-gate. That some of the same lawless ideologues who played a key role in that scandal are now embroiled in the current incarnation of the same sort of shenanigans ought to surprise no one.

What is needed is a congressional investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries, the purpose of which would be to determine how and why they managed to go undetected, and it is one that Republicans should be in the forefront of. After all, this is nothing less than a serious breach of U.S. national security involving the corruption of the U.S. intelligence-gathering process. Failure to plug up what is apparently a gaping hole in our security fence could prove fatal in an era when having the right intelligence can make the difference between preventing another 9/11 or failing to do so. Just as it made the difference between war and peace in the case of Iraq's fabled WMD.

This administration is facing a crisis of confidence, as far as the public is concerned, and that is in large part due to growing alarm at the gathering clouds of scandal currently hanging over Washington. A surprising proportion of the American people are paying attention to Plame-gate, and it has gone from being a story mainly of interest to Washington insiders and bloggers to a major and growing embarrassment – and all because of rising public awareness.

In case you missed it:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6677
July 15, 2005
Rove-gate: Who Leaked
to the Leakers?
This isn't about Karl Rove
by Justin Raimondo
What if Karl Rove isn't guilty of knowingly leaking Valerie Plame's name as a covert CIA agent involved in nuclear proliferation issues? What if Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, is correct when he says that he's been assured by prosecutors that his client is not a target of the ongoing investigation into Plame-gate? I'm going to swim against the tide, here, and against the expectations of my readers, by suggesting that this investigation isn't about Rove – and, furthermore, that Rove is a victim, in an important sense, someone who was used and abused by the real culprits. And who are these mysterious culprits? We'll get to that in a moment, but first some background…

One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair – and I wasn't the only one – is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her maiden name? After all, most married women – even in this era of Women's Liberation – defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brief moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?

The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with a CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in tracking and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her name was made public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted to a grave breach – far more of a crime than merely violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has only had a single prosecution since its passage in 1982. As the Washington Post reported when the Plame scandal broke:

"A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities. 'That's why the agency is so sensitive about just publishing her name,' the former diplomat said."

The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence and a fine – this is a question of possible espionage.

What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked to Novak, and half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the leakers?

This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove. In his book, The Politics of Truth, Joe Wilson says as much:

"Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.

"The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was obliged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: 'The president knows he wasn't involved. … It's simply not true.' McClellan refused to be drawn into a similar direct denial of Libby's or Abrams's possible involvement, however."

Suddenly, the complacent – and often complicit – American media seems to be waking up. Reporters are now publicly pillorying White House spokesman Scott McClellan:

"QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott…

"(LAUGHTER)

"… because after the investigation began – after the criminal investigation was under way – you said, October 10th, 2003, 'I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,' from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began. Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

"MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think you are well aware of that."

Reporters who heard McClellan's assurances back in October 2003 weren't being deceived so much as lulled to sleep, and that really didn't take much of an effort on the part of the administration, now did it? They were basically asleep anyway, and weren't really listening to what was being said. Some people were paying attention, however, and taking notes, Joshua Marshall for one:

"So, when McClellan was asked to be more clear, he opted for a meaninglessly vague statement and then fell back on the 'leaking of classified information' dodge. Can we all take note of this now? That denial wasn't what it seemed to be. In fact, I doubt it was a real denial at all.

"There's more there. Why not find it?"

Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now in the process of finding it – and Rove is not his real quarry, although he and some others in the White House could wind up as collateral damage. By all indications, Bulldog's real target points more in the direction of the Office of the Vice President. Ambassador Wilson knows who his enemies are, and he pointed to them in his book and in an interview with Joe Conason in Salon:


"Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby or the vice president – but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter – at which a decision was made to get a 'work-up' on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times."

"Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that accompanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration. Did these people run an intelligence operation against you?"


"Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from what I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence operation against my family and me. That's what a work-up is – to try to find everything you can about an American citizen."

After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from Cheney: "Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!", there was only one logical place for Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of "weapons of mass destruction" – the somewhat irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.

Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah, also worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having played a key role in all this:

"Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said. … The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."

Hannah is Cheney's Middle East policy point-man, and before that was director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle East expert Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what's under that particular rock:

"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.…"

The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the center of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the United States, with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for passing classified information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and his aide Keith Weissman, with an Israeli embassy official, chief political officer Naor Gilon, directly involved. In both cases, which involve the unlawful dissemination of sensitive U.S. secrets, the defense is claiming that "everyone does it" and that the classified information they're accused of leaking – or, in AIPAC's case, directly handing over to the Israeli government – is supposedly "common knowledge."

Treason is nothing to these people, because their real allegiance is not to the U.S., but to their own cause, which is perpetual war. Libby and Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the government. Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA headquarters, along with his boss, and, as Juan Cole writes:

"[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came – Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it."

In short, Hannah was at the center of that vortex of deception that swept us into a disastrous war. When Ambassador Wilson came out with his famous debunking of the infamous "16 words," Hannah was well positioned to go after the heretic.

If we look at the passing of this leak as we would a ball game, as "super smart commenter Sara" pointed out on Digby's blog, the probable trajectory of the ball as it makes its way to the goal goes something like this: "Bolton to Wurmser and Hannah, to Cheney (and/or Libby) to Rove."

In this case, however, unlike soccer or basketball, possession of the ball is not an asset: according to the rules of this game, the last man holding it loses.

I do not believe for a moment that this lengthy and increasingly controversial investigation is centered around alleged violations of a rarely invoked statute, incurring a penalty that hardly seems proportionate to the energy expended to get a conviction. It is extremely hard to prove that someone has violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; there are all sorts of conditions and sub-clauses that provide a legal escape route for anyone so charged: that can't be what all this is about.

If, however, Fitzgerald can prove there was a conspiracy inside the government to collect and selectively reveal classified information in order to crush political opponents, and shape U.S. policy, then the charges could be much more serious. By all accounts, the Plame investigation is said to be widening, and I would venture to say that by this time it is wide enough to include charges of espionage. The mere existence of a highly placed cabal that was engaged in collecting and utilizing highly sensitive information – a kind of intelligence bank that existed outside of normal governmental channels – would be of great interest to the FBI's counterintelligence unit, and word is out that they've been plenty busy lately. Who made withdrawals from this Intelligence Bank, and did any of these account holders include foreign governments – such as Iran, which received an intelligence treasure trove from neocon poster boy Ahmed Chalabi, and Israel, which is already under suspicion because of the Franklin affair, and has close links to several of the suspects in the Plame-gate investigation?

And then there is the question of the Niger uranium forgeries themselves: who forged the documents that fooled a president? Wilson's exposure of the Niger uranium ploy angered whoever introduced those documents into the U.S. intelligence stream – it was Hannah and Libby, by all accounts, who fought to keep these allegations in the president's speech, in spite of opposition from the CIA and the State Department. The same crowd that pushed this phony intelligence must have known something about the murky origins of what turned out to be a crude forgery.

Forging "evidence" that helped get us into a war – what are the penalties for that?

The fast developing scandal seemingly centered around Rove and a few journalists has only begun to unfold. By the time it is over, we'll have the War Party – or, at the very least, a few high profile representatives – in the dock, and then the fun will really begin. So forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for "Cheney-gate." I'll gladly forgo the pleasure of seeing the president's chief political advisor frog-marched out of the White House for the prospect of seeing our vice president, along with his top staffers, led out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in handcuffs.

http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=7732

October 22, 2005
Fitzgerald Expands Probe to Prewar Intel
Source: Chalabi responsible
for forged WMD documents
As Antiwar.com readers found out on Wednesday, prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame leak case has broadened to include a probe into the catalyzing event that set off the "outing" of CIA agent Valerie Plame to begin with: the Niger uranium forgeries. These documents, which purported to show that the Iraqis were trying to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, were utilized by the Bush administration in making the case for war – but, alas, they turned out to be crudely done fakes. The question of who forged them has always been at the heart of this case, and now it looks like Fitzgerald is getting close to the answer.

Since the forged documents first turned up in Italy, an Italian parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, Fitzgerald has received an unredacted and full version of the report, and he is moving fast on this front, as this video clip from MSNBC reports.

Watch the video (Windows Media Player)

Watch the video (Quicktime)

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7743

October 24, 2005
Let Justice Be Done
Though the heavens fall…
by Justin Raimondo
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.

"Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

The above Latin quotation – usually attributed to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman statesman and Julius Caesar's father-in-law – succinctly summarizes both prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's view of the law and the possible consequences of its application in the case of the CIA leak investigation.

In Washington, D.C., the heavens will surely fall on the heads of several prominent players, including not only the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but also the president's top national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley; John Hannah, the vice president's chief national security adviser; and David Wurmser, the VP's chief of Middle Eastern affairs. The fate of the more high-profile Karl Rove is in some doubt: he's probably looking at obstruction of justice and/or perjury charges, but the others – including, perhaps, a number of unindicted co-conspirators – are looking at some real jail time. The number of the indicted is likely more than just these few, however, especially as rumors that Fitzgerald's investigation has widened considerably harden into near certainty. It wasn't for nothing that Fitzgerald's people posted on their brand-new Web site a letter [.pdf] from the Justice Department making clear that the special counsel has "the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure." This isn't just about the "outing" of deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame anymore, if it ever truly was. Scooter-gate is about one of the biggest and most brazen lies used by this administration to drag us into an unjustified [.pdf] and reckless war: the Niger uranium forgeries.

No sooner had I written about this in my Wednesday column of last week than it was confirmed a couple of days later by MSNBC, which reported that Fitzgerald's investigation has led him to ask for the Italian parliamentary report on the Niger uranium forgeries, which, I am told, points directly at the identity of the forgers.

There are plenty of violations of federal law to be found around the Niger uranium forgeries, and I expect Fitzgerald has found most if not all of them by now. When the president made his 2003 State of the Union address, and referred to Iraq's efforts to procure uranium in "an African country," the source of his allegation was a cache of documents that had been turned over to the American embassy in Rome under mysterious circumstances. Less than a month after the president's speech, these documents were proved to be fakes, crude forgeries that could have been debunked by an amateur with a few hours to spend on Google.

Whoever forged these documents and introduced them into the American intelligence stream is guilty of violating this law:

"Whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully– (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

And this law:

"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Furthermore, the conspiracy charge applies equally to the unauthorized dissemination of classified information to persons not entitled to receive it – as in the AIPAC spy case in which longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Steve Rosen, his sidekick Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin are charged [.pdf] with passing classified information to Israeli "diplomats." Add to this charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the total number of the indicted and their prospective years in the hoosegow begins to add up. What also begins to add up is the rationale for this case, which has been only vaguely understood from the very beginning (and I include myself as being among those unclear on the concept).

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. To begin with, they must have known that such a course was risky, and out of all proportion to its possible benefits to their cause. As much as Scooter and his pals berated the CIA for not taking enough risks, it is unlikely they would have outed Plame without having a very good reason. A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense…

Remember, the forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized.

