old forged Niger docs. (thought interesting given Cheney is being

[rodeodance]

looked at also by Fritz---. The reason initally why Plame was outed--it would blow his 'reasons' for the war.




http://cryptome.org/niger-docs2.htm

27 July 2003

Previously published forged Nigerien documents:

http://cryptome.org/niger-docs.htm

David Loepp writes:

Last Friday the Berlusconi weekly "Panorama" published an article by Elisabetta Burba in which she tells her version of how she got the Niger documents, realized they were false, and on advice from her editor-in-chief, turned copies over to the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002. She asserts that she received seventeen pages of documents and a Niger codebook from 1967. The story is at

http://www.panorama.it/mondo/reportage/articolo/ix1-A020001020115

In the layout of the print version of the weekly many of the published pages are overlapping, so it is not possible to have full and good copies of the new documents. I hope you can eventually get better copies from other sources.

Attached you will find two new documents with my translations. In keeping with previous translations by Lars, I have done my best to put them in equivalently bad English.

The document "Global Support" (English brandname in the original) refers to an utterly ridiculous coalition of "Islamic" nations put together during the annual meeting of the FAO in Rome, to combat western injustices........

[seemslikeadream]

1. Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence

Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence
Norman Dombey, The Independent



October 9, 2005

President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq.

Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war.

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

...

Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier parts of US foreign policy. He is an American specialist on Italy with a long-standing commitment to Israel. According to The New York Times, in December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In Rome they met the head of Sismi.

Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.So far, so circumstantial. One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but "funnelled through the Italians". When an interviewer asked Cannistraro "if I said Michael Ledeen", he reportedly replied "I don't think it's a proven case ...You'd be very close"

Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: "I have absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject."

It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?

more
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m16578&l=i&size=1&hd=0

[rodeodance]

4. Fritz is getting close to Cheney on this one.

[orwell]

5. Thanks

for the link. Nice find. This whole mess is looking like one of the great acts of treason in US history.

[EST]

2. I still can't shake the notion that,

Given that being the CIA head (pre-Goss) required a strong intellect and the ability to plan ahead, Tenet may have picked up a bit of patriotism along the way. Could this, with its obvious-to-the-most-casual-observer fakery have been his plan to destroy the bfee empire and its stranglehold on the nation?

[bleever]

3. Another crucial element to the campaign to sell the Iraq war.

Nominated.

Thanks!

[rodeodance]

6. this secret group was set up to 'sell the war"

White House Iraq Group

Rove chaired meetings of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secretive internal White House working group established by August 2002, eight months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to CNN and Newsweek, WHIG was “charged with developing a strategy for publicizing the White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.”<25> WHIG's existence and membership was first identified in a Washington Post article by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus on August 10, 2003; members of WHIG included George W. Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio, and communication strategists Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, and James R. Wilkinson. Quoting one of WHIG's members without identifying him or her by name, the Washington Post explained that the task force's mission was to “educate the public” about the threat posed by Hussein and (in the reporters' words) “to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad.” Rove's "strategic communications" task force within WHIG helped write and coordinate speeches by senior Bush administration officials, emphasizing in September 2002 the theme of Iraq's purported nuclear threat.<26>

The White House Iraq Group was “little known” until a subpoena for its notes, email, and attendance records was issued by CIA leak investigator Patrick Fitzgerald in January 2004, a legal move first reported in the press and acknowledged by the White House on March 5, 2004.<27><28>