Month: October 2005

Laura Rozen has just posted a blockbuster article on the La Repubblica Niger forgery series:

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo 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. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

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. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi’s director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet, but the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, “I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley.”

Go read! For additional context, see this Gordon Prather article in AntiWar.com today. From Fixing and Forging :

In late 2001, the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service had informed the CIA that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican had reportedly attempted on a visit to Niger to arrange the purchase of yellowcake.

There was, at that time, no documentation.

In February 2002, Wilson and others went to Niger and reported back that the Italian report was without foundation.

Hence, in early October 2002, CIA Director Tenet asked that a reference to the alleged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq be removed from a speech President Bush was to give on Oct. 7.

Guess what happened next.

The “documentation” for the arranged purchase of yellowcake by Iraq from Niger was delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome on Oct. 9.

The next day, Congress approved the Joint Congressional Resolution Authorizing the Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq.

And Bush, Cheney, and Condi Rice began referring to the Niger documents as proof that Saddam Hussein was reconstructing his nuclear weapons program.

The documents were provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency in March 2003, and within hours were determined to be forgeries.

Days later, Bush invaded Iraq.

UPDATE: Henry at Crooked Timber has done a translation of the actual La Repubblica article.

The confirmation that Patrick Fitzgerald is indeed investigating the forged Niger uranium documents introduced to the Bush Administration through Italy, first broken by AntiWar.com’s Justin Raimondo is now appearing in multiple “MSM” reports. On October 19, 2005, Justin wrote:

Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. “Bulldog” Fitzgerald asked for and “has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,” the former CIA officer tells me:

“Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.”

Among other major media outlets, UPI’s Martin Walker reports:

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald’s team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald’s team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush’s closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair’s aides has “sexed up” the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Still, Walker doesn’t appear to have tumbled to the logical explanation of why Fitzgerald’s probe into the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame leads him to the Niger forgeries. Mark Kleiman is in the same boat. In speculating about the selection of documents Fitzgerald has posted on his new website, Kleiman writes:

On the other hand, his selection of documents does seem significant. As against the GOP spin that he was appointed to look into violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he has the original letter giving him “all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department’s investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee’s identity” and a second letter written shortly thereafter specifying that his authority extends to any criminal attempt to frustrate that investigation.

But note that none of the documents on the site gives Fitzgerald any authority over the wider question of who made up and peddled the Nigerien yellowcake story, or the still wider question about how the administration hyped the threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons acquisition program as part of its sales pitch for the war.

Apparently Frank Rich suggested on Meet the Press today that the case might go in that direction. Ain’t gonna happen. Surely if Fitzgerald were moving that way, he would have asked for authority to do so, and would have added that request and the response to it to his webpage.

There is an explanation for why Fitzgerald’s existing authority covers the Niger forgeries, which Kleiman and Walker miss, which is explained in Justin Raimondo’s column today:

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald’s reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald’s purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

Read the rest.

One of the most puzzling questions about the Plame-outing scheme has always been why? How stupid and petty is it to “discredit” Wilson with lame charges of nepotism and wife-sponsored boondoggles? A flat-out hit job on the CIA for getting too close to the Niger forgeries is far more in character for the Bushistas.

Oh, and that mysterious “third man?” My money is on Grover Norquist.

UPDATE: Well, isn’t Jane Hamsher’s post interesting?

Reuters reports that America is nothing remotely comparable to a limited constitutional republic:

“The U.S. prison population, already the largest in the world, grew by 1.9 percent in 2004, leaving federal jails at 40 percent over capacity, according to Justice Department figures released on Sunday.

Inmates in federal, state, local and other prisons totaled nearly 2.3 million at the end of last year, the government said. The 1.9 percent increase was lower than the average annual growth rate of 3.2 percent during the last decade.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, there are more people behind bars in the United States than in any other country.

China had the second-largest prison population with 1.5 million prisoners, according to statistics updated in April and cited by King’s College. The total U.S. population is about 296 million, while China’s is 1.3 billion.”

Take that, you Red-Commie Bastards!

More

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show, I interviewed Justin Raimondo, who knows a thing or two about Scooter-gate, and former CIA analyst and author Michael Scheuer about the future of the war against al Qaeda.

Justin Raimondo: stream – download
Michael Scheuer: stream – download

The rest of the archives are here.

Officer H, an “Intelligence Analyst,” in responding to an article of mine that he did not name, said this:

“It didn’t change my belief in the thought that when I pull the trigger it is to save a life, not take a life.”

Via The Editors at The Poorman, this post at The Tattered Coat is a must read.

…Daniel has been silenced, against his will. And not only has he been silenced — he has been forced to publicly declare himself “a supporter of the administration and of her policies.”

A stop-lossed soldier angry that he is still serving in Iraq, seven months beyond his original enlistment agreement, Daniel is no longer free to post on his blog.

Read the entire thing, but here’s a sample of Daniel Goetz’s writing, from July 04, 2005:

S.O.S.

We – the forlorn Atlas, who bears the burden of lofty decisions – salute you, the free. May this day be a blessing to you and yours as you celebrate your freedom from the clutches of tyranny and strife. May your beer be as cold as the hearts of your enemies and your fireworks carry the zeal of your patriotism.

On this day, may you not be napalmed by an invading Army. May you not be tortured for a parking violation. Today, may your hometown not be bombed. When you sit down to eat tonight, may armed men not barge into your house and search your wife’s underwear drawer. May you not be zip-tied, marched outside, beaten and shot in the face.

God Save America.

God, save America.