The CIA, after all, hadn't even gotten their hands on a copy of the forgeries until February 2003 – a year after the administration began citing them as "proof" of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It would have been well within the purview of Brewster Jennings & Associates to trace the origins of the Niger uranium documents back to the forgers: surely they weren't sitting on their hands in the months before columnist Robert Novak printed Plame's name and sparked a furor.

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

This drama is playing out in two theaters, one domestic and the other overseas. In Washington, the heavens are falling even before Fitzgerald issues so much as a single indictment, but they're also threatening to take a tumble in the Middle East. The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? For the sake of the country, I dearly hope Fitzgerald's staff has writer's cramp by now from furiously tapping out indictments.

The War Party has its own prosecutor, UN "investigator" Detlev Mehlis, currently trumping up charges against the next candidate for "regime change" in the Middle East: Syria. Mehlis operates under none of the constraints of the U.S. legal system that keep Fitzgerald's inquiries and the testimony before the grand jury under lock and key. The UN's grand inquisitor has published his findings midway through his investigation into the question of who killed Lebanese politician-entrepreneur Rafik Hariri. His report – here – is full of uncorroborated testimony from unknown witnesses of unknowable veracity, and in places reads more like a political polemic than a legal document. I defy anyone to read it and come to any definite conclusion other than that Lebanon is one vast snakepit we would do well to stay out of.

Yet drawing American troops into the Levant is precisely what the neocons are counting on to distract the American people from their treason, in a "wag the dog" scenario so bold it leaves one breathless. According to Joshua Landis, the respected scholar of Syrian politics and culture who resides in Damascus, the very people who fear indictments the most are behind this new push for war:

"I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked [sic] if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to."

The War Party is in a hurry. Even as they prepare to take indictments and fight the charges of a conspiracy to lie us into war, the neocons and their allies in the media are laying the groundwork for the next war. We're on the Middle Eastern escalator, as I've said before: there is no way to contain the conflict we've unleashed in Iraq. Michael Ledeen, named by a former CIA operations officer as the chief conduit of the Niger uranium forgeries, continually urges this administration to go "Faster, please!" – and there are ominous indications that the foot is off the brake. The neocons know they're running a marathon, desperately trying to outrun the consequences of their own trail of deception. Will the truth catch up with Hadley, Ledeen, et al., before they can do any more damage to American interests in the Middle East – and spill more blood?

Stay tuned…

– Justin Raimondo

AirAmerica Radio's - Springer on the radio is talking about this in depth.

This Italian - Niger - theft is broadening this investigation and the WH better be worried ...

A bit from Josh Marshall about the Italian connection to the forged Niger documents.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006819.php



And a bit later, he posts more on the subject:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006820.php

I wonder if the Italian connection has anything to do with the death of agent Nicola Calipari who was helping journalist Giuliana Sgrena escape Iraq on March 4, 2005?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405A.shtml

Who was "accidentally" shot in the temple from several hundred yards away while in a speeding vehicle.

Oh, boy, if they prove they had anything to do with forging those documents,
it's over.

October 24, 2005
Let Justice Be Done
Though the heavens fall…
by Justin Raimondo
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.

"Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."

The above Latin quotation – usually attributed to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a Roman statesman and Julius Caesar's father-in-law – succinctly summarizes both prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's view of the law and the possible consequences of its application in the case of the CIA leak investigation.

In Washington, D.C., the heavens will surely fall on the heads of several prominent players, including not only the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but also the president's top national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley; John Hannah, the vice president's chief national security adviser; and David Wurmser, the VP's chief of Middle Eastern affairs. The fate of the more high-profile Karl Rove is in some doubt: he's probably looking at obstruction of justice and/or perjury charges, but the others – including, perhaps, a number of unindicted co-conspirators – are looking at some real jail time. The number of the indicted is likely more than just these few, however, especially as rumors that Fitzgerald's investigation has widened considerably harden into near certainty. It wasn't for nothing that Fitzgerald's people posted on their brand-new Web site a letter [.pdf] from the Justice Department making clear that the special counsel has "the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure." This isn't just about the "outing" of deep cover CIA agent Valerie Plame anymore, if it ever truly was. Scooter-gate is about one of the biggest and most brazen lies used by this administration to drag us into an unjustified [.pdf] and reckless war: the Niger uranium forgeries.

No sooner had I written about this in my Wednesday column of last week than it was confirmed a couple of days later by MSNBC, which reported that Fitzgerald's investigation has led him to ask for the Italian parliamentary report on the Niger uranium forgeries, which, I am told, points directly at the identity of the forgers.

There are plenty of violations of federal law to be found around the Niger uranium forgeries, and I expect Fitzgerald has found most if not all of them by now. When the president made his 2003 State of the Union address, and referred to Iraq's efforts to procure uranium in "an African country," the source of his allegation was a cache of documents that had been turned over to the American embassy in Rome under mysterious circumstances. Less than a month after the president's speech, these documents were proved to be fakes, crude forgeries that could have been debunked by an amateur with a few hours to spend on Google.

Whoever forged these documents and introduced them into the American intelligence stream is guilty of violating this law:

"Whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully– (1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

And this law:

"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Furthermore, the conspiracy charge applies equally to the unauthorized dissemination of classified information to persons not entitled to receive it – as in the AIPAC spy case in which longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Steve Rosen, his sidekick Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin are charged [.pdf] with passing classified information to Israeli "diplomats." Add to this charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the total number of the indicted and their prospective years in the hoosegow begins to add up. What also begins to add up is the rationale for this case, which has been only vaguely understood from the very beginning (and I include myself as being among those unclear on the concept).

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. To begin with, they must have known that such a course was risky, and out of all proportion to its possible benefits to their cause. As much as Scooter and his pals berated the CIA for not taking enough risks, it is unlikely they would have outed Plame without having a very good reason. A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense…

Remember, the forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized.

The CIA, after all, hadn't even gotten their hands on a copy of the forgeries until February 2003 – a year after the administration began citing them as "proof" of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It would have been well within the purview of Brewster Jennings & Associates to trace the origins of the Niger uranium documents back to the forgers: surely they weren't sitting on their hands in the months before columnist Robert Novak printed Plame's name and sparked a furor.

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

This drama is playing out in two theaters, one domestic and the other overseas. In Washington, the heavens are falling even before Fitzgerald issues so much as a single indictment, but they're also threatening to take a tumble in the Middle East. The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? For the sake of the country, I dearly hope Fitzgerald's staff has writer's cramp by now from furiously tapping out indictments.

The War Party has its own prosecutor, UN "investigator" Detlev Mehlis, currently trumping up charges against the next candidate for "regime change" in the Middle East: Syria. Mehlis operates under none of the constraints of the U.S. legal system that keep Fitzgerald's inquiries and the testimony before the grand jury under lock and key. The UN's grand inquisitor has published his findings midway through his investigation into the question of who killed Lebanese politician-entrepreneur Rafik Hariri. His report – here – is full of uncorroborated testimony from unknown witnesses of unknowable veracity, and in places reads more like a political polemic than a legal document. I defy anyone to read it and come to any definite conclusion other than that Lebanon is one vast snakepit we would do well to stay out of.

Yet drawing American troops into the Levant is precisely what the neocons are counting on to distract the American people from their treason, in a "wag the dog" scenario so bold it leaves one breathless. According to Joshua Landis, the respected scholar of Syrian politics and culture who resides in Damascus, the very people who fear indictments the most are behind this new push for war:

"I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked [sic] if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to."

The War Party is in a hurry. Even as they prepare to take indictments and fight the charges of a conspiracy to lie us into war, the neocons and their allies in the media are laying the groundwork for the next war. We're on the Middle Eastern escalator, as I've said before: there is no way to contain the conflict we've unleashed in Iraq. Michael Ledeen, named by a former CIA operations officer as the chief conduit of the Niger uranium forgeries, continually urges this administration to go "Faster, please!" – and there are ominous indications that the foot is off the brake. The neocons know they're running a marathon, desperately trying to outrun the consequences of their own trail of deception. Will the truth catch up with Hadley, Ledeen, et al., before they can do any more damage to American interests in the Middle East – and spill more blood?

Stay tuned…

– Justin Raimondo

Is "discrediting Joe Wilson" a red herring?
The confirmation that Patrick Fitzgerald is indeed investigating the forged Niger uranium documents introduced to the Bush Administration through Italy, first broken by AntiWar.com's Justin Raimondo is now appearing in multiple "MSM" reports. On October 19, 2005, Justin wrote:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:
"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."
Among other major media outlets, UPI's Martin Walker reports:
Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Still, Walker doesn't appear to have tumbled to the logical explanation of why Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame leads him to the Niger forgeries. Mark Kleiman is in the same boat. In speculating about the selection of documents Fitzgerald has posted on his new website, Kleiman writes:
On the other hand, his selection of documents does seem significant. As against the GOP spin that he was appointed to look into violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he has the original letter giving him "all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity" and a second letter written shortly thereafter specifying that his authority extends to any criminal attempt to frustrate that investigation.

But note that none of the documents on the site gives Fitzgerald any authority over the wider question of who made up and peddled the Nigerien yellowcake story, or the still wider question about how the administration hyped the threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons acquisition program as part of its sales pitch for the war.

Apparently Frank Rich suggested on Meet the Press today that the case might go in that direction. Ain't gonna happen. Surely if Fitzgerald were moving that way, he would have asked for authority to do so, and would have added that request and the response to it to his webpage.
There is an explanation for why Fitzgerald's existing authority covers the Niger forgeries, which Kleiman and Walker miss, which is explained in Justin Raimondo's column today:
Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.
Read the rest.

One of the most puzzling questions about the Plame-outing scheme has always been why? How stupid and petty is it to "discredit" Wilson with lame charges of nepotism and wife-sponsored boondoggles? A flat-out hit job on the CIA for getting too close to the Niger forgeries is far more in character for the Bushistas.

Oh, and that mysterious "third man?" My money is on Grover Norquist.

www.antiwar.com/

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405A.shtml


Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
By Martin Walker
UPI

Monday 24 October 2005

Washington - The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission - and his disbelief - public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.

If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.

If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.

And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 - seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

-------

Boy I hope Fitzgerald has the goods on these people.

Josh Marshall now has a little more detail on the rather sketchy items I had posted earlier in the rumor mill thread.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006827.php

British connections to the Niger claims:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006833.php

Here's a story from the UK press, about the Italian connection to the Niger forgery.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...5369408,00.html

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10506

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

(October 26, 2005 -- 01:21 AM EDT //)

The tsunami flows over into Italy. From the Associated Press ...


The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday.

Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman.

She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.

...

When foreign intelligence agencies met the documents with skepticism, Pollari used his own contacts in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and an aide to the president's national security adviser to promote the dossier, La Repubblica said, without elaborating.


Remember, Pollari had good contacts with folks at Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. At the end of 2001 one he had attended a secret meeting in Rome with OSP stalwart Harold Rhode, the now-indicted Larry Franklin and neo-con regime-change-everywhere-at-once guru Michael Ledeen.

This is what my colleagues and I wrote last year about that meeting and the irregular nature of the meetings ...

The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington.
Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S. government channels only days after it occurred. On Dec. 12, 2001, at the U.S. embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Amb. Sembler had heard about it.

