Reply #30: MSN/Slate timeline for the forged documents - who said what, when: [View All]

[Nothing Without Hope]

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)