Reply #41: Seymour Hersh - "The Stove Pipe" (2003-10-20) is interesting...

[RSchewe]

This article is chock full of insight regarding the trip to Niger and what was going on around that time regarding the Bush administration.

Never read this article back then, but reading it now, I found this part fascinating:

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

(emphasis added)

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact">http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact
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Not sure if this is true, but can you imagine this war being caused in part by a plan by CIA officials to get back at Cheney backfiring? Wow...

One day there is going to be a movie about all these lies and these crazy back stories when these people finally go down.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration rushed the nomination for the Supreme Court to get it in before everything comes crumbling down and to go a step further have a friend on the inside when the crap hits the fan. I wouldn't put a thing past these people.