According to U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since U.S. government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac.

The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons. Since the late 1980s, Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two CIA "burn notices." The agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of U.S. government protocol? There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State Department direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has extensive trade ties).

According to U.S. government sources, both the State Department and the CIA eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House -- specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, Stephen J. Hadley. Later, Italian spy chief Pollari raised the matter privately with Tenet, who himself went to Hadley in early February 2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler, assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.


See the rest of the meetings article here ... "Entitled Iran Contra II"

Here's the

Iran Contra II ... Article ...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/...shallrozen.html

Iran-Contra II?
Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation.

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.


Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith's office, a polyglot Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have been pushing for a hard-line policy of "regime change" in Iran, against other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach.

Reports of two of these meetings first surfaced a year ago in Newsday, and have since been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Whether or how the meetings are connected to the alleged espionage remains unknown. But the FBI is now closely scrutinizing them.

While the FBI is looking at the meetings as part of its criminal investigation, to congressional investigators the Ghorbanifar back-channel typifies the out-of-control bureaucratic turf wars which have characterized and often hobbled Bush administration policy-making. And an investigation by The Washington Monthly -- including a rare interview with Ghorbanifar -- adds weight to those concerns. The meetings turn out to have been far more extensive and much less under White House control than originally reported. One of the meetings, which Pentagon officials have long characterized as merely a "chance encounter" seems in fact to have been planned long in advance by Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Another has never been reported in the American press. The administration's reluctance to disclose these details seems clear: the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.

The Italian Job

The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington.

Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S. government channels only days after it occurred. On Dec. 12, 2001, at the U.S. embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Amb. Sembler had heard about it.

According to U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since U.S. government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac.

The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons. Since the late 1980s, Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two CIA "burn notices." The agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of U.S. government protocol? There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State Department direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has extensive trade ties).

According to U.S. government sources, both the State Department and the CIA eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House -- specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, Stephen J. Hadley. Later, Italian spy chief Pollari raised the matter privately with Tenet, who himself went to Hadley in early February 2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler, assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.

The orders, however, seem to have had little effect, for a second meeting was soon underway. According to a story published this summer in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily, this second meeting took place in Rome in June 2002. Ghorbanifar tells The Washington Monthly that he arranged that meeting after a flurry of faxes between himself and DoD official Harold Rhode. Though he did not attend it himself, Ghorbanifar says the meeting consisted of an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a high-level U.S. government official, whose name he declined to reveal. The first two briefed the American official about the general situation in Iraq and the Middle East, and what would happen in Iraq, "And it's happened word for word since," says Ghorbanifar. A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment on this and other meetings and referred The Washington Monthly to the Defense Department, which did not respond to repeated inquiries. Ledeen also refused to comment.

No one at the U.S. embassy in Rome seems to have known about this second Rome meeting. But the back-channel's continuing existence became apparent the following month -- July 2002 -- when Ledeen again contacted Sembler and told him that he'd be back in Rome in September to continue "his work" with the Iranians (This time Ledeen made no mention of any involvement by Pentagon officials; later, he told Sembler it would be in August rather than September.) An exasperated Sembler again sent word back to Washington, and Hadley again went into motion telling Ledeen, in no uncertain terms, to back off.

Once again, however, Hadley's orders seem to have gone unheeded. Almost a year later in June 2003, there were still further meetings in Paris involving Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar says the purpose of the meeting was for Rhode to get more information on the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. "In those meetings we met, we gave him the scenario, what would happen in the coming days in Iraq. And everything has happened word for word as we told him," Ghorbanifar repeats. "We met in several different places in Paris," he says. "Rhode met several other people -- he didn't only meet me."

Not a "chance encounter"

By the summer of 2003, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had begun to get wind of the Ghorbanifar-Ledeen-DoD back-channel and made inquiries at the CIA. A month later, Newsday broke the original story about the secret Ghorbanifar channel. Faced with the disclosure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld acknowledged the December 2001 meeting but dismissed it as routine and unimportant.

"The information has moved around the interagency process to all the departments and agencies," he told reporters in Crawford, Texas, after a meeting with Bush. "As I understand it, there wasn't anything there that was of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further." Later that day, another senior Defense official acknowledged the second meeting in Paris in June 2003, but insisted that it was the result of a "chance encounter" between Ghorbanifar and a Pentagon official. The administration has kept to the "chance encounter" story to this day.

Ghorbanifar, however, laughs off that idea. "Run into each other? We had a prior arrangement," he told The Washington Monthly: "It involved a lot of discussion and a lot of people."

Over the last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has conducted limited inquiry into the meetings, including interviews with Feith and Ledeen. But under terms of a compromise agreed to by both parties, a full investigation into the matter was put off until after the November election. Republicans on the committee, many of whom sympathize with the "regime change" agenda at DoD, have been resistant to such investigations, calling them an election-year fishing expedition. Democrats, by contrast, see such investigations as vital to understanding the central role Feith's office may have played in a range of a dubious intelligence enterprises, from pushing claims about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda partnership and overblown estimates of alleged Iraqi stocks of WMD to what the committee's ranking minority member Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) calls "the Chalabi factor" (Rhode and others in Feith's office have been major sponsors of the Iraqi exile leader, who is now under investigation for passing U.S. intelligence to Iran). With the FBI adding potential espionage charges to the mix the long-simmering questions about the activities of Feith's operation now seem certain to come under renewed scrutiny.

Research assistance provided by Claudio Lavanga.

Image in web link is a photo of Ghorbanifar from the mid-1980s, around the time of Iran-Contra.


Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and the editor of Talking Points Memo. Laura Rozen reports on national security issues from Washington DC and for her weblog War and Piece. She can be reached at lkrozen@yahoo.com. Paul Glastris is editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.


-----------------------------------------------------------

Italian faces pre-war intelligence probe:

The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/110...aq_Uranium.html

Michael Ledeen’s Fingers in the Niger Yellowcake :

Some of us, those who pay attention, have suspected for some time the fraudulent Niger yellowcake documents—so crudely slapped together as to be laughable—are tied to Michael Ledeen, the neocon’s neocon, who is connected to the neofascist Italian military intelligence agency, SISMI.
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=84

===

http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=7789

October 26, 2005
Yellowcake Dossier Not the Work of the CIA
''Pollari went to the White House to offer his truth on Iraq"
by Carlo Bonnini e Giuseppe D'Avanzo of La Repubblica
[translated at the request of Antiwar.com by Azzurra Crispino]
Anything found in [ ] are translator's notes and not originally in the article.

For Nicolò Pollari, director of SISMI [sic Military Intelligence Agency of Italy] the rules of his job are non-negotiable. He tells La Repubblica: "I am the director of intelligence, and the only person I have spoken to in Washington on an institutional level, post September 11th, has been the director of the CIA, George Tenet. Obviously, I speak only to him." But is it really true that our undercover agents have worked exclusively with the CIA? Or, were they co-opted by the clandestine parallel intelligence efforts headed by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz over the "White House Iraq Group," the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, the National Security advisor's office, who all were set out to find the necessary proof to bring about 'regime change' in Bagdad?

On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Pollari, the director of SISMI meets in Washington with the staff of Condoleeza Rice, then White House National Security Advisor. This is done under the supervision of Gianni Castellaneta, currently the Italian ambassador to the US and then diplomatic advisor for Palazzo Chigi [Silvio Berlusconi's official residence as Prime Minister of Italy]. La Repubblica is able to document the simultaneous travel of the Italian government and intelligence. At least one of the "unofficial" meetings Pollari holds is, as secret agents say, the the creation of a love triangle between policy, intelligence, and information.

A quick summary: the Military Intelligence of Italy under Pollari wants to confirm the Iraqi purchase of unprocessed uranium used to make a nuclear bomb. The game plan is clear. Antonio Nucera, assistant chief of the Center for Military Intelligence in Rome, gives the "authentic papers" regarding an attempted acquisition of uranium in Niger (old Italian "intelligence" from the 80s). These are then bundled with other false papers hatched together from official stationery and seals, recovered during a faked burglary of the Niger embassy. These papers are shown by Pollari's people to CIA agents stationed in Rome. Meanwhile, a "deliveryman" for the Military Intelligence Agency, none other than Rocco Martino, delivers them to MI6 in London, run by Sir Richard Dearlove.

This is what gets the ball rolling. This will all be useful in understanding the second chapter of the great Italian deception -- framing the proof used to justify military intervention in Iraq. Greg Thielmann, former director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for the State Department, finds "the Italian report on uranium" on his desk. He claims not to recall the exact date, but it is roughly fall of 2001. The exact date may be important. We know three events coincide on the date October 15th, 2001. Nicolò Pollari, nominated on September 27th, becomes the head of SISMI, after having been the number two man at CESIS (the center coordinating intelligence for Palazzo Chigi). Silvio Berlusconi finally meets with George W. Bush at the White House and the first CIA report on the Italian evidence all occur on the same date: October 15th, 2001. One might call this nothing more than coincidence, except that it appears the Italians are desperately trying to get into the action. Berlusconi had difficulty, following an attack of "misunderstanding among civilizations," getting a meeting with a White House far more preoccupied with meeting with moderate Arab regimes. Pollari is anxious to be on board with the Premier and the new direction. Col. Alberto Manenti, Pollari's former boss and the newly appointed head of WMD unit at SISMI, also wants to be in tune with the new director. While Bush is showing Berlusconi the Rose Garden, writes Russ Hoyle, the CIA is taking action on the news Italian intelligence has just handed them on a silver platter: "negotiations between Niamey [the capital of Niger] and Bagdad regarding the acquisition of uranium began in the beginning of 1999. culminating in the authorization of the sale by the Nigerien government in 2000." No additional documentation is cited able to show that the shipment of uranium actually took place. CIA analysts consider this first report "very limited" and "lacking in necessary details." Analysts in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department rate the information "highly suspect."

Pollari's first contact with the American intelligence community is not particularly gratifying, but nevertheless useful. The director of SISMI is not a fool, he is quick to reconstruct where the main players fall in the sordid conflict underway in the Administration between those advocating prudence and a pragmatic outlook (State Department and the CIA) versus those who are merely looking for an opportunity to justify a pre-planned war. Gianni Castellaneta advises Pollari to "look in other directions," while Minister of Defense Antonio Martino invites him to meet "an old friend of Italy."

This old American friend is Michael A. Ledeen, an old fox of US parallel intelligence who was declared "undesirable" by Italy in the 1980s. Ledeen is in Rome on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, created by the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz to gather intelligence that supports military intervention in Iraq. A source from Forte Braschi [SISMI's headquarters in Rome] tells La Repubblica: "Jeff Castelli, head of the CIA station in Rome, gives a cold reception to Pollari's uranium story and lets the matter drop. Pollari understands this is merely a prelude to something else and talks to Michael Ledeen...." Some unknown reason moves Michael Ledeen back to Washington, D.C. But, at the beginning of 2002, Paul Wolfowitz convices Dick Cheney to explore in depth the Italian story on the uranium. The Vice President, states the Senate Selected Committee on Intelligence, asks the CIA one more time to know more about a possible acquisition of uranium from Niger. In that meeting, Dick Cheney explicitly states this shred of intelligence was gathered by "a foreign service."

