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Banned
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stevo, that factcheck.org piece is more than 2 years old....much more has
been reported, since......and before, that strengthens the argument that Joe Wilson was a victim of the white house, "payback".
Please read my post so that we can have a discussion on the same page. All of what is posted here is supported by news reporting included in this post, and by included citations of conclusions in the Senate Select Intelligence report, about Joe Wilson's "finidings".
<b>I share how I come to believe what I post, and consider what I receive as "feedback" (or blowback ?) from my effort....</b>
It is also irrelevant because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Phase I report, (we're still waiting for the 26 month delayed Phase II...)
said:
Quote:
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=6
or http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2...8-301/sec2.pdf
Report on the US . Intelligence Communitys Prewar Intelligence ...
From page 7:
On February 26,2002, the former ambassador arrived in Niger. He told Committee staff that he first met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick to discuss his upcoming meetings. Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick asked him not to meet with current Nigerien officials because she believed it might complicate her continuing diplomatic efforts with them on the uranium issue. The former ambassador agreed to restrict his meetings to former officials and the private sector.
The former ambassador told Committee staff that he met with the forrner Nigerien Prime Minister, the former Minister of Mines and Energy, and other business contacts. At the end of his visit, he debriefed Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick -,Chad.
He told Committee staff that he had told both U.S.officials he thought there was “nothing to the story.” Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick told Committee staff she recalled the former ambassador saying <h3>“he had reached the same conclusions that the embassy had reached, that it was highly unlikely that anything was going on.’’</h3>
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but, stevo.....<b>if you must....</b>
Quote:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...5/ai_n12757836
Butler `wrong' on Iraq uranium link
Independent on Sunday, The, Jul 25, 2004 by Raymond Whitaker
<b>A leading nuclear expert has pointed out a technical error in the Butler report on WMD intelligence in Iraq, and criticised the committee's finding that intelligence on Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was "credible".</b>
The Butler report demolished the most controversial allegation in the Government's September 2002 WMD dossier - that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes - but observers were surprised that the uranium claim passed scrutiny.
American investigators have dismissed the suggestion that Iraq was seeking uranium from the west African state of Niger in a quest for nuclear weapons, because it was based on forged documents. It was also inherently implausible, they added, since Iraq had 550 tons of "yellowcake" - uranium which has undergone the first stage of processing. But the Butler committee accepted the Government's contention that it had separate intelligence, which has never been disclosed, to support the claim.
Norman Dombey, retired professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University, said yesterday that the Butler report wrongly described Iraq's stocks of uranium as unprocessed. But Professor Dombey, credited with pointing out numerous flaws in the story of an Iraqi defector whose nuclear claims were widely circulated in the US during the 1990s, was more critical of the committee's intelligence findings on the Niger issue.<b> "The Butler report says the claim was credible because an Iraqi diplomat visited Niger in 1999, and almost three- quarters of Niger's exports were uranium. But this is irrelevant, since France controls Niger's uranium mines," he said. </b>
Last year this newspaper interviewed the now-retired diplomat, Wissam al-Zahawie, who said he had been sent on a tour of African countries in 1999 to invite their leaders to a trade fair in Iraq. In Niger he met only the President, who was assassinated two months later. British intelligence on the issue appears to be based entirely on speculation by other Niger officials about the purpose of Mr Zahawie's visit.
Professor Dombey pointed out that the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report in the US quoted widespread scepticism about the British information on Niger. One agency said "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious". Asked by the committee to comment on Britain's WMD dossier, the deputy director of central intelligence, John McLaughlin, said "they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch" on the African uranium question, adding: "I think they reached a little bit on that one point." Another senior official singled out the same part of the dossier, saying: "They put more emphasis on the uranium acquisition in Africa than we would."
Despite doubts at the time, George Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that "the British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa". The head of the CIA, George Tenet, who has since stepped down, apologised for its inclusion. But Britain stood by the claim, saying it was not based on the forged documents that had fooled other countries. Other US intelligence on the issue was conspicuously thin, the Senate committee noted.
