Blair still swears the Niger documents proved to be forgeries are real

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http://www.sundayherald.com/35264

Niger and Iraq: the war's biggest lie?

<snip>Some time after the Iraqi ambassador's trip to Niger, the Italian intelligence service came into possession of forged documents claiming Saddam was after Niger uranium. We now know these documents were passed to MI6 and then handed by the British to the office of US Vice-President Dick Cheney . The forgeries were then used by Bush and Blair to scare the British and Americans and to box both Congress and Parliament into supporting war. There are an increasing number of claims suggesting Bush and Blair knew these documents were forged when they used them as evidence that Saddam Hussein was putting together a nuclear arsenal.

The truth behind claims that Blair's government 'sexed up' intelligence reports that Saddam could mobilise weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes may never be known, but the Niger forgeries lie like a smoking gun covered in Britain's fingerprints. At some point Tony Blair is going to have to answer questions about what the British government and MI6 were up to.

The fact that the documents were forged matters less than the purpose to which they were put. On September 24, 2002, Blair's dossier Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government said: 'There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Iraq has no active civil nuclear power programme of nuclear power plants and, therefore, has no legitimate reason to acquire uranium.'

<snip>Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says the Niger uranium claim was based on 'reliable evidence', which was not shared with the US. Although the Foreign Affairs Select Committee hasn't seen the evidence either, Straw told its chairman, Donald Anderson, the 'good reasons' for withholding the intelligence from the US in a private session. Blair won't say why the information is being kept under wraps , but he tells the nation there is no reason to doubt its credibility.

Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien said on June 10 that all relevant information on Iraqi WMDs had been sent to weapons inspectors -- but less than a month later he was contradicted by another Foreign Office minister, Denis MacShane, saying the UK didn't give the IAEA any information on Iraq seeking uranium. One senior western diplomat told the Sunday Herald: 'There were more than 20 anomalies in the Niger documents -- it is staggering any intelligence service could have believed they were genuine for a moment.

'I know that the IAEA told Britain and America, two weeks before El Baradei made his statement to the UN in March, that the documents were forgeries, that the IAEA was going to publicly state the documents were faked. At that point, the IAEA gave them a chance -- they asked the US and UK if they had any other evidence to back up the claim apart from the Niger forgeries. Britain and America should have reacted with shock and horror when they found that the documents were fake -- but they did nothing, and there was no attempt to dissuade the IAEA from its course of action.

'The IAEA had said it would follow up any other evidence pointing towards a Niger connection . If the UK and US had had such evidence they could have forwarded it and shut the IAEA up -- El Baradei would never have gone public if that had happened. My analysis is that Britain has no other credible evidence.' The source added: 'The weapons inspectors have friends in the CIA and the State Department . They made sure the documents made their way to the IAEA as they knew fine well they'd be exposed as forgeries.