The Pentagon parallel intelligence then spreads this "new information," according to which "there exists an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of 500 tons of uranium a year." The technical analysts smile at this declaration: 500 tons of uranium is an astronomical quantity, and the news is clearly devoid of any accountability. All independent reports, requested following the "Italian document" warn that the two mines in Niger, Arlit and Akouta, are not capable of extracting more than 300 tons a year. But the climate is what it is. George Tenet, hobbled by the holes in intelligence surrounding 9/11, puts on a good face and turns a deaf ear when the State Department (as told to La Repubblica by Greg Thielmann) states in opposition that "the information gathered in Italy is inconsistent; the Niger-uranium story is fake; and that a bunch of things told to us were lies."

The source in Forte Braschi continues, "Pollari is extremely shrewd. He understands that in order to push the uranium story he cannot rely on the CIA alone. He has to work, as he was advised by Palazzo Chigi and the Defense Department, with the Pentagon and the National Security Advisor, Rice." This claim could be nothing more than a malicious rumor (as is often the case in the world of spies) but confirmation of "alternate channels" Pollari creates with Washington are within grasp in an image and a meeting.

The image: Pollari is in Washington. He meets George Tenet, as often happens, in a reserved room of a hotel near Langley. Someone who assisted with the meeting tells La Repubblica: "Pollari must not trust his English very much, because he utilizes an interpreter when speaking to the director of the CIA. George, to get the ball rolling, reveals some information on Al Qaeda and Italy that the Agency has gathered amongst the Guantanamo prisoners. Tenet expects at least a smile, if not a thank you. Instead, he gets a face of stone. At first, this upsets him, but then he lets it go. But what strikes everyone most about Pollari is the way he keeps his central boss in Washington completely marginalized from everything." This estrangement is interesting. In 2002 the head of the SISMI station in Washington is Admiral Giuseppe Grignolo, who has important experience in the proliferation of WMDs, an excellent relationship with the CIA and is very respected by CIA number two Jim Pravitt. The source from Forte Braschi recalls, "in reality, we wanted to keep the CIA out of our work and Pollari didn't trust Grignolo because he's too closely connected to Langley. So, he keeps all his moves quiet, leading [Grignolo] down the wrong path, like say having him focus unnecessarily on the criminal record of the new hires to the service who have perhaps spent a few years in the States... his more important meetings happen elsewhere. With Condi Rice, through Gianni Castellaneta and for the Office of Special Plans of Wolfowitz and Dough Feith, through Leeden. Castellaneta is the one who schedules the meeting in the office of the National Security Advisor." When? What do they discuss? "What do you think they discussed in the summer of 2002? Weapons of mass destruction." The date of the meeting? "That I'm keeping to myself... besides, all it takes is checking with the CAI [Commitato Aeronautico Italiano, the Italian version of the FAA] logs on planes scheduled to fly Ciampino-Washington." [Ciampino is the Italian military airport.]

Getting the flightplans in Rome is difficult, but there's better luck in Washington. An administration official tells La Repubblica, "I can confirm that on Sept. 9th, 2002, General Nicolò Pollari met with Stephen Hadley, at the time Deputy National Security Advisor under Condoleeza Rice. And just like October 15th 2001, September 9th 2002 is a date of coincidences. The issue of Panorama that will hit the stands with the date September 12/19 is going to press. This seems to be the customary in the "yellowcake affair." Recall that "the deliveryman" for SISMI, Rocco Martino, contacts in October a journalist from the weekly magazine, at the time edited by Carlo Rossella, to sell them the document of this crooked affair. No one seems to remember that, in that September 12/19 2002 issue, coinciding with the secret meeting between Pollari and Hadley, Panorama finds a colossal scoop. The title of the article, "The War? It's Already Begun," tells the story of "a load of half a ton of uranium." Further in the article, "the men of Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Service, acquired it [the uranium] through a Jordan intermediary company in far-off Nigeria, where some merchants were selling it as contraband after having stolen it from a nuclear deposit in one of the republics of the former USSR. Five hundred kilos of uranium landed in Amman [the capital of Jordan]. From there, after seven hours by land, they reached their destination: a plant 20 km north of Bagdad, called Al Radhidiyah, well-known for its production and treatment of fission materials." Later in the article, "... the alert pertains to Germany, where in previous years Iraq has tried to buy technology and industrial components from the "Leycochem" organization... including the coveted aluminum tubes for the gas centrifuges."

It is important to note that all the ingredients for the recipe for war are present in this Panorama article, even if in an inexact context (Nigeria is not Niger, a grave lapse) and in some parts far-out (contraband from the former USSR to Africa in a truck): the five hundred tons of uranium that, from Africa, reach Baghdad; aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges. A reasonable observation can be made that the schema at work here in Italy seems to overlap completely with the ones sustained in the US CIA/New York Times scandal. Government asks for something; intelligence gives it; the media circulates it; and government confirms it. It's a disinformation technique as old as the Cold War. Exaggerate the danger from the enemy, thereby terrorizing and convincing public opinion. In our own home, an even worse detail: the Prime Minister owns the magazine spreading this poisonous news. The same PM, who heads intelligence and wants to seem and be George W. Bush's biggest ally, who is in turn anxious to go to war.

The groundwork now laid out, Pollari can now concentrate on a different but essential aspect of his gameplan, the promotion of SISMI and himself. He cashes in on the dividends from the last year's obfuscated work, blinding parliament with news cautiously manipulated; revelations that would finally require a believable and documented reconstruction are instead met with a wall of secrecy from the state (that would be opposed by Gianni Letta on July 16th, 2003).

After his secret meeting with Hadley, Pollari has two audiences with the parliamentary committee overseeing secret services. In the first, the director of SISMI states, "we do not have documented proof, but we do have news that a central-African nation has sold pure uranium to Baghdad." Thirty days later, Pollari states, "we have documented proof of an Iraqi acquisition of pure uranium in a central-African nation. We also know of an Iraqi attempt to purchase centrifuges, to be used to enrich uranium, from companies in Germany and possibly in Italy as well." Leaving Parliament, Pollari still has the problem of how to get the fake document to Washington without his metaphorical finger prints on them. The "deliveryman" for SISMI, Rocco Martino, who has already gone knocking on MI6's door, contacts Panorama's Elisabetta Burba attempting to sell her the dossier. Is it the smokeseller's own idea, was it suggested to him by Antonio Nucera, or from someone else? Burba, justly, goes to double check the information in Niger. There she invents a cover-up of dinosaurs, from the Tyrannosaurus Nigeriensis to the Velociraptor Abakensis.

In the meantime, she also speaks to some credible sources. Elisabette does her duty with tenacity and rigor, and comes to the conclusion that the story just does not jive, and doesn't publish a single line of it. But in reality, everything has already happened, because the director of the weekly, Carlo Rossella, enthusiastic to have perhaps found "the smoking gun" (as he tells his staff), has already sent the documents to the American embassy, "as the best source of verification." Does Pollari then warn the Prime Minister's weekly that in regards to the uranium scoop, the whole thing is a fraud? It would appear not. Thus, Jeff Castelli and the CIA find they once again have to deal with this half-baked story, which they have been trying to avoid for a year. These documents are so obviously fake that they can only be hidden, if they do not want to be mortified when meeting with Dick Cheney. The arrival of the documents in Washington is hushed. On October 16th, 2002, the documents are given out to the various intelligence agencies by members of the State Department during one of their regular meetings, where four CIA members are also present. None of them recall if they have them or ever did. Mysteriously, in Langley the "Italian documents" are "lost" for three months in the counter-proliferation center's vaults. First strike for the Italian documents. The uranium hoax will redouble with the addition of tall-tale of the aluminum tubes. But that's another story.

New column about this by Josh Marshall in The Hill. He's also been posting quite a bit on this subject on TPM.

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/...all/102705.html

Maybe we should ask Clifford May. He seems to have been in the loop on the whole Niger story.

More from Josh at TPM:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006861.php

(October 27, 2005 -- 01:54 PM EDT)



And here's the AP story he references:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...ld/13004812.htm

October 28, 2005
F.B.I. Is Still Seeking Source of Forged Uranium Reports
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - A two-year inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and intelligence officials say.

A counterespionage official said Wednesday that the inquiry into the documents, which were intended to show that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program, had yielded some intriguing but unproved theories. One is the possibility that associates of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was a leading champion of the American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the forgery. A second hypothesis, described by some officials as more likely, is that the documents were forged at Niger's embassy in Rome, in a moneymaking scheme. The official said the matter was being investigated as a counterintelligence case, not a criminal one.

The United States government did not receive the papers until October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003 that the papers were forgeries.

But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency in the months before Mr. Wilson's trip also contained information that was "based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable."

That early foreign reporting, never endorsed by American intelligence analysts, prompted questions from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which in turn led to Mr. Wilson's trip, a chain of events spelled out in the reviews of prewar intelligence issued this year and last year.

The continuing inquiry into the source of the forged documents has been conducted separately from the investigation by the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak case, which has to do with whether Bush administration officials committed crimes related to disclosing the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, an undercover C.I.A. officer.

Law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the two issues are related. The documents were among the sources of President Bush's claim in a 16-word passage of his State of the Union speech in 2003, later retracted, that Iraq was seeking to obtain uranium from Africa.

The question of who forged the documents remains of intense interest on Capitol Hill, where Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, have received classified briefings on the status of the F.B.I. inquiry. The two are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the intelligence committee.

That the initial reports prompting Mr. Wilson's trip were based on forged documents was reported in March by the Robb-Silberman commission on intelligence involving weapons of mass destruction. A footnote in the commission's report said, "It is still unclear who forged the documents and why." But it added that a classified version of the report had included discussion of "some further factual findings concerning the potential source of the forgeries."

Among American allies, Britain was the most vocal proponent of the argument that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium, but former senior intelligence officials said the reporting had actually come from Italy's military intelligence service.

An Italian journalist handed the documents over to the United States government in October 2002, months after the Wilson mission to Africa, according to the review by the intelligence committee.

A month earlier, the deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen J. Hadley, met in Washington with the head of an Italian intelligence service, according to a report that was published this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The White House has confirmed that the meeting took place, but a spokesman for Mr. Hadley described it as a courtesy call of 15 minutes or less.

"No one present at that meeting has any recollection of yellowcake being discussed or documents being provided," Frederick Jones, Mr. Hadley's spokesman, said Thursday, referring to a form of uranium.

The Italian government denied on Wednesday that its intelligence services had played any role in the "manufacture or spreading" of such a falsified dossier.

Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, would say only that he and Mr. Roberts had been briefed by the F.B.I. about the Niger inquiry. An aide to Mr. Roberts said only that "ongoing investigations of that type are the kinds of things they are briefed on."

According to the review by the committee, the C.I.A. produced intelligence documents in October 2001 and February 2002 describing reports by "a foreign government service" that Niger planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq, but cautioned that the information was uncorroborated. The second report provided what the C.I.A. described as the "verbatim text" of what the foreign service had said was an Iraq-Niger agreement.