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/po...gewanted=print
or http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...A80894DE404482
2002 Memo Doubted Uranium Sale Claim
January 18, 2006, Wednesday
By ERIC LICHTBLAU (NYT); Foreign Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 8, Column 1, 1068 words
A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was ''unlikely'' because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.
Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send ''25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers'' filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous ''16 words'' in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, relied on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech. Two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the supposed Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.
But the intelligence assessment itself -- including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim -- was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.
The White House declined to discuss details of the declassified memo, saying the Niger question had already been explored at length since the president's State of the Union address.
''This matter was examined fully by the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission, and the president acted on their broad recommendations to reform our intelligence apparatus,'' said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
The public release of the State Department assessment, with some sections blacked out, adds another level of detail to an episode that was central not only to the debate over the invasion of Iraq, but also in the perjury indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
In early 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency sent the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger to investigate possible attempts to sell uranium to Iraq. The next year, after Mr. Wilson became a vocal critic of the Bush administration's Iraqi intelligence, the identity of his wife, Valerie Wilson, a C.I.A. officer who suggested him for the Niger trip, was made public. The investigation into the leak led to criminal charges in October against Mr. Libby, who is accused of misleading investigators and a grand jury.
The review by the State Department's intelligence bureau was one of a number of reviews undertaken in early 2002 at the State Department in response to secret intelligence pointing to the possibility that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake, a processed uranium ore, from Niger to reconstitute its nuclear program.
A four-star general, Carlton W. Fulford Jr., was also sent to Niger to investigate the claims of a uranium purchase. He, too, came away with doubts about the reliability of the report and believed Niger's yellowcake supply to be secure. But the State Department's review, which looked at the political, economic and logistical factors in such a purchase, seems to have produced wider-ranging doubts than other reviews about the likelihood that Niger would try to sell uranium to Baghdad.
The review concluded that Niger was ''probably not planning to sell uranium to Iraq,'' in part because France controlled the uranium industry in the country and could block such a sale. It also cast doubt on an intelligence report indicating that Niger's president, Mamadou Tandja, might have negotiated a sales agreement with Iraq in 2000. Mr. Tandja and his government were reluctant to do anything to endanger their foreign aid from the United States and other allies, the review concluded. The State Department review also cast doubt on the logistics of Niger being able to deliver 500 tons of uranium even if the sale were attempted. ''Moving such a quantity secretly over such a distance would be very difficult, particularly because the French would be indisposed to approve or cloak this arrangement,'' the review said.
Chris Farrell, the director of investigations at Judicial Watch and a former military intelligence officer, said he found the State Department's analysis to be ''a very strong, well-thought-out argument that looks at the whole playing field in Niger, and it makes a compelling case for why the uranium sale was so unlikely.''
The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
A Bush administration official, who requested anonymity because the issue involved partly classified documents, would not say whether President Bush had seen the State Department's memo before his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003.
But the official added: ''The White House is not an intelligence-gathering operation. The president based his remarks in the State of the Union address on the intelligence that was presented to him by the intelligence community and cleared by the intelligence community. The president has said the intelligence was wrong, and we have reorganized our intelligence agencies so we can do better in the future.''
Mr. Wilson said in an interview that he did not remember ever seeing the memo but that its analysis should raise further questions about why the White House remained convinced for so long that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.
''All the people understood that there was documentary evidence'' suggesting that the intelligence about the sale was faulty, he said.
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Yes...it's complicated, and I gave no control over that....it just is.
This is the background.....this is what happened:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...901478_pf.html
A Leak, Then a Deluge
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?
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; A01
..........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 [Martino] 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.
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 [prime minister] 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 -- soon departed for Niamey, the Niger capital. He said he found no support for the uranium report and said so when he returned.
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.
President Bush invoked the mushroom cloud in an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. References to African uranium remained in his speech until its fifth draft, but a last-minute intervention by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet excised them.
Tenet's success was short-lived. The uranium returned repeatedly to Bush administration rhetoric in December and January. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice cited the report in a Jan. 23 newspaper column, and three days later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for a nuclear weapon?"
