In addition to the Niger yellowcake hoax there were also the aluminum tubes imported from Europe which Pollari indicated would allow for enrichment of the uranium using centrifuges. There were no centrifuges in Iraq, but Judith Miller dutifully wrote an extensive article in The New York Times explaining that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with the tubes:
http://www.watchingamerica.com/larepubblica000007.html
Double-Crossers and Dilettantes - the Men Behind Nigergate Were All Italians
The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe (2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war.
—C-SPAN VIDEO: President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, Including the 16 Words About Niger Yellowcake, Feb, 28. 2003, 01:05:21 [Go to 00:49:40 for Yellowcake Remarks]
They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for The New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.
The "war dance" which followed Judith Miller's scoop seemed like "carefully-prepared theater" to an attentive media-watcher, Roberto Reale of Ultime Notizie (The Latest News). [Note: Roberto Reale is a TV news commentator for RAI-3 and a professor of Communications and Media at the University of Padua]
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So on September 8, 2002, Judith Miller portrays the aluminum tubes as "a smoking gun." The next day, Pollari is seated in front of Stephen Hadley. So what does he tell him? Pollari keeps his mouth shut. He doesn't reveal what he knows about the aluminum tubes, which are the source of so much concern (or even enthusiasm) for the Bush Administration. The shame is that those 7075-T6 tubes, 900 millimeters long, 81 millimeters in diameter, 3.3 millimeters thick, are well-known hardware to the Italian Army. They are 81-mm rocket artillery shells used in the Medusa air-to-ground missile system installed on Italian Army and Navy helicopters. In reality, the Iraqis are merely attempting to reproduce weaponry with which they became familiar during the long years of economic, military and nuclear cooperation between Rome and Baghdad. (Iraq's top army and air force officers trained in Italy during the 1980's). Saddam's General Staff needs to duplicate them, so to speak, because their inventory is stockpiled outdoors and is now corroded. That was the reason behind the new anodized aluminum tube purchases.
Why does Pollari not utter a word? If you ask Greg Thielmann, ex-chief of the State Department Intelligence Service, he'll tell you: But seriously, haven't you yet understood why the chief of Italian military intelligence did not provide us with any indication that would have allowed us to definitively discard the notion that the tubes would be used in someone's nuclear program? Well, I have an idea for you. SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the US Administration. Thielmann's assertion echoes like a shotgun blast. And the dates will yield solid confirmation.
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