The Defense Intelligence Agency then issued a Feb. 12, 2002, report repeating the details in the C.I.A. report, but its assessment "did not include any judgments about the credibility of the reporting," the Senate report said. It said Mr. Cheney, after reading the report, asked for the C.I.A.'s analysis of events.

In response to those questions, the Senate report said, the C.I.A.'s counterproliferation division decided to contact Mr. Wilson, who was posted early in his career in Niger. His wife, Valerie Wilson, also known as Valerie Plame, was an undercover officer in that division. The Senate report says that when the division decided to send Mr. Wilson to Niger, she approached him on behalf of the agency and told him "there's this crazy report" on a possible deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

David Johnston and Ian Fisher contributed reporting for this article.




http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/politics...agewanted=print

I'd like to know if the Niger forgery was
done by the same source as the Bush
National Guard document slipped to
Dan Rather, who happened to be the
Bush White House's major attacker in
the MSM.

War based on lies,
a CIA covert agent outed,
forgery, torture, no-bid theft,
illegal wire and email taps,
what a "Christian" administration.

What a mob.

October 28, 2005
F.B.I. Is Still Seeking Source of Forged Uranium Reports
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - A two-year inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and intelligence officials say.

A counterespionage official said Wednesday that the inquiry into the documents, which were intended to show that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program, had yielded some intriguing but unproved theories. One is the possibility that associates of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was a leading champion of the American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the forgery. A second hypothesis, described by some officials as more likely, is that the documents were forged at Niger's embassy in Rome, in a moneymaking scheme. The official said the matter was being investigated as a counterintelligence case, not a criminal one.

The United States government did not receive the papers until October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003 that the papers were forgeries.

But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency in the months before Mr. Wilson's trip also contained information that was "based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable."

That early foreign reporting, never endorsed by American intelligence analysts, prompted questions from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which in turn led to Mr. Wilson's trip, a chain of events spelled out in the reviews of prewar intelligence issued this year and last year.

The continuing inquiry into the source of the forged documents has been conducted separately from the investigation by the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak case, which has to do with whether Bush administration officials committed crimes related to disclosing the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, an undercover C.I.A. officer.

Law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the two issues are related. The documents were among the sources of President Bush's claim in a 16-word passage of his State of the Union speech in 2003, later retracted, that Iraq was seeking to obtain uranium from Africa.

The question of who forged the documents remains of intense interest on Capitol Hill, where Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, have received classified briefings on the status of the F.B.I. inquiry. The two are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the intelligence committee.

That the initial reports prompting Mr. Wilson's trip were based on forged documents was reported in March by the Robb-Silberman commission on intelligence involving weapons of mass destruction. A footnote in the commission's report said, "It is still unclear who forged the documents and why." But it added that a classified version of the report had included discussion of "some further factual findings concerning the potential source of the forgeries."

Among American allies, Britain was the most vocal proponent of the argument that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium, but former senior intelligence officials said the reporting had actually come from Italy's military intelligence service.

An Italian journalist handed the documents over to the United States government in October 2002, months after the Wilson mission to Africa, according to the review by the intelligence committee.

A month earlier, the deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen J. Hadley, met in Washington with the head of an Italian intelligence service, according to a report that was published this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The White House has confirmed that the meeting took place, but a spokesman for Mr. Hadley described it as a courtesy call of 15 minutes or less.

"No one present at that meeting has any recollection of yellowcake being discussed or documents being provided," Frederick Jones, Mr. Hadley's spokesman, said Thursday, referring to a form of uranium.

The Italian government denied on Wednesday that its intelligence services had played any role in the "manufacture or spreading" of such a falsified dossier.

Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, would say only that he and Mr. Roberts had been briefed by the F.B.I. about the Niger inquiry. An aide to Mr. Roberts said only that "ongoing investigations of that type are the kinds of things they are briefed on."

According to the review by the committee, the C.I.A. produced intelligence documents in October 2001 and February 2002 describing reports by "a foreign government service" that Niger planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq, but cautioned that the information was uncorroborated. The second report provided what the C.I.A. described as the "verbatim text" of what the foreign service had said was an Iraq-Niger agreement.

The Defense Intelligence Agency then issued a Feb. 12, 2002, report repeating the details in the C.I.A. report, but its assessment "did not include any judgments about the credibility of the reporting," the Senate report said. It said Mr. Cheney, after reading the report, asked for the C.I.A.'s analysis of events.

In response to those questions, the Senate report said, the C.I.A.'s counterproliferation division decided to contact Mr. Wilson, who was posted early in his career in Niger. His wife, Valerie Wilson, also known as Valerie Plame, was an undercover officer in that division. The Senate report says that when the division decided to send Mr. Wilson to Niger, she approached him on behalf of the agency and told him "there's this crazy report" on a possible deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

David Johnston and Ian Fisher contributed reporting for this article.




http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/politics...agewanted=print

F.B.I. Is Still Seeking Source of Forged Uranium Reports:

A counterespionage official said that the inquiry into the documents, had yielded some intriguing but unproved theories. One is the possibility that associates of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was a leading champion of the American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the forgery.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10802.htm

Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Italian Media Reveals U.S. Officials Met With Italian Intelligence Officials To Discuss Fake Documents Citing Niger Nuke Sales to Iraq

As the country waits to see whether indictments will be handed down to top White House officials in the CIA leak case, reports are breaking that Italian intelligence and Bush administration officials met in connection with the forged Niger documents that were used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We get the latest from law professor Scott Horton and journalist Laura Rozen. [includes rush transcript]

To discuss the latest news about the CIA leak investigation and to explain how grand jury indictments work we are joined by:


Scott Horton, chairman of the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University where he lectures on international law and international humanitarian law.
Laura Rozen, a journalist who covers national security and foreign policy issues. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and she edits the widely read blog warandpiece.com.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was questioned about the impact the investigation has had on the White House.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: First of all, there's a lot of speculation going around, and I think there are a lot of facts that simply are not known at this point. It remains an ongoing investigation, and we'll let the special prosecutor continue to do his work, and I'm sure he will have more to say in due course. In terms of the White House, this White House is focused on the priorities of the American people. We're working on the priorities that the American people care about. The President has had a very busy day. He started his morning focused on the highest priorities facing this country, which is winning the war on terrorism and protecting the homeland.

AMY GOODMAN: That was White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan speaking Wednesday. To discuss the latest news about the C.I.A. leak investigation and to explain how grand jury indictments work, we're joined by two guests. Laura Rozen is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist, senior correspondent for the American Prospect, frequently writes about national security and foreign policy issues on her blog, WarAndPiece.com. And we are joined in our New York studio by Scott Horton, Chair of the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association; he’s also Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University where he lectures on international law and international humanitarian law. Laura Rozen, let's begin with you. Can you tell us the latest at point of this broadcast?

LAURA ROZEN: I'm afraid I can't. I was really preparing to speak more on these Niger forgeries, and I -- --

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

LAURA ROZEN: I'm not up on latest from over night really on the leak investigation. I apologize.

AMY GOODMAN: No, that's fine. Why don't you talk about exactly what you're referring to when you talk about how Niger fits into this story?

LAURA ROZEN: Yes. You know, the outing of Valerie Plame is kind of the end of this long process that began with these documents, these forged documents that came into the possession of the U.S. government that purported to show a contract for Iraq to purchase vast quantities of yellow cake uranium in the African country of Niger. So, in Italy this week, an investigative reporting team has made great headway in actually identifying who were the people who actually set this whole forgeries in motion that, you know, the Bush administration cited as one of the reasons they thought that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons. And it turns out to be various current and ex-officials from the Italian military intelligence organization, SISMI. And that's quite interesting, because, you know, the Italian prime minister was very supportive -- is a supporter of President Bush and was one of the few European allies to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And they kept, through various channels, trying to channel this false intelligence to the U.S. and British intelligence.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Many Americans here are not familiar with this angle, this Italian angle to the entire situation here of the false information given out about the -- about Niger and nuclear weapons. Could you talk about -- a little bit about the La Repubblica articles? And exactly what is the connection between the officials in the Bush administration and the -- this Italian -- the forgeries that originated there?

LAURA ROZEN: Right. Well, Vice President Cheney asked his C.I.A. briefers in February 2002, that says that he had heard something about this Niger yellow cake claim and asked them to find out more. They sent Joseph Wilson on the trip to Niger. He didn't -- Cheney's office apparently didn't know anything about this. You know, seven, eight months later, September 2002, just as Andy Card is saying, you know, now is the time for the White House to make its sales pitch to the country for the war, and, you know, Vice President Cheney is going on TV saying -- talking about Iraq reconstituting its nuclear weapons, now we find out that the head of Italian military intelligence came to meet with a White House official, which is very unusual. He met with Steve Hadley, who has also been someone who has been identified as part of a kind of alleged conspiracy in the White House to eventually out Joseph Wilson's wife to the media as a C.I.A. operative, kind of as retaliation for Joseph Wilson pushing back on these false Niger uranium claims. Does that tie the two things together? Does that make clear how the leak investigation is tied in some ways to these documents?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. But also, in terms of Hadley's then role in the Bush administration putting out this information?

LAURA ROZEN: It's not clear. He was Deputy National Security Adviser at the time. He’s National Security Adviser now. He met with the head of Italian military intelligence, September 9, 2002. The N.S.C. spokesman told me, you know, that meeting’s not necessarily secret, it's just that Hadley's schedule is not public. On the Italian side, my colleagues at La Repubblica tell me that the head of Italian military intelligence doesn't admit to having met with Hadley.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, you have -- Hadley goes to Italy --

LAURA ROZEN: No, no. Pollari comes here.

AMY GOODMAN: He comes here. They have the meeting.

LAURA ROZEN: They have the meeting.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain again how this information then got out in the Italian publication and the connection of that Italian publication to Berlusconi.

LAURA ROZEN: The other thing – right. The other thing -- so then a month after Hadley and the head of Italian military intelligence meet in September 2002, a reporter for an Italian magazine owned by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gets passed by a shady middleman in Italy a bunch of documents that turn out to be the Niger forgeries. And her editor who is kind of the favorite in the Berlusconi media empire tells her, “Take these immediately to the U.S. embassy in Rome,” which she does, and they get cabled back to Washington. So, even though the C.I.A. originally dismissed these whole Niger uranium claims at several points, as had the State Department, as being unsubstantiated, and Joe Wilson went on his trip to Niger and also found the claims to be unsubstantiated, you find the President, you know, in January 2003 citing Iraq's alleged efforts to acquire uranium in Niger as being one of his – you know, in his State of the Union address.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Scott Horton, you have this story of a top Bush administration official meeting with Italian intelligence, and then soon a publication owned by the prime minister of Italy, Berlusconi, who is a close Bush ally, publishes this information that Saddam Hussein is getting 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Niger; the significance of this?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, it's actually a bombshell, because it shows this entire investigation doubling back and coming to the very beginning, to the original case of the yellow cake forgeries. People have been asking for a long time, “Why is it that people in the Vice President's staff were so concerned about Ambassador Wilson and his debunking of the yellow cake forgeries?” I mean, many people have thought that it just doesn't make sense that they would be so deeply engaged. Of course, one thing we know from the investigation, what's come out from it to date, is that they were very deeply involved from the top of the staff to the bottom of it. And this shows the first glimmers of a real explanation for that by linking key figures from the White House and what Colonel Wilkerson has called the “cabal” around Vice President Cheney to the forgeries themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Wilkerson being the former Chief of Staff of Powell.

