So who forged the Italian uranium documents?

[Hamlette]

The only people who stood to gain were those who wanted rid of Saddam. Chalabi? PNAC? Iran? US?

Rosanne asked the right question. Is Congress investigating this?

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Why & how did they fall for them?

Apparently they were so utterly bogus it took a few minutes to discredit them. How did they end up as a major justification for war months later?

[ComerPerro]

2. not hard to believe in something when it says everything you want to believe

EDIT: please don't assume I am giving them the benifit of the doubt here, or even implying that they were overzealous. I don't even think they ever believed it in the first place.

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. Either they are totally incompetent & lack any ability to decipher

fact from fiction, or they intentionally pushed the thing in full knowledge it was bogus. Either way they have no business being in charge of anything except their own defense in war crimes trials.

[Monkeyman]

4. Oh please let them defend them self's

[ComerPerro]

13. That's what I always like to point out

there can be no "well meaning, but we just screwed up" possible.

Its one of two:

They are either deliberate liars who charged in, evidence be damned.

Or they are completely incompetent, and are so bad at what they do that they put lives in danger and should be removed.

[GreenZoneLT]

5. I don't think they did.

You have to realize, the attack on Iraq was being planned BEFORE 9/11. Rumsfeld and a lot of those other guys were on the record in the late '90s calling for an invasion, saying that Clinton's using only missiles and no-fly zones was "feckless."

Sept. 11 just eliminated any obstacles. All the supposed evidence for WMDs was just cherry-picked to try to sell the invasion to the American general public, and to a lesser extent the UN. Rumsfeld was opposed to even GOING to the UN; he thought we had enough justification under the post-Gulf-War UN resolutions that Saddam had repeatedly violated.

The quality of the intel wasn't important to the Bushies; it was just marketing material. They'd made up their minds LONG before that.

I can say from personal experience that I started hearing rumors of an Iraq invasion in the spring of '02, and by July of '02, everybody in the military knew it was just a matter of getting the orders drawn up and the people and gear in place. It seemed silly to me at the time that people were paying so much attention to Colin Powell's dog and pony show, since none of that stuff would affect the outcome.

[The Magistrate]

7. Exactly, Sir: Just Marketing Material

And put together 'in house' to boot....

"How are countries governed and wars begun? Politicians tell lies to journalists, and then believe what they read in the newspapers."

[wildbilln864]

6. I've read that it was the Italian Intelligence...

but not sure. I am sure however that they knew they were forgeries.

[Richard Steele]

8. Someone who did NOT do well in art class. Some of the markings were LAUGHABLY bad.

Any decent HS art student could have made better fakes.

[DURHAM D]

9. We did. n/t

[Venus Dog]

10. Rocco Martino, an Italian businessman

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml

Whoever it was, I'm sure they were connected to Chalabi in some way

[seemslikeadream]

11. HADLEY NAMED

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/10/index.html#008117

HADLEY NAMED. La Repubblica has a dynamite series this week on the origin of the yellowcake forgeries. Laura Rozen reports:
With Patrick Fitzgerald widely expected to announce indictments in the CIA leaks investigation, questions are again being raised about the murky matter that first led to the appointment of the special counsel: namely, how the Bush White House came into possession of discredited Italian intelligence reports claiming that Iraq sought uranium "yellowcake" from Niger.
The key documents supposedly proving the Iraqi attempt turned out to be crude forgeries on official stationery stolen from the African nation's Rome embassy. Among the most tantalizing aspects of the debate over the Iraq War is the origin of those fake documents and the role of the Italian intelligence services in disseminating them.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo reveal how Niccolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as SISMI, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons.

The La Repubblica article quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, general Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."

Laura will have more on this story later today.

[seemslikeadream]

12. Berlusconi Behind Fake Yellowcake Dossier

Update 2 Nov 05: View all the crude forgeries here.
http://cryptome.org/niger-docs.htm






http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html


La Repubblica's Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo have been bird-dogging the phony yellowcake documents and they now have the goods on Silvio Berlusconi, who instructed Italian Military Intelligence to plant the evidence implicating Saddam in a bogus uranium deal with Niger. This is their story, printed in yesterday's on-line edition and translated by your friendly little blog owner.

All the Italians behind Nigergate were doublecrossers and dilletantes.

The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: (1)Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger 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 of centrifuges) were the Italian Government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and handover of the dodgy dossier for war to British and American intelligence.

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).

Condoleezza Rice, who was then White House Security Advisor, said on CNN: We don’t want the smoking gun to look like a mushroom cloud. A menacing Dick Cheney delivers a bolus injection on Meet the Press that We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his technical and commercial capabilities to acquire the material necessary to enrich uranium needed build a nuclear weapon. This was the beginning of an escalation of fear.

[seemslikeadream]

14. "The (Niger forgeries) Report that Wasn't"

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002983.html

Laura Rozen: "The (Niger forgeries) Report that Wasn't"

For weeks in the run-up to the Libby indictment last Friday, reports swirled in the blogosphere and some wires. They contended that CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had “widened his probe” to include investigating the origins of the Niger yellowcake forgeries themselves. They spoke of Fitzgerald getting ahold of a secret Italian parliamentary report that reportedly fingered a gang of American neoconservatives and aides to Ahmad Chalabi as being behind the Niger forgeries.

...

There’s just one problem: Not only has Fitzgerald not received such a report or even indicated he has any interest in one. There is no Italian parliamentary report, published or unpublished, on the Niger forgeries. In fact, until today, there has been no Italian parliamentary investigation of the Niger forgeries, or the claim promoted by the Italian military intelligence organization Sismi to the CIA and other western intelligence agencies that Iraq was seeking vast quantities of yellowcake uranium in Niger.

...

A reporter with the Italian newspaper Repubblica, which published a blockbuster series on the origins of the Niger forgeries last week, said that he heard rumors of such a report while in Washington this past summer, and went back to Italy and checked them out with his sources. He was left scratching his head. Not only is there no such report, there is as yet no such Italian parliamentary investigation. Sismi’s director Nicolo Pollari was interviewed by the Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence services on Thursday, in a closed-door session.

...

The Italian military intelligence organization Sismi reported that Iraq had signed a contract to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to the CIA in October 2001 and February 2002. It also reported those claims to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the MI6, which reported them back to Washington. A motley crew including a senior Sismi officer, a former Sismi officer turned intelligence peddler (Rocco Martino), and a Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome were identified by Repubblica as having collaborated to assemble the Niger forgeries, after staging a robbery on New Year’s Day 2001 to get official Niger embassy letterhead and a diplomatic codebook. Martino reportedly sold the dossier of forgeries to the French, the British, attempted but failed to sell them to the American embassy in Rome, and to an Italian reporter working for a Berlusconi owned magazine.


Lets hope Fitzgerald really does stay un-compromised, period because everyone knows from reading it Cheney deflected the blame to Italy.

The real forgers were NOT mentioned ie Duane Claridge so you can immediately see it.....total fucking whitewash in progress and its going to take a huge entity/army to get this bastard once and for all.

Notice how there was never any mention of....MICHAEL LEDEEN, mossad etc....

[Avalux]

15. PNACer Michael Ledeen - links

His 'fingerprints' are all over the documents.

http://lawnorder.blogspot.com/1990/01/daily-kos-niger-yellowcake-and-man-who.html

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/American_who_consulted_for_Pentagon_says_0117.html

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

16. Believe it or not, from American Conservative Magazine... excellent article on this!

http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html




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.

Continued at above link