16 Words and Wilson Strikes Back
By the time Bush stated the case personally -- in the notorious "16 words" of his Jan. 28 State of the Union address -- the uranium had been thoroughly integrated into his government's case for impending war with Iraq.
The IAEA exposed the documents as forgeries on March 7, 2003. The Bush administration, while acknowledging uncertainty, did not admit its primary evidence had been faked.
Late April and early May saw a succession of Bush administration assertions that the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had just begun. By then, The Washington Post was reporting that teams looking for weapons in Iraq were departing in frustration, making way for a new Iraq Survey Group that became an 18-month forensic examination of where U.S. intelligence had gone wrong.
Wilson spoke anonymously about his trip to Niger to New York Times opinion writer Nicholas D. Kristof, whose May 6 column accused Cheney of permitting truth to go "missing in action." The failure of the weapons hunt, and alleged deception of the public, had been laid at Cheney's feet.
In the vice president's office, Libby had long since come to believe that the CIA was undermining Cheney and the president's conduct of the war. One undercurrent of the events to come was a venerable form of Washington institutional combat, between the White House and the executive agencies ostensibly under its command.
Miller of the New York Times wrote later that Libby believed the CIA was hedging against accusations of failure by blaming Cheney and Bush for its mistakes. Another top official, a longtime ally of Libby's, told a reporter at the time that the CIA was working actively to conceal evidence favorable to the White House.
Libby had known enemies inside government -- but an unknown enemy outside. It did not take him long to discover that the latter was Wilson.
'There Would Be Complications'
In late May and early June 2003, according to Fitzgerald's indictment, Libby asked for and received information about Wilson's trip from a senior State Department official, who is not named in the indictment but is identified by colleagues as then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman.
On June 9, the CIA faxed classified accounts of Wilson's assignment "to the personal attention of Libby and another person in the Office of the Vice President." Two or three days later, Grossman told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and had been involved in planning Wilson's trip. An unidentified "senior officer of the CIA" confirmed Plame's employment for Libby on June 11, and Cheney told Libby the next day which part of the agency employed her.
For Libby, according to a senior official who worked with him at the time, "I think this just hit a nerve." By June, he said, "the blind, deaf and dumb had to be aware that something was wrong in Iraq." Uranium was "always a side issue," but it was also "the beginning of the unraveling of the big story . . . calling attention to a huge mistake he was part of. So it's no wonder he took this personally."
A senior intelligence officer who knew of Libby's inquiries about Wilson and Plame said in an interview yesterday, <b>"It didn't occur to anyone that the reason why was so that her name would go out to reporters." That, the official said, is "the lesson you learn from this."</b>
On June 12, The Post published a story challenging the uranium claims. Wilson has since said he was among the sources for that story.
A man identified by colleagues as John Hannah, described in the indictment as Libby's "then principal deputy," asked Libby soon afterward whether "information about Wilson's trip could be shared with the press." Libby replied, the indictment states, "that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly."
On June 23, Libby allegedly crossed his first big line. At a meeting in his office with Miller of the Times, he said Wilson's wife might be a CIA employee.
Attack and Counterattack
Wilson emerged from anonymity with a splash on July 6, telling his story in a New York Times opinion column, a lengthy on-the-record interview with The Post and an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The next day, Libby lunched with Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, according to the indictment. He told Fleischer that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and noted that the information was not widely known. The same day, the State Department sent Powell a classified memorandum written a month earlier identifying Wilson's wife as a CIA employee and saying it was believed she recommended Wilson for the Niger mission. Powell was traveling with Bush to Africa, and sources said the memorandum was widely circulated among officials with appropriate clearances aboard Air Force One.
On July 8, Libby met Miller, the reporter, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel at 16th and K streets. Asking that she attribute the information to a "former Hill staffer" -- he had once been legal adviser to a House select committee -- Libby criticized CIA reporting of Wilson's trip and "advised reporter Judith Miller of his belief that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA," the indictment states.
On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, Libby talked to Miller and Cooper. <h3>That same day, another administration official who has not been identified publicly returned a call from Walter Pincus of The Post. He "veered off the precise matter we were discussing" and said Wilson's trip was a boondoggle set up by Wilson's wife, Pincus has written in Nieman Reports.</h3>
Quote:
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index....howcaseid=0019
......By Walter Pincus
pincusw@washpost.com
.......Journalists, including me, have been put in the middle of highly publicized criminal investigations and civil cases based on leaks. <b>On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.</b>
I didn’t write about that information at that time because I did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip. But I did disclose it in an October 12, 2003 story in The Washington Post. By that time there was a Justice Department criminal investigation into a leak to columnist Robert Novak who published it on July 14, 2003 and identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Under certain circumstances a government official’s disclosure of her name could be a violation of federal law. <b>The call with me had taken place two days before Novak’s column appeared.</b>
I wrote my October story because I did not think the person who spoke to me was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get me to stop writing about Wilson. Because of that article, The Washington Post and I received subpoenas last summer from Patrick J. Fitzgerald...
......I refused..... It turned out that my source, whom I still cannot identify publicly, had in fact disclosed to the prosecutor that he was my source, and he talked to the prosecutor about our conversation......
When my deposition finally took place in my lawyer’s office last September, Fitzgerald asked me about the substance of my conversation about Wilson’s wife, the gist of which I had reported in the newspaper. But he did not ask me to confirm my source’s identity.....
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Earlier that week Rove and another unknown source gave the information to Novak as well.
On July 14, for the first time, the name passed into the public domain in sixth paragraph of Novak's syndicated column: "his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative." For all its seismic importance now, that column provoked little immediate response.
Time magazine reported on its Web site shortly afterward -- based on sources that Cooper, the author, has since identified as Rove and Libby -- that "some government officials have noted to Time in interviews . . . that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
David Corn of the Nation was among the first to protest. Naming Wilson's wife, he wrote July 16, "would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated her entire career."
By the following week the story reached NBC's "Today Show," and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) demanded an investigation. The administration replied without apology at first. According to Wilson, MSNBC's Chris Matthews told him off camera: "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was 'fair game.' "
Out of view of the public, the CIA took the first steps towards a formal investigation. On July 30, it reported to the Justice Department a possible offense "concerning the unauthorized disclosure of classified information." In August the agency completed an 11-question form detailing the potential damage done. In September, Tenet followed up with a memo raising questions about whether the leakers had violated federal law.
On Sept. 26, 2003, the FBI launched an inquiry into who leaked Plame's name and occupation.
'If Only It Were True'
Justice Department lawyers notified then-White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales at about 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 29, that the investigation had begun. Gonzales, now attorney general, has said he alerted Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. at once. But he did not tell anyone else -- or instruct White House employees to preserve all evidence -- until the following morning. According to Gonzales, lawyers at Justice said it would be fine to wait.
John Dion, a veteran counter-espionage prosecutor, ran the initial investigation with a team of FBI agents at his disposal. They soon brought in Rove and other top aides for questioning.
But early signals from the White House suggested the probe might come to nothing. Bush expressed doubts on Oct. 7. "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official," he said. "Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials."
Three days later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters he had talked to three officials -- Libby, Rove and Elliot Abrams -- and "those individuals assured me they were not involved in this."
The following Tuesday, Oct. 14, Libby reached a decision point. The FBI asked whether he had disclosed Plame's job or identity to any reporter, and he said he had not even known those details until July 10 or 11. His source, he asserted, was NBC's Tim Russert. According to the indictment, he said he passed along Russert's information as gossip to Cooper of Time. He told the FBI that he did not discuss Plame with Miller at all when they met on July 8.
Current and former officials said they did not know why Libby made those statements. Perhaps, they said, Libby believed the reporters would never be forced to testify, or that the statements from Bush and McClellan encouraged him to believe the inquiry would reach no result. Whatever his reasons, Libby had committed himself. He would give much the same account to agents again in November, and repeated them twice in sworn testimony before a grand jury.
"It would be a compelling story that will lead the FBI to go away, if only it were true," Fitzgerald said in his Friday news conference. "It is not true, according to the indictment."