SCOTT HORTON: Exactly right. I mean, there's no evidence that has come out that suggests that these people uttered the forgeries, but it does suggest they had a great interest in them. They knew about them from a very early date, and they knew they were forgeries from very early on and nevertheless showed great interest in getting these documents out and into the public. And there was a very, very high level complicity between White House figures and Prime Minister Berlusconi and senior confidants of his.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to break, and then we're going to come back. Laura Rozen, thanks very much for being with us. And your website, your blog, WarAndPiece.com, writing for The American Prospect. Scott Horton, I'd like you to stay on to talk also about Vice President Dick Cheney, the Washington Post editorial yesterday saying “Vice President for Torture,” Maureen Dowd saying "Just say vice."

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Scott Horton, who is a law professor here in New York City. Scott Horton, the issue of this grand jury. What -- it has been impaneled for how long? Who are they, and what happens now?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, we have 23 citizens from the District of Columbia, who are serving, and they have been in session now for a very long time. I think more than a year.

AMY GOODMAN: Full-time?

SCOTT HORTON: No, it's not full-time. They meet several times in the course of a month. I think this grand jury has been meeting pretty regularly on Fridays in the afternoon. But it's a tremendous amount of service that they're providing. And Friday is the last day of their scheduled term; or is it? That's one of the questions we have got, because what happened yesterday that has attracted a lot of interest from lawyers is that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, had a 30 to 45-minute meeting with Chief Judge Hogan.

Now, why would he have had that meeting? It could have been a courtesy call. That's not terribly likely. More likely, he was either seeking to arrange special meeting times for the current grand jury, seeking to extend its term or seeking to have indictments that have been voted or about to be voted put under seal. And that suggests very strongly that the investigation is, in fact, not completely wrapped up now. We may have charges announced today, but that there's an important slice of it remaining to be completed.

JUAN GONZALEZ: From the perspective of the Bush administration, would it be better for this grand jury to be extended, for this to drag out, or would it be better for them to have -- if these indictments are going to come down, have them come down now and begin the process of adjustment into the new conditions?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, I think, surely, they would like to get this behind them, and having an open portion of it is going to create an ongoing public distraction. I think most commentators looking at the White House in the last month see it as nearly incapacitated by this scandal. I mean, you already referred earlier in the broadcast to withdrawals and reversals, the Miers nomination is floundering. This is a political low point for the White House, no doubt about it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, could you have some indictments handed down today, others announced later?

SCOTT HORTON: Absolutely. And we could have a number of indictments handed down today that won't be announced.

AMY GOODMAN: Sealed?

SCOTT HORTON: They will be under seal.

AMY GOODMAN: For what reason?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, there are a number of reasons why you would put -- it's a rather unusual process, putting indictments under seal. We should state that up front. The most traditional cause for it is that -- is to not let slip the fact that someone's going to be indicted so they can be apprehended. You're afraid that they're going to flee. That doesn't make sense when we are dealing with public officials, frankly. What would make sense with public officials is that the fact of the indictment would tip people to the fact that they and people who are working with them are targets of the investigation. And, you know, and I think, obviously, of all the things we’ve seen, the Italian side of this is the most intriguing. I think it's most likely that that part of the investigation hasn't been finished. But this is just speculation.

AMY GOODMAN: Can a vice president be indicted?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, vice presidents have been indicted. In fact, Aaron Burr was indicted twice and Spiro Agnew was indicted. But there is a question of executive immunity. And how far does executive immunity go? And on that issue, actually, the leading authority is probably Robert Bork, a former judge and Yale Law professor who wrote quite in great detail about this, saying that the vice president does not have immunity, that that's really limited to the president. But that's not really a settled question.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But how would it be possible to have sealed indictments? Would the actual people indicted be notified, or even they would not know that they had been indicted?

SCOTT HORTON: They would not be notified of the fact that they’d be indicted, and neither would the public.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Scott Horton, who is the Chair of International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association, also Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University.

Dear Colleagues, This past week the Italian daily Repubblica has published in three segments an account of the Italian role--considerable--in the fabrication of
evidence regarding the alleged efforts by Iraq to obtain uranium from Niger. Repubblica, when it is mentioned at all in the US Press is described as of the "left" and I suppose that is true. It was founded to espouse, and still does, a conception of civic culture certainly not represented by the repeatedly indicted parvenu who is Silvio Berlusconi, nor by most of the parties and persons in his coalition. The burden of the article is as follows. A visit was made to Italy by Dr. Michael Ledeen, acting as a messenger for what Scowcroft termed the Cheney led cabal in the government. Ledeen met with the head of SISMI, the Italian inteilligence service, a military officer named Pollari, who was responding to instructions from the diplomatic advisor to Berlusconi, Signor Castellaneta (now the Ambassador to the US). A set of crooks retained by SISMI provided the "evidence." Pollari came to Washington to present it, met with scepticism on the part of the CIA and turned instead to the White House, where he had a distinctly more enthusiastic reception. The report in Repubblica, clearly, came from amongst other sources the large number of government officials in Italy who sympathize with the opposition. Dr. Ledeen hardly needs an introduction. One of my own most vivid recollections of encounters with Mike, whom I have known for decades, is of being favoured with his advice re contacts in Rome. Don't take the Italians of any political family too seriously, Mike warned me, the best thing would be to consult with his friend, the then chief of station in Rome for Mossad. Enough said.......the original link follows.

http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezione/es.../sismicia..html 10/27/2005

Forging the Case for War

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?

by Philip Giraldi

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.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10816.htm

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006892.php



And here is the Washington Post item that Josh quotes from:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/worldopini...cles_to_co.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...INGJPFG2J11.DTL

Seeds of leak scandal sown in Italian intelligence agency
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Behind the CIA leak scandal lies a bizarre trail of forged documents, an embassy break-in and international deception that helped propel the United States to war in Iraq.

While American public attention focuses on special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak, U.S. and Italian lawmakers are probing a series of bogus claims of Iraqi uranium purchases in Africa that were the opening chapters in a saga that resulted in the disclosure of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

In the past week, the respected, left-of-center Italian daily La Repubblica published a three-part series of investigative articles claiming that documents purporting to prove that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger had been forged by an Italian freelance spy and then were fed by the Italian intelligence agency to eager officials in Washington and London.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate Democratic leader, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., are asking for public hearings into the forgeries and their role in Bush administration claims that Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

The Italian Parliament is scheduled to hold hearings about the La Repubblica allegations on Thursday, with intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari expected to come under heavy grilling.

The articles relied heavily on sources in the Italian spy agency, the Military Information and Security Service, known as SISMI. They provide a tantalizing account -- credible to some observers, baseless speculation to others -- of how President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were snookered by fabricated intelligence about Hussein's alleged nuclear program.

The allegations in La Repubblica's articles lead far into the murky depths of Italy's intelligence agencies, a realm of conspiracy claims and counterclaims. In Italy this netherworld is called dietrologia -- a word that loosely translates as the widespread belief that political, security and criminal forces are constantly engaged in secret plots and maneuvers, noted Henry Farrell, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University in Washington and a blogger on the Crooked Timber Web log, which has dissected the Italian angle to Plamegate.

"It's hard to say if (the La Repubblica information) is the truth, truth with some distortion, or misinformation from the officials who are leaking this," Farrell said. "But it certainly raises some very troubling questions."

Farrell noted that during the Cold War, the U.S. and Italian spy agencies cooperated closely on undercover work. Bush and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are close allies, and Berlusconi has strongly supported Bush's Iraq policy, stationing 3,000 Italian troops south of Baghdad.

SISMI has long been accused of involvement in rightist conspiracies, including work in collaboration with Propaganda Due, or P-2, a Masonic secret society, and the Armed Falange, a neo-fascist terrorist group.

SISMI "does not have an immaculate history at all," said Gianfranco Pasquino, a political science professor at the Bologna, Italy, campus of the School of Advanced and International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. "It has been purged and reorganized very often."

Pasquino called SISMI "friendly to the right wing and willing to offer its services for right-wing purposes."

According to La Repubblica, the forged documents were originally produced in 2000 by Rocco Martino, a former member of the Carabinieri paramilitary police who then became a freelance agent for both SISMI and French intelligence. SISMI combined these fakes with real documents from the 1980s showing Hussein's yellowcake purchases from Niger during that period -- in the process, conducting a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome to steal letterhead and seals.

Soon afterward, La Repubblica reported, Italian operatives passed news of their scoop to the CIA and the British intelligence agency, MI6. When the CIA expressed doubt about the veracity of the claims, SISMI began seeking to peddle it directly to the most pro-war faction of the Bush administration.

SISMI chief Pollari met in Rome with Michael Ledeen, an influential Washington neoconservative who has long been reputed to play a back-channel role between U.S. and Italian spy agencies. Pollari also met in Washington with Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, to discuss the new information, La Repubblica reported. On Thursday, a National Security Council spokesman confirmed that the Hadley-Pollari meeting had taken place but was only "a courtesy call" with no documents exchanged.

In early 2002, CIA officials sent Wilson, who had served as a diplomat in Africa, to Niger to investigate the matter. Wilson reported back to CIA headquarters that the claims were unfounded.

Meanwhile, however, MI6 recycled the information and, without disclosing the source, reported it to the White House -- which interpreted this British echo chamber as independent confirmation of the Italian claims.

The elaborate hoax finally succeeded. In late September 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited Iraq's alleged Niger dealings as proof of Hussein's nuclear ambitions. In his February 2003 State of the Union address, Bush declared that British intelligence had "learned" Saddam Hussein had been seeking to buy nuclear material in Africa. Throughout the period, Blair made similar claims.

British officials have insisted that they had other evidence in addition to the forged documents that confirmed Iraqi uranium purchases in Niger. The British have declined to show this evidence, however.

La Repubblica quoted a SISMI official as saying of this alleged corroborating evidence, "If it ever were brought forward it would be discovered, with red faces, that it was Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980s and shared with our friend Hamilton McMillan" -- the top MI6 counter-terrorism official during that period.

After war was initiated in 2003 and invading U.S. troops found no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program, Wilson began to tell reporters about his fact-finding trip and his report to Washington that the Niger uranium claims were bogus. Wilson's maneuvering came at a politically sensitive moment, as the administration's war rationale appeared to be crumbling. According to the indictment released Friday, it was during this period when Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, began to organize a counterattack against Wilson and Valerie Plame, leaking her identity as a CIA agent and suggesting that he may have been sent to Niger merely because of nepotism.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the FBI has been investigating the forged uranium documents for two years but has not reached any conclusions about who fabricated them or how they were funneled to U.S. and British officials.

