Harry,
Why do you post in rec.boats? What is your hidden agenda?


"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
This is juicy...those damned questioning liberals, eh?

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.

The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct
a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the
Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo
Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to
make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the
American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his
position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself
with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to
present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly
accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s
obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to
provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in
Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6.

But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating
from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it
was “lacking in detail” and “very limited” in scope.

In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to
Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to
Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to
the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.

Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was
paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report
on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources
indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners,
knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials
who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself
as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant.
Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s
Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice
President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming
from the CIA and State.

The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was
intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the
White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing
information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that
false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was
given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.

On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and
Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a
group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the
Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon
dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents
was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD
dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his
request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily
intended to surface the documents.

Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister
Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the
U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the
CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent
straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went
directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.

On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16
words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the
Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had
actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they
not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy
Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and
pronounced them crude forgeries.

President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice
President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear
weapons.

The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence
suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s
Office of Special Plans.

In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome.
Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently
connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier
to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI
acquiescence, originally created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it
to the French, who were managing the uranium concession in Niger and were
concerned about unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the
Financial Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind
the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a disinformation
operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched with the
Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy
stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to
establish the authenticity of the forgeries.

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains
unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent
established procedures to present the information directly to receptive
policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved,
Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would
have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the
documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and
was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA
friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from
Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the
Iraqi National Congress.

It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling
to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from
an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi
worst-case.

The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees
would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her
husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in
July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into
something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign
against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned
about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.
__________________________________________________ ___

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro
Associates, an international security consultancy.
November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative