Yglesias: WHO FORGED THE NIGER DOCUMENTS? At the heart of the WMD lies

[Nothing Without Hope]

that led to the Iraq invasion, this question has been strangely overlooked by even the Dems. Identifying the forgers and exposing how such transparently fraudulent documents were officially accepted by the Bush Administration despite warnings is potentially far more important than Rovegate/Plamegate. This Matthew Yglesias article should be a must-read for all of us - and then we need to find ways to find the truth about this vital, central question. Surely it's worth as much attention as the Plame leak.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10015

Follow the Documents

There's another Joe Wilson–related investigation that needs answers: Who forged the Niger memos in the first place?
By Matthew Yglesias
Web Exclusive: 07.19.05

(snip)

Upon further examination, those suspicions proved well-founded. The uranium document was not properly formatted as a Nigerian government document, and there were inconsistencies regarding names and dates. It's worth underscoring, moreover, exactly how absurd this second document was. It reads, in part:

Le groupement dirigé par les Ambassadeur de Niger, Soudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libye, Iran ont décidé que le "Global Support" qui est composé de spécialistes provenant de différents corps militaires des pays alliés sera actif dans l'immédiat. Nous sommes convençus que l'haute profession des militaires appartenants au "Global Support" soient dotes d'expériences considérables et très diversifiés dans le secteur de la défense et de la sécurité et sans aucun doute ils sont résponsables des charges qui seront leur assignées.

Suggestively, this is not grammatical French. Moreover, as a rough translation shows, it's completely ridiculous:

The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately. We are convinçed that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defense and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.

That something so absurd could have formed the basis for an important line in a presidential speech says a lot about the degree of unseriousness with which the Bush administration went about building its case for war. That aside, it raises a couple of pretty obvious questions: Who produced these documents, and why? I don't even have a "gotcha" speculation to offer -- I'd genuinely like to know. What we do know is that according to a footnote in the SSCI report, "in March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, , the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI's investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues."

The FBI, so far, seems to have come up with, well, with nothing. What we do know about the documents is that they were brought to the U.S. Embassy in Rome by Elizabetta Burba, an Italian journalist. According to European press reports, she got the documents from Rocco Martino, a former Italian military-intelligence official turned businessman with some kind of ties to French intelligence services. Martino has been to the United States at least twice since being publicly identified as the source of the documents, and the FBI didn't bother to interview him (http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/14/172732/082).

It seems clear that some powerful elements in Washington don't want to know the truth, which should raise suspicions. This, after all, would seem to be an important matter. Somebody went to some lengths to do this. He or she must have had some purpose in mind, and it's hard to see how that purpose could have been anything but nefarious. Republicans don't seem interested in finding out, perhaps because further scrutiny of the matter would simply reveal how willfully gullible the White House was, or perhaps for some deeper reason. Democrats' reticence to ask what happened to the FBI investigation is more puzzling, but someone ought to get on the case. That there's a partisan payoff at the end of this particular rainbow is far from clear, but unlike in the Plame case, knowing the truth might actually change how we think about a thing or two.

[Captain Hilts]

1. And why did we fall for them so easily?

This is a big issue that needs investigating. The IAEA and Italian governments didn't fall for them for a minute, yet we swallowed the whole thing hook, line and sinker.

[Nothing Without Hope]

2. The question of who pushed for their acceptance as authentic is part

of the question. As I recall, no one outside Bush Administration-controlled personnel were allowed to see these documents for a long, long time. (I'd like to find an article I vaguely recall about this and hope someone else will post on this aspect.) Once outside experts were allowed to see the documents, it took less than a day to prove they were frauds. To me, this is strong evidence that the Bush Administration people who used them for pushing the war KNEW they were frauds.

We need to find those old articles on this - the timeline for the appearance and general accessibility of these fraudulent documents. Who saw them and when? From the description of the documents, anyone who spoke French would be able to see the fraud; it wasn't even necessary to expose the mistakes about Nigerian officeholders.

[Nothing Without Hope]

9. I answered my own question: New Yorker article and Google search

Here's Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on this, posted downthread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1939214&mesg_id=1939297

And there is a LOT more info from this google search;
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22New+Yorker%22+Niger+Uranium+forgery&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[Supersedeas]

3. why haven't any media folks tried to speak with Rocco?

[FloridaPat]

4. It took the IAEA 24 hours to declare them forgeries. That was known

before we invaded. It was part of the lie. No need to investigate. Rumor had an American behind the actual forgeries. Don't know where that link went to.

[Nothing Without Hope]

5. There was a New Yorker article about this, suggesting that it might

have been done by disaffected people at the CIA for a joke and a way to demonstrate the gullibility and lack of expertise of the Bush-run intelligence stovepipers. Then, the theory goes, it got out of hand.

Don't know whether that theory is true, but the article did have useful facts.

[sam sarrha]

20. probably to 10 seconds the report took a day to get read.

[sam sarrha]

6. It is said that a Nigerian Diplomat made them up for Profit, he heard that

was money in such documents and he cut and pasted some letterheads and signatures, with the desired middle typed in.

The Zeroxed department letter heads were so bad they couldn't be recognized, A pen was used to outline the eagle, etc. m It is said that when the FBI saw them they were so amateurish they laughed out loud.

whatever the case Amatures were involved.. that alone points a BIG finger tword Bu$hitCO

[Nothing Without Hope]

7. Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker re the forged Niger documents:

This is excellent, worth reading in its entirety. Only a bit of it can be shown here because of the 4-paragraph excerpt rule:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

WHO LIED TO WHOM?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
Issue of 2003-03-31

(snip)

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

(snip)

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

(snip)

ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”

(snip)

[enough]

12. This Hersh article is very interesting. Thanks for the link.

Definitely worth going back and reading this.

[Nothing Without Hope]

15. And there's another important Hersh article downthread here;

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1939214&mesg_id=1939297

[Emit]

8. RE: Michael Ledeen/Niger Docs/Etc.

As discussed on this thread this past weekend:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4124354&mesg_id=4126740

Don't know how credible these sources are...


Here's a piece that points to Ledeen, or someone very close to him, as being the forger of the Niger Documents:

Who Forged the Niger Documents?
By Ian Masters, AlterNet. Posted April 7, 2005.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21704 /

This is an excerpt of transcripts of an interview by Ian Masters (Los Angeles public radio KPFK on April 3, 2005)with Vincent Cannistaro, former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Reagan.

<<snip>>
(Cannistaro cont'd)...Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents.

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction.

(Ian Masters) Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.

(Cannistaro) It was SISME, yeah. ...

During the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

(Ian Masters) Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...

(Cannistaro) I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...

(Ian Masters) If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?

(Cannistaro) You’d be very close . . .

<<snip>>

[Norquist Nemesis]

10. Well don't shoot a messenger

but google "Victor Ostrovsky fake documents"

A friend who has read his books tells me that plants just such as these were have been circulating out there for a while waiting for harvesting. The books also explain how secret intel is circulated and recycled to the point that when it comes back to the original source, they don't realize it was their intel but rather believe it is confirmation of their intel.

[Nothing Without Hope]

11. BUT these documents were OBVIOUS, BLATANT FORGERIES

It isn't that they were "intelligence," it's that they were clear forgeries that were pushed as authentic. Any competent intelligence insider would - and did - spot them for what they are. So recirculation isn't the issue, it's who forged them and why were they publicly clamed as authentic when they were so obviously fake?

The resistance to allowing any outside experts to see the documents (see the Hersh New Yorker excerpt upthread here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1939214&mesg_id=1939297
implies that the people using these fakes to push war with Iraq KNEW they were forgeries, whether they forged them themselves or not.

[Norquist Nemesis]

13. The people pushing them are the same people that put 16 words

into the State of the Union Address. They shook hands with one another and slapped Bush on the back congratulating themselves. Reality and authenticity are not an issue for these people. The documents could have been written in crayon and initialed GWB in the upper right hand corner...it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was they existed.

OSP likely saw them, too. They managed to filter intelligence to the WH, and cherrypicked with a focus on 'fixing the intelligence'. So, "who" did it doesn't matter at this point. And those who "knew" they were fakes apparently didn't care. It suited their purpose and that was enough.

[Nothing Without Hope]

16. They were told the documents were forgeries but they still used them.

It wasn't ignorance, it was deliberate deception.

Condoleeza Rice is supposed to be a gifted linguist. If she had read the 20 pages or so of these documents in the French original, she would have known. It wasn't something that took a lot of insider information to work out - these documents were not only forgeries, they were horrendously BAD forgeries, and warnings about this had been coming in from the first.

[Norquist Nemesis]

21. I'm not disagreeing

They were all in this. How many times have administration officials claimed :shrug: instead of claiming responsibility? With them, everything and anything is on the table for the ends to justify the means. If it doesn't, it isn't used. And God forbid someone should publicly call them on it.

[Nothing Without Hope]

24. Nope, no disagreement here. Amazing how this whole story has been

allowed to float without being pursued seriously by more than a very few, like Seymour Hersh in his 2003 articles.

Who forged the documents?

And how was the suppression of their obvious fraudulence orchestrated? The 'Stovepipe" Hersh article suggests Bolton was involved in that part.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

22. no wonder they fought (and are still fighting) to discredit Wilson -

Now, because they are afraid to open the WHOLE can of worms...

[sam sarrha]

17. I smell...... BU$H SHIT..............!!!! this is typical Bu$h Shit

:puke:

[Nothing Without Hope]

14. Here is the other Seymour Hersh New Yorker article, where Bolton's

central role is discussed and an insider speculates that the forgery could have been an intended prank by disaffected CIA agents hoping to demonstrate the incompetence of the Bush Administration intelligence stovepipers.

This long article is also well worth reading in its entirety.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

THE STOVEPIPE

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
Issue of 2003-10-27

(snip)

Who produced the fake Niger papers? Ther is nothing approaching a consensus on thi question within the intelligence community There has been published speculation about th intelligence services of several differen countries. One theory, favored by som 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.”

(snip)

[Norquist Nemesis]

18. This supports what I was pointing out

that it didn't matter that they were fake. (period) Wolfowitz and Perle probably clinked champaign glasses over those documents.

[sam sarrha]

19. was this before or after Bush ordered a 'Purge of Liberals' from CIA/FBI ?

that could make a difference..

[Nothing Without Hope]

25. The "Stovepipe" Hersh New Yorker story lays that out - how "real"

intelligence was not welcome and only the Bush Admin-approved product was passed along. Bolton was centrally involved in that part.

[SpiralHawk]

46. He also purged "liberal" generals from the Pentagon

By "liberal," I mean career officers who would not merrily bend over and kiss BushCo ass for any and everything. All that remains at the top of the Pentagon are the True Believers and Ass Kissers.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/01/rumsfeld_army_leaders_in_discord?mode=PF

Most recently, a handful of Army three-star generals retired, prompting speculation that Rumsfeld was conducting a purge.

"It's a major purge. Blood is flowing out of the Pentagon," said David Hackworth, a retired Army colonel who writes a syndicated column.

An Army spokesman said that the retirements were not unusual and that 13 three-star generals are expected to retire this year.

The truth appears to lie in the middle. "This is not a large number of generals to be retiring," said Loren Thompson, a defense specialist at the libertarian Lexington Institute. "However, it is striking how many of them are out of the weapons purchasing part of the bureaucracy. Either by design or by coincidence, that means that when the Army gets a new secretary there will be very few people in senior positions who have a sense of ownership of the weapons programs."

But the reaction illustrates the antagonism toward Rumsfeld.

[bunny planet]

23. This might have nothing to do with this, just a thought. Remember

about 10 days or two weeks ago when the Italians were all up in arms about our CIA agents kidnapping Italian citizens off the streets in Italy and extraditing them to country's that sanction torture. They were threatening us with legal redress, it was in the news for a couple of days, and then nothing. About a week later, there was a little blurb here on DU that Italy had changed their minds about withdrawing their troops from Iraq as they'd said they would earlier in the year. What made them change their minds about both of those stories. Lots of stories out of Italy, Ledeen connection, Niger documents, CIA rendition of Italian citizens. I'm just saying, what's the connection, is there one?

[Nothing Without Hope]

26. I'm betting there is a connection, even if it is only cronies passing info

along as requested. The Italian regime is fascist too and a staunch ally of Bush.

[bunny planet]

27. so I haven't entered the total paranoia zone Hope.

That's a relief!
:D

[Nothing Without Hope]

28. With this gang, the Paranoia Zone is probably the wisest place to be

There isn't anything that's too horrible or too stupid for them, apparently.

Good to see you, Thumper, despite the disturbing story! :hi:

[Emit]

31. A MAJOR SPY SCANDAL IS BREAKING IN ITALY Jul 4, 2005

Speaking of coincidences...

And...

If we can trust Madsen as a credible source:

<<snip>>
A MAJOR SPY SCANDAL IS BREAKING IN ITALY -- PARALLEL, UNOFFICIAL NEO-FASCIST ITALIAN INTELLIGENCE GROUP HAS TIES TO NEO CON INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS IN BUSH ADMINISTRATION INVOLVED IN KIDNAPING MILAN IMAM. GENOA POLICE BUST PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE CELLS AROUND ITALY. POSSIBLE LINKS BETWEEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND TERRORIST GROUPS FIGURE IN PROBE.

Washington and Rome, Jul 4, 2005 UPDATED -- Genoa police have arrested the two leaders of a neo-Fascist unofficial intelligence and "anti-terrorism" police network in Italy and have conducted searches of homes throughout the country in a major crackdown on a group that recruited police and intelligence agents to their cause. The two neo-Fascist leaders -- Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca -- who reportedly have close ties to both the P-2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic lodge and a secret Cold War network known as Gladio, were arrested....

<<snip>>

The parallel intelligence network is reportedly the outgrowth of a Gladio network consisting of six divisions that operated in Italy, North Africa, and the Middle East during the Cold War. The P-2 Lodge, headed by fascist leader Licio Gelli, reportedly maintained close links to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig and his one-time foreign affairs adviser Michael Ledeen. Former CIA Osama Bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer told Italy's La Repubblica that the kidnaping of Abu Omar was authorized by SISMI chief Nicolo Pollari. A number of SISMI agents and assets have been tied to the group, including Francesco Pazienza, a SISMI agent, and Rocco Martino, who said he was the source of the faked Niger yellowcake uranium documents that were laundered through Rome and used as proof by the Bush White House that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Niger. That charge prompted the CIA to send Ambasssador Joseph Wilson to Niger resulting in a retaliatory exposure by the White House of the CIA's covert weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation network....
<<snip>>
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/diplomatic/foreign.htm

______________________________________________________________

[AuntiBush]

29. Libby/Cheney: War Machine & Their Overseas Buds

That's my guess. All of them are criminals - worse then Watergate. Way, way worse. Others agree (today)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3080261

[Nothing Without Hope]

30. MSN/Slate timeline for the forged documents - who said what, when:

Article cites (witihout links) some of the published articles on the forged documents during the key months of 2003.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2085616/

Follow That Story: The Nuclear Whodunit, Part 4

Who forged the uranium documents that bamboozled the U.S.? A chronology.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, July 14, 2003, at 4:47 PM PT

(snip)

Tenet's gallantry, however, does little to answer the question first raised in early March when inspectors at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency judged fake a mysterious set of documents Bush had relied on to buttress his claim about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Press speculation has fingered Iraqi dissidents as the group who had the most to gain in alleging Saddam's uranium shopping spree. The paper trail behind the documents has led to: a "con man" out to make money; Italian intelligence; and "the French." Some publications even suggest the United States, Britain, or other interested powers forged the uranium letters.

The documents are only a part of the disputed "intelligence" the Bush administration used to enlist support for an Iraq invasion. Other intelligence findings, which the administration and its principal ally, Britain, still support, assert a Saddam-Africa nuclear connection.

In the four months since the uranium documents were unmasked, the press has made only halting progress in identifying the counterfeiters, which may help explain why the documents seemed credible in the first place. Why wasn't Secretary of State Colin Powell ever tempted to cite the Niger intelligence? Who devised and executed the Niger scam? What exactly did they hope to gain from it?

A driftline cast into the Nexis sea captures hundreds of stories written about the disputed documents. It's beyond the scope of this article to determine who reported what first, so in condensing those stories into a timeline, more effort has been made to give a sense of how the story has unfolded in all its contradictory glory.

(snip)

[paineinthearse]

32. *'s answer: "It was Bubba!"

Can't wait to see the spin they put on this one.

[Nothing Without Hope]

33. The Wikipedia entry on this leans toward the Bush Admin, probably

Ledeen or person(s) close to Ledeen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_Forgery
(snip)

It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistaro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians:

"The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein . . . . <4>"

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistaro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." <5>

In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a Congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation. As of September 2004, the FBI had not yet interviewed Martino, claiming they were awaiting permission from the Italian government to do so. <6> However, Martino is known to have been in New York in August 2004. <7>

(snip)

(The Wikipedia page has many live links in the entry.)

A year and a half, and appaently STILL no serious investigation by the FBI despite Sen. Rockefeller's request. I'd like to know more about thiat - anybody hear any details about the FBI stonewalling this investigation?

[KoKo]

34. Doesn't anyone remember Josh Marshall & Linda Rozen all over this when

"Rathergate" spoiled the "60 Minutes Investigation" they had been working on for months? Josh and Linda tracked down someone in Italy that they thought could lead to the forged memo's which came from a seedy source who pushed the forgeries to an Italian journalist.

I can't remember all the details but Salon actually showed the Ed Bradley piece from "60 Minutes" that was canned when "Rathergate" broke. The video was excellent. Let's hope that at some point the Salon video and the "60 Minutes" report get "re-aired" if Plame and DSM's finally breaks open the whole coverup and lies they fed us to sent our sons and daughters into Iraq to fight for a PNAC/NEOCON Dream of Glory. :-(

[Emit]

36. Yes, never saw the video. Here's an overview

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:_IFSbXRZj28J:www.bluelemur.com/index.php%3Fp%3D311+Elisabetta+Burba+60+minutes&hl=en

<<snip>>

...The report contains little new information, but it is powerfully, coherently and credibly reported. It features the first on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who received the fake Niger documents in 2002 and passed them on to the U.S. embassy in Rome. Burba tells how she traveled to Niger and concluded that Iraq could not have purchased uranium from the tightly controlled French-run mines in Niger and that therefore the documents must have been faked…

That broadcast raises the question of whether the right-wing government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had helped manufacture evidence that his ally, Bush, could use to persuade Americans to support an invasion. Burba passed on the documents to the U.S. embassy in Rome at the instruction of her editor at Panorama, a news magazine owned by Berlusconi. An alternative theory, floated in corners of the conspiracy-minded European press, is that Martino was working for the antiwar French, who hoped to discredit the Bush administration by getting American officials to swallow obviously forged documents.

<<snip>>

[KoKo]

37. Thanks..for "overview" info...good read. Even my "dial up" allowed Ed

Bradley from Salong to be viewed...although...I have to admit it took a loooooong time to download. I was so "Hyped" at that point that I thought the loooooooooong Download was worth it, though. I even posted on DU that it was a great view ..but I believed at that time, anyway, that our "Media" was honest and that "60 Minutes" would air the Bradley interview within a month...How wrong I was...:-(

[Nothing Without Hope]

35. Maybe we should EMAIL Sen. Rockefeller and ASK ABOUT THE STATUS OF

THE FBI INVESTIGATION INTO THIS HE REQUESTED. I went to his official web site (http://rockefeller.senate.gov/index.htm) and found nothing about it.

Here's his email contact form page:
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/services/email.cfm

Anybody got a better way of reaching him?

[Nothing Without Hope]

38. kick n/t

[TexasThoughtCriminal]

39. A related question: Who forged the "Rathergate" documents?

Probably worth a whole other thread, but I always wondered why some news hound never tracked down the forgery of the TANG records of chimpy's AWOL years. Instead the media went into a conniption fit about Dan Rather and CBS's mistaken reporting. The more interesting news would be hunting down the forger!!

[Al-CIAda]

40. .

[homeopathic]

41. And who Forged the Documents on Galloway

Just a thought? They might want to compare documents to see if they are from the same source.

The Christian science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0620/p01s03-woiq.html

SNIP:

Awash in documents:

After the fall of Hussein's Baghdad government, stories based on internal Iraqi documents appeared in many news outlets. They detailed everything from mundane aspects of control used by local Baath Party cells to the high living of Saddam Hussein and his sons.

------------------------------
George Galloway:

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

[Norquist Nemesis]

42. Oh, My! I hadn't seen this one

Interesting that they "were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime". Sounds exactly like the Attack Machine's MO.

[Nothing Without Hope]

43. AGAIN: WE SHOULD DU JAY ROCKEFELLER, ASKING ABOUT THE FBI PROBE

that he officially requested back in early 2003. Apparently, NOTHING has been done. That official request for the FBI probe shut off all discussion of other investigations - which I suspect was the real reason it was made. A coverup ploy.

Senator Rockefeller, what about that FBI probe???? When will we see the report???

I found a page for a email submission form for Rockefeller here:
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/services/email.cfm

Anybody know of a better way to reach him?

If he fails to respond, I believe we should start DUing Congress and news media. This is outrageous - no investigation of this extremely important forgery or any of the others (as mentioned above).

[Nothing Without Hope]

44. kick n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

45. kick n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

47. Investigation of these questions MUST MUST MUST be pushed!!!

Who forged the documents?

Who suppressed the fact that they were obvious, blatant forgeries that even an amateur or a high school French student could detect? Why were all requests for copies by outside experts stonewalled for MONTHS?

And what happened to the supposed FBI probe of the Niger forgeries requested in early 2003 by Jay Rockefeller? At the time, that request served to derail any push for other investigations. Was that distraction actually its sole purpose?

[Nothing Without Hope]

48. This dovetails with the Plame leak scandal, but has received MUCH less

coverage than it should have.

[Emit]

53. Agreed

It's an important piece of the big picture here.

[KoKo]

49. Kick.. ....because maybe Fitzgerald is persuing this....

If the Italian Govt. helped Bushies out with Niger Forgeries this could be serious involvement in "treason."

[Nothing Without Hope]

50. They KNEW the Niger documents were forgeries too - and suppressed this

fact. They deliberately witheld access to them despite continuous pleas for MONTHS - it took only a few hours for the experts to be able to gather conclusive proof of their fakery once they did see them. You didn't have to be a Niger expert to spot it - as the excerpted translation in the OP shows, the French used was laughably bad. (I tend think that if the Italian government had done it, or if a Nigerian had done it, better French could have been used.) The administration had been told by their own security experts not to believe these documents.

It's both things - the forgery itself and how/by whom the fact of their OBVIOUS fraudulence was suppressed. Condi is supposed to be this great linguist - if she had read them she would have known.

[KoKo]

56. Didn't Condi say: "It didn't come to my attentio...maybe it was somewhere

in the bowels of theState Department." Hasn't she always denied knowing "anything?" Yet she spends those weekends at Camp David with Chimp playing his "favorite hymns" on the organ. "Little Star" has turned out to be quite the liar...hasn't she. :-(

[Nothing Without Hope]

58. Yes, they don't call her CondiLiar for nothing. She's definitely part of

these conspiracies, a front-line enabler of the Bush crimes.

[Emit]

51. Here's a MUST READ opinion piece, summarizing this

Justin Raimondo tries to piece it all together--long, lotsa' detail (some repeat info), but worth the read:

http://antiwar.com/justin/

July 20, 2005
Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald, American Insurgent
Occupied Washington under siege
by Justin Raimondo
The investigation into who "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent formerly engaged in deep-cover operations involving weapons of mass destruction, is now threatening to bring down some of the president's top advisers, including Karl Rove, the Machiavellian mastermind behind the White House's political machine. This has helped to create a partisan debate that obscures the potential significance of the investigation now being conducted by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, and blocks any real understanding of what in blazes is going on. There's one way to get beyond this political smokescreen, however, and that's by clearing the air about the origins of this probe: what prompted it, and why is it so important?

In October 2001, the CIA received a report from a foreign intelligence agency claiming that an agreement between Iraq and the African nation of Niger had been inked sometime in early 1999, and that by late 2000 Niger's president had personally communicated to Iraq his nation's willingness to begin uranium shipments pronto.

This news was met with almost universal skepticism by the American intelligence community, and our ambassador to Niger dismissed the claim as being beyond the realm of possibility. In November, the same foreign intelligence service reiterated its claim, this time with more detail. The outcome of a proposal to have the source submit to a polygraph test remains unclear. What is clear is that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) reflected the views of the Niamey embassy: the uranium mines of Niger, tightly controlled by a French consortium, were an unlikely source to fuel Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons program, particularly since the purported Iraqi order – 500 tons of yellowcake – amounted to one-sixth of that country's annual production. Surely such a large chunk torn out of Niger's yellowcake stock would attract a certain amount of notice. The whole notion just didn't make any sense.

<<snip>>

What we are witnessing is an insurgency arising to take back Washington from the occupiers. It is a two-pronged legal assault, launched from within the FBI and the Department of Justice by patriotic Americans who mean to take back their country from the invader. That is the meaning of the Plame investigation and the AIPAC-Larry Franklin spy case. The battlefield is not Baghdad, it's an American courtroom: the weapon of choice is not the RPG but the subpoena. As the prosecutor-insurgents inch slowly toward the White House, occasionally scoring direct hits inside the Green Zone, the panic begins to spread: talk of "staying the course" is tempered by hints of negotiations and rumors of withdrawal. Donald Rumsfeld tells us that the Iraqi insurgency could last a decade or more, but the Washington version is likely to end much sooner – in a clear victory for the insurgents.

–Justin Raimondo
Edited to add MUST READ

[bribri16]

52. When they tell us who forged the documents, they will have to kill us.

You can bet that that bit of intel came to us from a "trusted ally" in the ME. We knew it was a lie but we must protect the source.

[Nothing Without Hope]

54. Josh Marshall: the FBI is AVOIDING investigating Martino - a hot potato!

According to this report from Josh Marshal in September 2004, the identity of the person who tried to sell the forged documents to Burba in Italy has been widely known, but the FBI has made no attempt to interview him even when he was in the US. This, plus the other desultory work done in the "investigation" requested by Sen. Rockefeller, imply that

the FBI is deliberately avoiding providing any answers to the questions behind the Niger document forgery.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092604K.shtml

FBI Could Talk to Source of Forged Niger Papers. I did

Josh Marshall
The Hill, Thursday 23 September 2004

(snip)

My colleagues and I have known the guy's {i.e., the one who tried to sell the forged Niger documents to Burba} name since late spring. And at least three European intelligence agencies knew who he was well before we found out. In fact, twice this summer we brought him to New York for interviews.

By the time we brought Martino to New York in early August, he had already been identified by name in the Italian and the British press as the man who tried to sell Burba the forged documents.

In fact, when we whisked him out of the country, he was already under very active and conspicuous surveillance by Italian authorities in Rome. He flew to New York under his own name and stayed for several days.

(snip - says that the FBI did NOT attempt to interview Rocco Martino while he was in the US.)

I told my friend I didn't think they were even looking for him. And if they were keeping tabs on him, I really doubted they wanted to make contact. He was a hot potato. Everything we'd learned reporting on the Niger uranium case told us that this was a story the U.S. government did not want to get to the bottom of.

(snip -says the FBI knows who he is but has never tried to interview Martino. The lack of investigation is DELIBERATE.)

Hmmm...looks like the Bush administration may know all about the source of the forgeries but doesn't want it publicized.

Where did Martino get them? And at just the right moment, when the Bushies were looking for excuses to invade Iraq. And again, why was their brazenly fraudulent character kept secret by the administration?

CONSPIRACY.

[KoKo]

57. This is the person Josh and Linda brought into the US while Dan Rather

and Mary Mapes where taking heat for Bush Medals Lies ...which cost them their careers. Josh and Linda took a chance on this story. Josh in his innocence even alerted us that "Tectonic Plates in DC were going to "shift" soon under the weight of their investigation.

And...Ed Bradley and 60 Minutes had to "can" it because of the heat from the Bushies...and it died except that Salon covered it...with the video.

Let's hope that our Internet Warriors for TRUTH can really get this story back out there in front of the American People. It's time with the release of "DSM's" and "RoveGate" to get this out there. The audience with "unplugged ears" might be greater now than in the heat of the Bush vs. Kerry battle. :shrug:

[maryallen]

69. FBI director, Mueller ---

Bush waterboy.

[Nothing Without Hope]

55. Why is investigation into the Niger forgeries being suppressed?

Let's ask Sen. Jay Rockefeller to ask the FBI some tough questions about the investigation he requested and they are avoiding.

[maryallen]

72. Re: Robert Mueller, FBI director ---

From Perspectives.com:

JOEL SKOUSEN'S WORLD AFFAIRS BRIEF: was responsible for the prosecution of Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, who was the CIA's main money launderer for CIA operations in Panama. Even Congress knew of Noriega's CIA connections. Senator Kerry said that Noriega "had been on the payroll and an employee of the CIA for many, many, many years" Noriega was taken down by the CIA and prosecuted because he was found to be taking a much larger cut out of CIA drug profits than was agreed upon. During the trial, the presiding judge ruled that Noriega could not enter into evidence any documents proving his relationship to the CIA over the years. Mueller helped cover up this major issue by silencing Noriega . . . Mueller presided over the prosecution of John Gotti, the alleged Mafia head of the Gambino family group. CIA agent Richard Beneke, in response to a question of whether or not the Gotti family had ties to the CIA, testified, "Yes. As far back as 1968 and early 1969, we had begun to launder money from organized crime families in New York. At that time, Mr. Gotti was an up and coming member of one of the families. We used to wash their money out overseas and put it in Switzerland in nice, safe places for them."We do not know why the government turned on Gotti as a partner in crime. Perhaps he was also found guilty of skimming too much off the top.
<> The BNL investigation---
MUELLER WAS A TOP JUSTICE DEPT. OFFICIAL AS THE BNL -- Savings and Loan --fiasco unfolded. The full story of this seedy period has yet to emerge]

[Emit]

59. I have a question

Sorry if it's stupid, but, just trying to understand this.

British officials said that "their claim about Iraqi uranium purchases rested on a second source."

See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/05/ixworld.html


Have Blair/British officials ever divulged who their source was for their claim? And, if not, are we left to assume that they are, in fact, both from the same source?

It is, afterall, the whole spin that the WH is using for their own claim:

See the thread on the curious missing WH gaggle:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1944812&mesg_id=1946066

"AMERICAMERICAblog asks: 'Why is this White House transcript missing?'"

Q: What's the final language, Ari, your final position on the State of the Union speech and the uranium -- I know they were working on stuff last night, but I never got a chance to read it.

Q: Is this on the record?

MR. FLEISCHER: Yes, we're back on the record. After the speech, information was learned about the forged documents. With the advantage of hindsight, it's known now what was not known by the White House prior to the speech. This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech. There was reporting, although it wasn't very specific, about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa. It's a classic issue of how hindsight is 20-20. The process was followed that led to the information going into the State of the Union; information about the yellow cake was only brought to the White House's attention later.

<<snip>>
Q: When you talked about the contemporaneous reporting right before the speech, what exactly do you mean?

MR. FLEISCHER: There was the national intelligence estimate, intelligence community.

Q: So you had other reports about Niger and about the yellow cake from Niger.

MR. FLEISCHER: -- part of the intelligence community's reporting leading up to the speech --

Q: There wasn't a lot --

Q: Some British --

MR. FLEISCHER: -- which subsequently -- no, the President in the State of the Union cited the British report. But there had been an independent American report which in the instance of yellow cake, subsequently turned out not to be valid. But keep in mind, again, we've said that about the yellow cake for an extended period of time. This administration has been forthright.

____________________________________________________________________

From this link below, it appears that the British report was possibly based on the same faulty info (or was even really the same report) that the WH confirmed was bogus - So it's a circuitous deceit tactic...

See:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001138.html

<<snip>>
So what's the point? All of these articles focus on who was the customer, but fail to get at, who was the cook? And what was the identity and motivation of the Niger embassy official who allegedly handed off the documents to Martino?

Here's where an article by La Repubblica's Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, from July 16, 2003, becomes worth revisiting. The Repubblica article asserts, among other things, that the director of Sismi, Niccolo Pollari, actually told an Italian parliamentary committee back in November 2002 that Sismi was in possession of the Niger documents themselves:

It was SISMI Director Niccolo Pollari who, in November 2002, gave the Parliamentary Supervisory Committee on the Intelligence Services confirmation of the fact that "the service is in possession of documentary evidence of the trade in pure uranium between a central African country and Iraq."


The not so final analysis? It's a bit hard to believe that Sismi suddenly hasn't the faintest clue about the origins of the Niger documents. Among other sources, Pollari is on record in front of the Italian parliament intelligence oversight committee in November 2002 saying that the Italian services were in possession of such documents. Secondly, all of these articles that suggest the French intelligence service were Martino's customer for the Niger documents are interesting for reasons other than their champions may realize: for it just bolsters the evidence that the "other sources" the British and others have cited for claims about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger were in fact based on what we know to be the forged Niger documents.
<<snip>>

[Al-CIAda]

60. .

[Nothing Without Hope]

61. kick - we need to be pushing this

[Nothing Without Hope]

62. kick - this is an epicenter of the lies, we need to investigate n/t

[Al-CIAda]

63. .

[Al-CIAda]

64. .

[IChing]

65. .

[Al-CIAda]

66. .

[Al-CIAda]

67. .

[Al-CIAda]

68. .

[Nothing Without Hope]

71. Thank you for keeping this kicked. The complementary thread

is here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4169890#4171409
Thread title: "Niger forgeries: SISMI, OSP, Ledeen, Feith, Iran-Contra - It's ALL here!"

Taking the information in these two threads together, we see the outline of just how big this horrible story is. No wonder they wanted Plame out of the CIA and Wilson shut up and discredited.

[McCamy Taylor]

70. Maybe same person who forged Bush military records given to CBS?

[Emit]

73. Nothing Without Hope, if you haven't read this article

It's a long read, but I recommend it for the chronological detail and time line of events, and for some small but significant info on the Niger documents. For example:

"January 2001: Parties unknown burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up offices are various valuables along with stationery and official seals, which the Italian police warn might be used to forge documents."

Here's the original DU thread with article NVMojo posted:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=142972&mesg_id=142972


Here's the direct link to the article:

http://www.egp360.net/midnightride/morris_2005_07_24.shtml