The Armitage Confession & the Niger Problem by Dave Lindorff

Annces

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Wed Aug-30-06 12:58 PM
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The Armitage Confession & the Niger Problem by Dave Lindorff

Edited on Wed Aug-30-06 01:00 PM by Annces

(Though this is mostly old news, I think it is at least worthwhile to have the story take on a shape and life of its own, so it doesn't get scattered to the winds. )

Now that Dick Armitage has admitted to being the initial source of right-wing columnist Robert Novak's news story outing Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent and wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, it's important to remember what this story is really all about. The mainstream media has focused on the scandal as a whodunit, all about White House leaks and journalists' unidentified sources, but the real issue has largely been left unaddressed, namely: Why did the White House go to such lengths to try to attack and discredit Wilson, a career diplomat?

To answer that question we have to go back to 2002 and the march to war in Iraq, and to 2003, when the Bush administration was starting to take the heat for its evident failure to find any "weapons of mass destruction" in the defeated land of Iraq, and for the fiasco of the occupation, which was becoming obvious.
As I wrote in Barbara Olshansky's and my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, May 2006): "the Bush-Cheney administration, which had its sights set on Baghdad and `regime change' from the day it took office, was by 2002 well on the way to invading Iraq, and was only looking for ways, to borrow from the Downing Street memo, to `fix the facts' so as to win public support for war. The game plan was to make Saddam Hussein look scary to Americans, and what better way to scare people than to say that this bloody dictator was trying to get The Bomb?"

This propaganda goal was accomplished with the help of a crude forgery of documents which were presented as solid evidence of such an effort. The documents-supposedly signed letters of intent to ship 400 tons of uranium ore from Niger in Africa to Iraq, bearing the signature of Niger's mining minister-had initially been provided to the White House by the sycophantic and obliging Italian Prime Minister, S. Berlusconi, and his chief of intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, back in October 2001. The documents were immediately spotted by the CIA and the State Department's own intelligence office as forgeries-the minister whose signature appeared on the sale documents had been out of office for years by the time of the signing date.

This is where the plot thickens, though. A team of investigative reporters in Italy, working for the respected newspaper La Repubblica, learned that a group of people, allegedly including Michael Ledeen, Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Defense Intelligence Agency Middle East analyst Larry Franklin, Pentagon Office of Special Plans member Harold Rhode and convicted bank swindler and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, met secretly in Rome. Also present, reportedly, were Pollari and the head of the Italian Department of Defense. The La Repubblica reporters, led by investigative reporter Carlo Bonini, claim that it was at this unusual meeting that a plan was developed to recycle the bogus and discredited Niger documents through British intelligence, so that they would come back to the White House as "new evidence" of Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

full article
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08302006.html

Yes, we could do a forgery