On Wednesday, Berlusconi's office "categorically" rejected La Repubblica's claims. "The facts that are narrated ... do not correspond to the truth," the prime minister's office said in a statement in which it reiterated denials that the government had any "direct or indirect involvement in the packaging and delivery of the 'false dossier on Niger's uranium.' "

But Farrell said that many Italians view the matter as yet another dark conspiracy.

"Italian politics is incredibly byzantine and incredibly nontransparent, especially on security issues," Farrell said. "There is a pervasive (public) belief of dietrologia carried out behind the scenes by powerful, shadowy figures, all more or less incomprehensible except to a few insiders in Rome.

"This case will be interpreted as more of the same."

E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1031/dailyUpdate.html


Berlusconi: 'I tried to get Bush to not invade Iraq'

Italian PM says he even tried to get Libyan leader Qaddafi to help him.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

In an interview to be broadcast today in Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of George Bush's closest allies, said he tried repeatedly to persuade the president not to go to war. The Guardian reports that, in a "behind the scenes effort" he even asked Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to help him.
"I have never been convinced war was the best way to succeed in making a country democratic and extract it from [a] ... bloody dictatorship," [Berlusconi] says. "I tried on several occasions to convince the American president not to wage war."
His version of events, recounted in an interview with the La7 private TV station, with excerpts reported by the Apcom and Ansa news agencies at the weekend, was backed by his deputy, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the former neo-fascist party, who said: "We tried right up to the end to persuade Bush and Blair not to launch a military attack."

The Associated Press reports that the meeting between Bush and Berlusconi comes at a bad time for both men, and they will discuss a difficult topic - Berlusconi's plan to pull Italian troops out of Iraq.
Berlusconi has said Italy would gradually withdraw groups of 300 troops until 1,000 remain, when they will all come home. Italy's defense minister has said it's "plausible" that troops would return home in the first half of 2006.


The Guardian says that the Italian prime minister's comments, coming the weekend after the indictment of Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, will be seen as "treacherous." The timing of the statement may have to do with Berlusconi's upcoming election bid in five months. Polls show that his support of George Bush is seen as a "major handicap." The Italian news organization AKI reports Monday that there may already be a problem - former Bush adviser David Frum said the US president "no longer trusts" the Italian PM after his remarks.

"What Berlusconi said has damaged his personal relationship with Bush. In politics, it sometimes good to be cynical, but not to appear cynical. Berlusconi's's words and their meaning seemed very cynical," said Frum, a political scientist at the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute think-tank in Washington.
"The Bush administration's perception of Berlusconi has long been very positive. Bush [has made] it plain that he enjoyed his company and appreciated the sacrifices Italy has made in the war on terror. But maybe Bush thought Berlusconi a stronger leader than he actually is," Frum continued. "I think that from now on, it will be very difficult for the president to confide in Berlusconi, to believe and trust him," Frum added.

Reuters reports that on Sunday Berlusconi also defended his chief of intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, whose agency was accused last week by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with "passing off bad intelligence to the United States, helping bolster claims about Iraq's prewar nuclear ambitions.
La Repubblica says the agency passed off fake documents showing Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Niger. Bush cited Iraq's attempted purchase of African uranium in a 2003 speech, helping to build support for war. ...

The Niger uranium allegations partly extend to Berlusconi, whom La Repubblica accused of siding with US hawks before the war and possibly pressuring Sismi for evidence against Iraq. The newspaper has focused much of its attention on a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, between Pollari and Stephen Hadley, who was at the time deputy White House national security adviser. Hadley later took the blame for a reference to Iraq seeking uranium in Africa made in Bush's State of the Union address before the invasion of Iraq.

The Associated Press reports that La Repubblica reported that Berlusconi had pressured Mr. Pollari in the buildup to the war to "make a strong contribution" in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. It then said Pollari "used a dossier that had originally been fabricated in early 2001 with material stolen from Niger's embassy in Rome."
Reuters reports that Berlusconi's office tried to quash the "respected, left-leaning" newspaper's story, saying on Friday there "was no mention of the Iraq-Niger affair at Pollari's September 9 meeting in Washington, at which it said Hadley was a just silent guest."

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Henry Farrell, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University in Washington and a blogger on the Crooked Timber Web log, says the reports about the Italian intelligence community's involvement in the Niger uranium affair, are examples of what Italians call "dietrologia - a word that loosely translates as the widespread belief that political, security and criminal forces are constantly engaged in secret plots and maneuvers."

"It's hard to say if [the La Repubblica information] is the truth, truth with some distortion, or misinformation from the officials who are leaking this," Farrell said. "But it certainly raises some very troubling questions."

Berlusconi's opponents in Italy accused him of "crocodile tears" over his comments about how he tried to stop the war. The Independent reports that Romano Prodi, who will run against Berlusconi next April, said mockingly: "What on earth has happened? He's finally realized this was a mistaken war? And he said as much to Bush? Which goes to show that he counts for nothing, nothing, nothing!"

How the 'IoS' broke the story of the ambassador and the fake uranium claim :

When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally had the opportunity to look at the documents itself, it concluded they were forgeries. Last week the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that they had been created by low-level agents of Sisme, the Italian intelligence service, which was trying to curry favour with the White House by supporting its WMD campaign.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10827.htm

November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative



Forging the Case for War


Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?


by Philip Giraldi


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 President 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

Reporters are questioning Scotty McClellan about the Italian connection to the Niger forgeries. This is from this morning's press WH press briefing, via Josh at TPM:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006903.php

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.htm...y=1130878217000



November 1, 2005 9:50 PM

White House disputes Italy role in Iraq claim

By Adam Entous

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Tuesday disputed accusations that Italian intelligence in a 2002 meeting passed off fake documents, showing Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, that formed part of U.S. President George W. Bush's case for war against Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials who attended a September 9, 2002, meeting with Italy's spy chief do not recall the issue coming up, said a spokesman for the White House National Security Council. The meeting is central to the accusations.

"No one who was present at the meeting remembers yellow cake (uranium) being discussed nor any documents being passed," spokesman Frederick Jones said.

Bush, in making a case for war in his 2003 State of the Union address, said there was evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa to further apparent nuclear-weapons ambitions.

Bush cited British intelligence as the source of the information. But U.S. officials have said in the past that the information was partly traced back to Italian sources.

The White House acknowledged after the war that the intelligence was faulty.

The Niger issue has attracted renewed attention as U.S. special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. As part of his investigation, Fitzgerald has asked witnesses about the Niger report.

At issue in the documents charges is the September 2002 meeting, between Italy's spy chief, Nicolo Pollari, and Stephen Hadley, then the deputy White House national security adviser. Hadley is now Bush's national security adviser.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has rejected accusations at home that the intelligence agency, known as Sismi, gave fake documents to Washington about the Niger deal.

On Friday, Berlusconi's office said that there was no mention of the Iraq-Niger affair at Pollari's September 2002 meeting, at which it said Hadley was a just silent guest.

During his visit to the White House on Monday, Berlusconi followed up with Bush, briefly raising the issue, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"COURTESY CALL"

Jones played down the Pollari meeting as an 11-minute "courtesy call."

The White House had previously refused to discuss any details of Hadley's meeting with Pollari.

Berlusconi is one of Washington's strongest allies. Although he did not send troops to join the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he did send forces after the fall of Baghdad.

"Prime Minister Berlusconi brought it up, and as they indicated, that there wasn't any documents that were provided to us on Niger and uranium," McClellan said.

He said the reference in Bush's State of the Union speech was based on a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and British intelligence. However, Italy's La Repubblica newspaper said that an Italian middleman provided Britain with forged Niger documents.

Bush's 2003 uranium claim fuelled criticism from Plame's husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, that the administration twisted intelligence to bolster its case for war.

Wilson based his criticism in part on a CIA-sponsored mission he made to Africa in 2002 to check out reports that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Wilson said the report was unsubstantiated, and later accused the White House of leaking his wife's identity in retaliation.


Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051031/...puteoveruranium


Scandal grew from dispute over uranium By John Diamond, USA TODAY
Mon Oct 31, 6:26 AM ET

What's now a political scandal and a legal controversy began with a question over whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger to help Saddam Hussein's scientists build nuclear bombs.

Three years of investigations by a Senate committee, the CIA's chief weapons hunter in Iraq and a presidential commission provided an answer: No conclusive evidence was found to show that Iraq either bought or tried to buy uranium in Africa during the dozen years Iraq was under United Nations sanctions after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the intelligence on this question was not clear and what the CIA did collect, the agency badly mishandled, according to a 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report.

In some ways, the uranium allegation never made sense. Iraq already had a supply of uranium, which was subject to inspection once a year. Iraq did not have the equipment to enrich uranium for use in a bomb.

In February 2002, the CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to look into an Oct. 15, 2001, intelligence report from an unidentified country. Wilson was sent to Africa at the suggestion of his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked in the CIA's counterproliferation division. It is the leak of her name and CIA employment that launched the investigation that led to Friday's indictment of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The intelligence report said Iraq had a deal with Niger for an illicit supply of uranium. A follow-up to that October 2001 report sparked Vice President Cheney's interest and led the CIA to dispatch Wilson.

Here the bungling began:

The agency did not tell Cheney that Wilson had been sent to Niger to look into the matter and did not brief Cheney on Wilson's findings, according to the Senate report.

At the time of Wilson's trip in February 2002, the CIA had the text of the purported Iraq-Niger deal but failed to notice errors in dates and names, according to a commission headed by former senator Chuck Robb, D-Va.

When the CIA got supporting documents in October 2002, it filed them away and forgot about them, according to the Senate report. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared in March 2003 that the documents were forgeries.

Wilson was wrong in his July 2003 op-ed piece in The New York Times that his mission to Niger had put to rest concerns about the uranium deal. He had reported to the CIA and State Department about a 1999 overture by Iraq to re-establish commercial ties with Niger. The CIA thought it could be a veiled effort to open negotiations for buying uranium.

In the ensuing months, U.S. intelligence reports on the uranium issue were inconsistent. An Oct. 1, 2002, intelligence report to the president and Congress stated that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" to make nuclear weapons.

The next day, however, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin told lawmakers reports that Britain was using the uranium allegation were not "very credible." Later in October, CIA officials urged the White House to delete a reference to the uranium issue from a draft presidential speech because "the reporting was weak," recalled George Tenet, who was CIA director at the time.

Even so, President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

No one at the CIA told the White House to delete the 16 words, a lapse for which Tenet later accepted responsibility. Days after Bush's speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell made no mention of the uranium reports in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council aimed at justifying an Iraq invasion.

Not until June 2003 - three months after the invasion of Iraq - did the CIA formally state that "we no longer believe that there is sufficient reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad."

Chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer also examined the issue in 2003-04 with the help of Iraqi archives and senior officials in Iraq's long-defunct nuclear program. Duelfer said his team had "not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7876

November 2, 2005

While You Slept
They lied us into war
by Justin Raimondo

In the run-up to war with Iraq, Iranian intelligence was playing the U.S. like a violin – with the knowledge and full cooperation of certain major (and minor) – players in the U.S. government. That's the conclusion we are forced to draw upon reading the latest from Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo at La Repubblica (see Part I and Part II), the Italian daily that has done so much recently to expose the true origins of the Niger uranium forgeries. I covered the provenance of those forgeries – which led to President Bush uttering the infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address – in a previous column, but now La Repubblica is breaking another important dimension of this story:

"The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of 'Iranian exiles.' The meeting is organized by SISMI [Italian military intelligence]….

"Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. The big cheese are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant (the former is a balding man between 46 and 48 years of age; the latter is younger, around 38, with braces on his teeth) and some mysterious Iranians."

This meeting has been documented elsewhere, by others, but what's new here is that the proceedings – and the participants – are described in detail by La Repubblica's reporters. It was at least implied, before, that the Iranian element of this polyglot assemblage consisted of those chafing under Tehran's heel, but here is what the head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, has to say about it:

"I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly 'exiles.' They came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran."

"These men," says La Repubblica's reporters, "are members of the regime, sent by Tehran." But what about the others? Michael Ledeen, the neoconservative ideologue and veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, whose Iranian – and Israeli – contacts made him a key go-between in the arms-for-hostages deal, is the Machiavelli of the neocons, the one who ends his polemics with the exhortation "Faster, please!" – a plea to accelerate the pace of "regime change" throughout the Middle East. And he is not just an ideologue, rooting on the sidelines for the "good guys," but an active player, as La Repubblica makes all too clear: he played the key role of facilitator of the various factions with a keen interest in "liberating" Iraq. La Repubblica cites an unnamed U.S. intelligence source:

"The meeting called in Rome assembles the representatives of all the teams: Michael A. Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, the colonels of the Iraqi National Congress and in addition, the Iraqi Shi'ites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and of course, the Guardians of the Revolution. All these actors gathered in Rome. Wouldn't you say that's interesting?"

Fascinating. As I've said before, anyone could have seen that the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and British forces would hand most of the country over to the Iranians, and I was hardly the only one to foresee this:

"Patrick Lang, former director of the [Defense] [I]ntelligence [A]gency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. 'They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,' he said. He described it as 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.' 'I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,' he said."

Good – but apparently not good enough to fool the U.S. indefinitely: last year, Chalabi's generous subsidy from the U.S. government was abruptly halted. Not only that, but his Iraqi headquarters was raided by U.S. plainclothes agents acting in concert with Iraqi government soldiers. It was alleged that the Iraqi exile leader and his group had betrayed their American patrons by supplying Tehran with vital U.S. secrets. According to several news outlets, the charge was that Chalabi had revealed to the Iranians that we had broken their internal code. An investigation was launched, and Pentagon employees – several of them high-ranking – were given polygraph tests as they were questioned by the FBI.

As I have said before, the Chalabi-neocon-Iranian axis of deception functioned like a two-way transmission belt, relaying bogus "intelligence" on Iraq's alleged WMD to the White House and also mining U.S. secrets and passing them on to their foreign sponsors – not only Tehran, but also Tel Aviv. Larry Franklin, one of the ringleaders of the American delegation to the Rome conclave, has recently pled guilty to charges of passing classified information to Israeli "diplomats" via two officials of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both of whom have been charged with violating the Espionage Act.

Franklin and Rhode set up the Office of Special Plans, which funneled fake "intelligence" supplied by the INC and their Iranian allies to U.S. policymaking circles – and to Judith Miller, who plastered their lies all over the front page of the New York Times. The subversive role played by the Office of Special Plans is by now well known: La Repubblica supplies a few more pieces to the puzzle, informing us that the Niger uranium forgeries – reports of which sent Joe Wilson to Niger in the first place – were brought to the Rome meeting, apparently by Chalabi, who passed off the documents to the American delegation.

These now-famous forgeries, which played such a key part in lying us into war – and, also, in unraveling the conspiracy behind the lying – seem to have gone through several editions. They started out as recycled Italian intelligence reports from the 1980s, which were then embellished with the addition of stolen letterheads and official seals – the fruit of a mysterious robbery that occurred at the Niger embassy in Rome, which La Repubblica exposes as a SISMI operation. Another addition, perhaps the contribution of the Americans, seems to have been tacked on almost as an afterthought: it purports to show, on official-looking stationary, summaries of meetings held by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Iran leading to the creation of a "Global Support" group that would militarily resist attempts by the West to interdict "governments continually suspected, and without just cause, of producing nuclear, bacteriological, chemical weapons."

The spectacle of seeing ostensible opponents of Tehran, such as Ledeen, in bed with the Iranian mullahs in a scheme to overthrow Saddam may seem like a contradiction. After all, why would Ledeen, long an opponent of the Iranian government, wind up collaborating with them? It makes sense if we see what the neocon strategy is in the Middle East: playing the Shi'ite card. Robert Dreyfuss, writing on the TomPaine.com blog, analyzes the contention, pushed by Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, that the rise of Shi'ite power in Iraq will undermine the legitimacy and primacy of the mullah-ocracy in Tehran:

"This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as [the] second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms – instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq's Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran's 'clerical dictatorship.' I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia's Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It's a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades."

Last year, when all the various scandals associated with the neocons' drive to war – l'affaire Plame, the Niger uranium forgeries, Chalabi-gate – were popping up like mushrooms after a heavy rain, I suggested:

"Why not consolidate all these ongoing investigations – and the Abu Ghraib war crimes … into one big investigation? We can call it Neocon-gate. After all, the trail of evidence in all these various scandals leads back to the same few dozen or so key neocons, centered in the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President. It would certainly avoid duplication of effort and save the taxpayers a pretty penny. Even more importantly, it would save time."

Time is the key factor here, because we don't have a lot of it. The neocons are moving fast to regionalize the Iraq war and extend their efforts at "regime change" to Syria, Lebanon, and even Iran. Saudi Arabia, too, is in their sights, as Dreyfuss points out. A regional conflagration that will have Americans standing in line to buy gas at 10 times the present price, and ignite a new wave of war hysteria in the U.S. predicated on the alleged necessity of U.S. intervention to ensure our economic survival – that is the prospect before us.

Opponents of the Iraq war argued, in the run-up to the invasion, that U.S. policies would lead to chaos in the Middle East – without realizing that this is precisely what the War Party is hoping and working for. It's not for nothing that Ledeen hails the transformative power of "creative destruction," a phrase originally utilized to describe the economic benefits of competition, and borrowed by the War Party to convey a very different – the exact opposite – meaning. In the economic sense, the phrase refers to the peaceful competition of free traders in an open market, producing goods and services for the ultimate benefit of all, whereas in the neocon version it signifies destruction, rather than production, and a war of all against all.

Whether we can nail this cabal before they do any more damage, and come closer to their horrific goal, is an open question. While the underlying issues are beginning to emerge in the "mainstream" media, I wouldn't count on Seymour Hersh's recent declaration that Patrick J. Fitzgerald "is going to save America" by "unraveling the whole conspiracy." It seems too much to expect of a single person, although, if I had to bet on any one individual, it would be Fitz.

It seems, though, that he won't have to bear the burden alone. As this column is being written, news is breaking that Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is taking the Senate into special closed session to discuss some of the following questions:

"How did the Bush administration assemble its case for war against Iraq? Who did Bush administration officials listen to and who did they ignore? How did senior administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people? What was the role of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics? How did the administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the administration's assertions? Why has the administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements?"

The story of the Niger uranium forgeries – and the cabal that created and circulated them – is about to be exposed, and this is well-suited to illustrate the tragic lesson of how and why we got to where we are today. For a long time, the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee has delayed its promised "phase two" of the investigation into the generation of bogus pre-war intelligence. The indictment [.pdf] of Scooter Libby, and the La Repubblica revelations, have busted the logjam. We may be about to learn how a crude forgery was inserted – by high U.S. government officials – into the U.S. intelligence stream, with the active collusion of the Iranians, the INC, and the intelligence agencies of three major U.S. allies.

How many laws were broken in the process?

While Congress slept, the neocons lied us into war. But the nation and – finally! – our representatives are beginning to wake up.

The Libby indictment is just the beginning. Neocon-gate is big, and getting bigger by the day. Before this is over, we'll have half the staff of the American Enterprise Institute in the dock – and the other half testifying against them.

– Justin Raimondo

A couple of pertinent blog entries about the Italian connection to the Niger forgeries, from Josh Marshall at TPM. There are several links to source material that I didn't include here, but which you can access by going to the links below.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006910.php



And later that evening...

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006914.php

http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=46867

Bush aide denies ties to fake Iraq-Niger documents
By Adam Entous, WASHINGTON: President George W Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, denied that he or his staff received fake documents in 2002 that showed Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, a claim that formed part of the administration's case for going to war.

After consulting with a member of his staff ''to refresh my memory,'' Hadley told reporters yesterday that the documents were first obtained by the State Department and then shared with the CIA, and that he does not recall ever discussing the issue with Italian intelligence officials.

''Suffice to say they didn't come to me. They didn't come to the NSC,'' Hadley said, referring to the National Security Council.

Bush, in making a case for war in his 2003 State of the Union address, said there was evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa to further apparent nuclear-weapons ambitions. Bush cited British intelligence as the source of the information.

The FBI has been investigating the origin of the forged documents. US officials have said in the past that the information was partly traced back to Italian intelligence sources.

The White House acknowledged after the war that the intelligence was faulty and Hadley took the blame for the reference that showed up in Bush's State of the Union speech.

According to reports in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Italian intelligence helped pass off forged documents that accused Iraq of trying to buy 500 tons of ''yellowcake'' uranium from Niger.

Focus has centered on Hadley because of his Sept. 9, 2002, meeting with Italy's intelligence chief, Nicolo Pollari.

Exactly one month later, on Oct. 9, 2002, an Italian journalist provided the U.S. Embassy in Rome with copies of douments about the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sale, according to a US congressional investigation. Copies of the documents were then sent to State Department headquarters and the CIA, the congressional report said.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office said last week that the government and Italian intelligence had no ''direct or indirect role in the fabrication and the transmission of the 'fake dossier on Niger uranium.''' Backing up Berlusconi's account, the White House said earlier this week that US officials who attended the September 9, 2002, meeting do not remember any discussion of the Niger claim or any exchange of documents.

ITALY'S ROLE? Pollari is due to address an Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence service on Thursday at a closed-door meeting called to discuss the latest claims.

Asked if he or any member of his staff met with Italian ntelligence outside the White House when the issue was discussed, Hadley said: ''I can tell you my recollection. My recollection is no, not here, not anyplace else.'' The Niger documents were declared forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency in March 2003.

The Niger issue has attracted renewed attention as US special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. As part of his investigation, Fitzgerald has asked witnesses about the Niger report.

Bush's 2003 uranium claim fueled criticism from Plame's husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, that the administration twisted intelligence to bolster its case for war.

Wilson based his criticism in part on a CIA-sponsored mission he made to Africa in 2002 to check out reports that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Wilson said the report was unsubstantiated, and later accused the White House of leaking his wife's identity in retaliation.