WP: A Leak, Then a Deluge

[kskiska]

Did a Bush loyalist, trying to protect the case for war in Iraq, obstruct an investigation into who blew the cover of a covert CIA operative?

Sunday, October 30, 2005; A01

Air Force Two arrived in Norfolk on Saturday morning, July 12, 2003, with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff aboard. They had come "to send forth a great American ship bearing a great American name," as Cheney said from the flag-draped flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

As Cheney returned to Washington with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the two men spoke of the news on Iraq -- the most ambitious use of the war machine Reagan built two decades before. A troublesome critic was undermining a principal rationale for the war: the depiction of Baghdad, most urgently by Cheney, as a nuclear threat to the United States.

Defending the war became the animating priority aboard Air Force Two that day. According to his indictment on Friday, Libby "discussed with other officials aboard the plane" how he should respond to "pending media inquiries" about the critic, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Apart from Libby, only press aide Catherine Martin is known to have accompanied Cheney on that flight.

The crimes alleged in Libby's indictment would come later. But the flight from Norfolk marked a transition in the four-month slide from politics as usual -- close combat in defense of the president's policies -- to what a special prosecutor described as perjury and obstruction of justice. Summer would give way to fall before Libby reached the point of no return, with his first alleged lies to the FBI. But he skirted the line soon after stepping off the aircraft.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901478.html

[MADem]

1. A good article-hits the high points/ fills in for anyone who missed it -nt

[Pirate Smile]

2. It includes the forged documents: "Burglary, Forgery, Delivery"

Burglary, Forgery, Delivery

The chain of events that led to Friday's indictment can be traced as far back as 1991, when an unremarkable burglary took place at the embassy of Niger in Rome. All that turned up missing was a quantity of official letterhead with "Republique du Niger" at its top.

More than 10 years later, according to a retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, a businessman named Rocco Martino approached the CIA station chief in Rome. An occasional informant for U.S., British, French and Italian intelligence services, Martino brought documents on Niger government letterhead describing secret plans for the sale of uranium to Iraq.

The station chief "saw they were fakes and threw out," the former CIA official said. But Italy shared a similar report with the Americans in October 2001, he said, and the CIA gave it circulation because it did not know the Italians relied on the same source.

-snip-
Martino continued to peddle his documents, with an asking price of more than 10,000 euros -- this time to Panorama, an Italian magazine owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Panorama editor Carlo Rossella said his staff concluded the letters were bogus but in the interim sent copies to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October 2002. "I believed the Americans were the best source for verifying authenticity," he said. When the documents reached the State Department, according to a commission that investigated prewar intelligence this year, analysts there said they had "serious doubts about the authenticity" of the "transparently forged" documents.

By summer 2002, the White House Iraq Group assigned Communications Director James R. Wilkinson to prepare a white paper for public release, describing the "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq's allegedly "reconstituted" nuclear weapons program. Wilkinson gave prominent place to the claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." That claim, along with repeated use of the "mushroom cloud" image by top officials beginning in September, became the emotional heart of the case against Iraq.

[lebkuchen]

3. This piece makes a big jump and contradicts what I've heard on CNNI

from its reporters. Here's where:

On Feb. 12, 2002, Cheney received an expanded version of the unconfirmed Italian report. It said Iraq's then-ambassador to the Vatican had led a mission to Niger in 1999 and sealed a deal for the purchase of 500 tons of uranium in July 2000. Cheney asked for more information.

The same day, Plame wrote to her superior in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division that "my husband has good relations with both the PM and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Wilson -- who had undertaken a similar mission three years before -- departed soon after for Niamey, the Niger capital. He said he found no support for the uranium report and said so when he returned.


The writers make it appear as though Plame had initiated her husband's going to Niger based on a request from Cheney, who wanted "more information." However, CNNI reporters have stated that Cheney's request went to the CIA, presumeably Tenet, and CIA heads considered Joe Wilson since he had been Ambassador to Gabon and the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Principe. They then asked Plame what she thought, and she gave her opinion. She did not initiate the plan to send her husband. I think that's an important point to make clear, before Sunday morning RWnut koffee klatches run amok. I'm surprised, or maybe not, that the Post article has implied otherwise. The Post has a bad enough reputation without its contributing to the false rumor-mill.

Joe Wilson has also felt it important to clear up the falsehood that the Post coontinues to promote:

Valerie was an innocent in this whole affair. Although there were suggestions that she was behind the decision to send me to Niger, the CIA told Newsday just a week after the Novak article appeared that "she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment." The CIA repeated the same statement to every reporter thereafter.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-wilson29oct29,1,5237501.story

[No Exit]

4. Kick! This article introduces the casual newspaper-reading public

to ROCCO MARTINO. That's a name everyone should know.

I hope other papers follow the lead until the whole story of the Niger forgeries--and the so-called Americans who used them to sell the Iraq war even when they KNEW they were forgeries-- is splashed across every newspaper.