Josh Marshall: Niger Forgeries the REASON Wilson Was Sent to Investigate

[Stephanie]

The forgeries were not only the evidence cited in the sixteen words. They were actually the source of the Iraqi nuclear claim in the first place, and the reason that Wilson was dispatched to Niger.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006896.php

According to US government sources I spoke to in the course of my reporting, there was far more tying the forgeries to Italy than the mere fact that they had first emerged in Rome in October 2002. Almost a year earlier, US suspicions about an illicit uranium trade between Iraq and Niger had begun with intelligence reports from Italy. Soon after the September 11th attacks, the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI sent its first report to the US government including details of an alleged Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of lightly-processed uranium ore from Niger.

Details of this and a subsequent SISMI report formed the basis of a reference to alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sales which was included in a CIA briefing Vice President Cheney received in early 2002. It was that briefing that prompted Cheney's request for more information on the Iraq-Niger sale. And that request led, in turn, to the CIA's decision to dispatch Joe Wilson on his trip to Niger. The Italian reports had set the whole process in motion.

But there was another key detail: The reports out of Italy were not a separate source of intelligence from the forgeries. They were the forgeries. To be precise, the intelligence reports from Italy were actually text transcriptions and summaries of the forged documents. The reports from Italy and the forgeries were one and the same. The distinction is rather like saying you haven't seen the PDF of a letter only the text from the letter that someone copied down from the PDF. The fact that the Italian reports came from as-yet-to-be-revealed forgeries of course could not be known at the time. That only became clear to intelligence officials much later when these post-9/11 Italian reports and the forgeries were compared. But looking back in retrospect, it was clear that the whole Niger uranium canard seemed to lead back to those forgeries.

***

In addition to these clues, there was one more piece of information. And here is where the two streams of information I noted above flowed together. A US government source pointed me toward a series of suspicious points of overlap between the forgeries story and a series of unauthorized meetings between Italian intelligence figures, two Pentagon employees working under Doug Feith, other Americans and the disgraced Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar. (These meetings were the subject of an article ("Iran-Contra II?") I published with Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris in the Washington Monthly in early September 2004.) Around the same time, another source -- this one outside the US government – told me a murky series of details about the meetings which purported to connect them to the emergence of the forgeries in Rome in October 2002.


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Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and U.S. President Bush greet each other prior to a luncheon at the 2005 World Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York, in this Wednesday Sept. 14, 2005 file photo.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/051029/481/rom15110291510
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President Bush meets with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, left, in this file photo taken Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2004, in the Oval Office of the White House.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/051029/481/rom15210291510
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[readmylips]

1. Forged papers were delivered to the White House per...

other articles. These were the papers used as proof to go to war against Iraq. Who received these forged papers? Why was the report delivered to the White House and not the CIA? The report was handed to the CIA and they discovered the papers to be a forgery. Cheney stopped the CIA from making it public, and suggested Wilson to visit Niger to investigate. Meanwhile, little bush's speech was already in motion to include the lies because WAR is what they all wanted.

Per above article: Details of this and a subsequent SISMI report formed the basis of a reference to alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sales which was included in a CIA briefing Vice President Cheney received in early 2002. It was that briefing that prompted Cheney's request for more information on the Iraq-Niger sale. And that request led, in turn, to the CIA's decision to dispatch Joe Wilson on his trip to Niger. The Italian reports had set the whole process in motion.

The article says that Cheney was briefed after the report was received. Who briefed Cheney?

[Stephanie]

2. Good question, and I bet Fitzgerald knows the answer

Isn't there an unnamed CIA briefer in the indictment?

[Norquist Nemesis]

3. There's also the Niger Embassy break in

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051023-104217-9679r

Good story about it all at link!

[Stephanie]

4. Thanks! Excerpt >

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.

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051023-104217-9679r