Libby's attorney, Joseph Tate, has said Libby testified to the best of his recollection. "We are quite distressed the special counsel has now sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr. Libby's recollection and those of others and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements," Tate said in a statement Friday.
'Eliot Ness With a Harvard Law Degree'
On the next to last day of 2003, John D. Ashcroft, then attorney general, abruptly recused himself from the case. He had ignored months of complaints from Democrats that his political ties to potential suspects should disqualify him from supervising the investigation. Rove, in particular, was a longtime friend and paid adviser to Ashcroft's campaigns for Missouri governor and the U.S. Senate.
Through the fall and winter, officials said, Ashcroft received periodic briefings on the case. In the last week of December, about a month after Libby's second interview with the FBI, then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey had multiple discussions with Ashcroft about whether it was time for a change, Comey has said.
Comey told reporters on Dec. 30 that an "accumulation of facts" in the investigation had brought about Ashcroft's recusal. Details of their conversations have not been made public, and it is not known who initiated them.
"The issue surrounding the attorney general's recusal is not one of actual conflict of interest," Comey said, but "one of appearance."
Juleanna Glover Weiss, a spokesman for Ashcroft's Washington consulting firm, said yesterday that the former attorney general would not discuss the decision.
Republican officials expressed the hope at that time that Ashcroft's recusal would provide political cover for the White House if no indictment resulted. One said the move would "depoliticize" the case on the eve of presidential campaign season.
Ashcroft's departure brought to the probe a man Comey described as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree." Fitzgerald, an old colleague of Comey who had recently become U.S. attorney in Chicago, asked for and received the full delegated powers of the attorney general. A month later, Comey clarified in writing that Fitzgerald could pursue any violation of criminal law associated with the case -- including perjury and obstruction of justice, the heart of the indictment handed up Friday against the vice president's chief of staff.
Indictment and Resignation
After a year-long struggle with journalists, who resisted demands to disclose their sources, Fitzgerald persuaded Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan -- and the appellate judges above him -- that reporters were the only available "eyewitness[es] to the crime." Pincus, Cooper and Russert gave testimony under negotiated limits after receiving the consent of their sources. Miller went to jail for 85 days, then testified after Libby gave her his direct consent, by letter and telephone. Novak has never disclosed whether he spoke to Fitzgerald's grand jury.
The denouement came Friday. Just after noon, six men and 13 women filed silently into Courtroom Four in the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse. They had served on Fitzgerald's grand jury for two years. Now they sat silently before U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson. Calling the courtroom to order, Robinson asked whether the grand jury had something to present. The forewoman, wearing a black cardigan, rose and walked a few steps with a sheaf of papers. She handed them up to the magistrate's clerk. Robinson declared them in order and adjourned.
Charged with five felony counts, Libby resigned from the vice president's office that day.
Fitzgerald, in his news conference, said he could not speculate on whether anyone else would be charged. He said "the substantial bulk of the work of this investigation has concluded," but not all of it.
"I will not end the investigation," he said, "until I can look anyone in the eye and tell them that we have carried out our responsibility."
Staff writers Dan Eggen, Dafna Linzer, Dana Milbank and Christopher Lee, and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Quote:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9938948/site/newsweek/page/3/
Newsweek. (International ed.). New York: Nov 14, 2005. pg. 4
The FBI ended a two and a half year probe into suspicious Niger documents without resolving a mystery: who forged papers used to bolster Bush's case for war in Iraq? The bureau announced that the documents, which purportedly showed attempts by Saddam Hussein's government to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger, were concocted for financial gain rather than to influence U.S. foreign policy. The CIA sent diplomat Joe Wilson in February 2002 to look into the issue after Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, got copies of the forged papers and sent reports about them to the CIA and other Western intel agencies. But a senior bureau official, requesting anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, told NEWSWEEK <b>the FBI never interviewed Rocco Martino, the Italian businessman who provided the documents to SISMI.</b> Last week Martino told an Italian newspaper he played "a double, triple game"—working as a freelance agent for SISMI and French intelligence. Martino said he was instructed by a SISMI agent to pick up the documents from a woman at the Niger Embassy in Rome. "I was simply the deliveryman," he said, adding he had no idea the papers were fraudulent. Italian intel chief Gen. Nicolo Pollari denied that his agency forged the documents, but claimed that SISMI warned the United States the documents were fraudulent after President George W. Bush mentioned Saddam's interest in buying uranium from Africa in his January 2003 State of the Union Message.
—Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Quote:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006939.php
Is that really how it is? Please.
As those of you who are following my <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_30.php#006908">on-going series of installments</a> on this story know, I spent time with Martino during both of those visits to the US. And this line about not being able to compel him to testify is a crock.
I don't know what the Bureau's authority would have been in such a case. But whether they had any power to compel Martino to talk is irrelevant because they didn't even try to contact him while he was here.
When Martino came to the US the first time last year, it was in early summer. His identity was then still a secret. At least it hadn't yet been published anywhere. So there's no way to know whether the FBI investigators would have known that this sixty-something Italian man flying into New York was a central player in the forgeries drama.
The second time he came, however, was in early August. And by that time his name had been splashed across papers in several European countries, as well as in the Financial Times, which of course you can find on newsstands in most large US cities.
He flew to New York under his own name. And no FBI, law enforcement or intelligence officials made any attempt to contact him during the several days he remained in the US.
There have now been a number of press reports about the alleged FBI investigation into the forgeries story. The Bureau has stated publicly that they have closed the investigation and that they did so after determining that there were no political motives behind the hoax, only a desire to make money. They made that determination without figuring out who forged them or even talking to the guy at the center of the story. And the reasons they're giving for not talking to him are, frankly, bogus.
None of that adds up.
Something's wrong.
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<b>Then it was reported that the FBI was re-opening the investigation:</b>
Quote:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...7_niger03.html
FBI reopens its inquiry into forgery leading to Iraq war
By Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The FBI has reopened an inquiry into an intriguing aspect of the pre-Iraq war intelligence fiasco: how the Bush administration came to rely on forged documents linking Iraq to nuclear-weapons materials as part of its justification for the invasion.
The documents inspired intense U.S. interest in the buildup to the war and led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said he found little evidence to support the claim, and the documents later were deemed to have been forged......
......The FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a two-year inquiry and concluded the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme, not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.
<h3>Those findings concerned some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a former Italian spy named Rocco Martino</h3>, identified as the original source of the documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.
After talking with committee members, FBI officials decided to pursue "additional work" on the case.
.....A senior federal law-enforcement official confirmed late Friday that the bureau has reopened the investigation.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the request to reopen the inquiry was prompted by information recently made available to the FBI. Also, he said, some people he declined to name had become more cooperative.
The issue erupted in July 2003, when Wilson published his findings in a New York Times opinion piece. Administration officials leaked the identify of Wilson's wife, a covert CIA agent named Valerie Plame, allegedly as part of an effort to discredit Wilson's claims, prompting an investigation into the outing of a covert agent.
The Plame case led to charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements against Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who resigned. <b>It also has raised questions about the administration's use of intelligence and how it targeted critics.</b>
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Quote:
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/g...s/060606fege02
The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed
The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House
By CRAIG UNGER
READ V.F.'s PLAMEGATE COVERAGE
......."A Classic Psy-Ops Campaign"
or more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.
The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.)—that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet–East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."
In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.
By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.
o trace the path of the documents from their fabrication to their inclusion in Bush's infamous speech, Vanity Fair has interviewed a number of former intelligence and military analysts who have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon. Some of them refer to the Niger documents as "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops [psychological-operations] campaign." But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.
The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness."
All of which flies in the face of a campaign by senior Republicans including Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to blame the C.I.A. for the faulty pre-war intelligence on W.M.D. Indeed, the accounts put forth by Wilkerson and his colleagues strongly suggest that the C.I.A. is under siege not because it was wrong but because it was right. Agency analysts were not serving the White House's agenda.
What followed was not just the catastrophic foreign-policy blunder in Iraq but also an ongoing battle for the future of U.S. intelligence. Top officials have been leaving the C.I.A. in droves—including Porter Goss, who mysteriously resigned in May, just 18 months after he had been handpicked by Bush to be the director of Central Intelligence. Whatever the reason for his sudden departure, anyone at the top of the C.I.A., Goss's replacement included, ultimately must worry about serving two masters: a White House that desperately wants intelligence it can use to remake the Middle East and a spy agency that is acutely sensitive to having its intelligence politicized.
Cui Bono?........
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....and now....the news:
Quote:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13085306.htm
Posted on Fri, Nov. 04, 2005
Italy provided U.S. with faulty uranium intelligence, officials insist
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Contrary to Italian government denials, a powerful Italian military intelligence agency passed bogus allegations to the United States of an Iraqi effort to buy uranium ore from the African nation of Niger for a nuclear bomb program, U.S. officials said Friday.
The purported deal, which President Bush cited in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, was a key argument that Bush and his senior aides advanced for invading Iraq and toppling dictator Saddam Hussein. It remains unclear, however, who forged the documents, why and how information from such crude forgeries got into a major presidential speech.
No nuclear weapons program was found after the March 2003 invasion.
<h3>Four U.S. officials said the Italian military intelligence agency known as SISMI passed three reports to the CIA station in Rome between October 2001 and March 2002 outlining an alleged deal for Iraq to buy uranium ore, known as yellowcake, from Niger. Yellowcake is refined into the uranium fuel that powers nuclear weapons.
The U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because portions of the matter remain classified.</h3>
One of the reports passed by SISMI contained language that turned out to have been lifted verbatim from crudely forged documents that outlined the purported uranium-ore deal, the U.S. officials said.
"SISMI was involved in this; there is no doubt," said a U.S. intelligence official who's closely followed the matter.
The United States obtained complete copies of the forgeries in October 2002; the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that the documents were fakes in March 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, and the White House later conceded that Bush shouldn't have made the allegation.
The Italian government has denied that SISMI was involved in concocting or passing the forged documents.
A July 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report said three reports on the alleged deal were passed to the CIA during that period, but it didn't disclose the name of the foreign intelligence service that provided them.
Two of the U.S. officials said SISMI passed similar reports about the alleged deal, based on the forgeries, to the intelligence services in Britain, France and Germany.
Britain has continued to stand by a 2002 white paper that charged that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake in Africa.
Bush cited the British assertion in his 2003 State of the Union address rather than the U.S. intelligence reports, which had been disputed by some CIA experts and by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
The U.S. officials were reacting to the reported testimony by SISMI Director Nicolo Pollari on Thursday in a closed-door Italian parliamentary committee hearing.
After the hearing, Italian lawmakers said Pollari had pinned the passing of the forgeries on a former SISMI informer named Rocco Martino and had denied that any Italian intelligence agency was involved in concocting the fakes or disseminating them.
News reports have quoted Martino as saying he'd obtained the documents from a contact at the Niger Embassy in Rome, but this was the first time that he'd been officially identified.
In a related development, the FBI on Friday confirmed Pollari's assertion that FBI Director Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Italian officials in July in which he said an investigation into the forgeries had determined that they weren't part "of an effort to influence U.S. foreign policy."
"The investigation discounted that motive, confirmed the documents to be fraudulent, and concluded they were more likely part of a criminal scheme for financial gain," an FBI statement said.
Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who'd asked the FBI to investigate the forgeries in March 2003, said he wasn't ready to declare himself satisfied.
"While I greatly appreciate all of the FBI's efforts into completing the investigation of the Niger documents, some questions remain," Rockefeller said in a statement. "Until I receive additional information about the thoroughness of the investigation, I cannot make a judgment on the accuracy of the conclusions."
Key questions remain about how the Niger claim made it into the Bush administration's case for war, including who concocted the forged documents and why the claim was in Bush's State of the Union address after being knocked out of a draft of a nationally televised presidential speech some two months earlier.
<b>The issue is receiving new attention because of last week's indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of lying to a grand jury</b> that investigated who leaked the identity of a CIA officer after her husband, a former U.S. diplomat, accused Bush of twisting the intelligence on the alleged uranium deal.
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