Does the title sound like a roadside attraction? a circus sideshow? I have no pride.....
I have not previously seen this, from Bellaciao (linked below). Perhaps I missed it. Never hurts to put up something this cool a couple of times.
This is easily translated from the French into English. I may miss a word or two but here is what it says:
Republic of Niger
Fraternity-Work-Progress
Niamey [capital of Niger], the 27th of July, 2000
Mr. President:
I have the honor of referring to agreement #381-MI 2000, concerning the supply of uranium, signed at Niamey the 5th of July, 2000, between the government of the Republic of Niger and the government of Iraq by their respective delegation officials.
This supply equals 500 tons of pure uranium by _ will be delivered in two phases.
Having seen and examined the aforementioned agreement, I approve all and each part, by the powers vested in me by virtue of the constitution of 12 May, 1966.
(More documents in the dossier can be found
HERE)
MORE BELOW THE JUMP
I have heard some of this story here on dKos, but have not been able to digest it completely, nor have I have I seen the mysterious multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino,
ROCCO MARTINO
nor the document which he seems to have been so intimately associated with. There is some amazing stuff here I have not seen. Perhaps the reported FBI investigation of Michael Ledeen will ultimately lead to additional information.
MICHAEL LEDEEN
I will not get into Ledeen's story, suffice to say that Ledeen has been referred to as Karl Rove's brain on foreign policy. He is an Iran-warmonger. Clayton Hallmark believes he is insane. According to Hallmark:
George Bush Jr., when he assumed the presidency in 2000, already knew that he was going to settle the family score with Saddam Hussein. His "brain," Rove, quickly enlisted Ledeen to trump up a causus belli.
Now we have to leave Ledeen for a moment and get back to Rocco Martino, who at this same time, when Bush is elected in 2000, is some sort of con man/dealer in intelligence, who gets an assignment from the French to snoop around and find out who, if anyone, might be trying to buy contraband uranium from Niger. Rocco sniffs around the Nigerien embassy in Rome and comes up with something real, but insignificant:
Martino provided the French with documents showing that Iraq may have been planning to expand trade with Niger. In fact, the first set of documents did not refer to uranium, and the trade plans were probably the typical sort of relationship Arab oil states had with a whole range of third-world countries.
THIS MAY WELL BE AN ACCOUNT OF SAME 1999 IRAQI DELEGATION THAT JOE WILSON HEARD ABOUT, while Wilson was visiting Niger. He reported it to the CIA as a "nothing," but the CIA, the Butler Report, et al interpreted (falsely, it seems) as evidence of possible Iraqi interest in obtain Nigerien uranium !!!
"The Butler report said British intelligence had "credible" information -- from several sources -- that a 1999 visit by Iraqi officials to Niger was for the purpose of buying uranium:
Butler Report: It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible."
Not surprisingly, I suppose, the French, in 2000, not knowing what we know now, wanted Martino to obtain confirmation. This apparently led to the January, 2001 break-in at the Nigerien embassy in Rome, the theft of stationery, seals, etc, and the production of the forgery which you see.
Martino passed it on to the French secret service, who had paid for it, and also to Panorama [a magazine owned by Bush ally and Italian president Silvio Berlusconi], which assessed it by dispatching a female reporter to Niger. Panorama also turned the file over to the US Embassy in Rome for cross-checking in the US.
The female journalist soon told Martino that the trip to Niger had not produced any real confirmation, and also the French confirmed to Martino that the reports he had passed on to them were groundless. [SHADES OF JOE WILSON, ONE YEAR LATER] In other words, Bush's war rationale was debunked way back in 2001 by amateur and professional sleuths.
Furthermore, it was a very amateurish forgery, not likely produced through official channels by any state intelligence agency with their vast resources.
It is important to recall that in those early days of 2001, the Bush administration was largely ignoring warnings about Osama Bin Laden, and seemingly had no concerns about Iraq: February 24, 2001: "Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction," says Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
July 29, 2001: "We are able to keep his [Saddam's] arms from him," NSC advisor Rice tells the media. "His military forces have not been rebuilt."
However, in August 2001, An African informant reportedly hands Italian intelligence what are purported to be official Nigerien documents of "great importance." Among them are letters apparently dealing with Niger's sale of uranium to Iraq, including an alleged transaction in 2000 for some 500 tons of uranium oxide, telltale in a weapons program. The Italians routinely pass the letters on through NATO channels to the US, where by the fall of 2001 both State Department and Department of Energy nuclear intelligence analysts doubt the genuineness of the documents, and duly report their findings to Rice's NSC staff. One key feature which alerts the State analysts is the presence of a document which suggests that Iran and Iraq were plotting military action against major powers, coordinating through the Nigerien embassy in Rome (cited in Senate report).
The horror of 9/11 now breathes life back into the Niger forgeries.
Now back to Michael Ledeen. We are now post 9/11.
Michael Ledeen organized a meeting in Rome in December 2001 to gather evidence to support the planned war. Present were:
- Michael Ledeen, Karl Rove's foreign policy advisor and organizer of the meeting
- Nicolo Pollari, head of the the Italian equivalent of the CIA, the SISMI
- Italy's Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino
- Larry Franklin, an American who presently is being prosecuted in the US for giving classified information to an Israeli front group, AIPC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)
- Harold Rhode: member of Dick Cheney's Office of Special Plans, protege of Ledeen, go-between with Iraqi exile and CIA asset (at the time) Ahmed Chalabi.
This little group dusted off Martino's discredited second dossier on Iraq-Niger trade, with the uranium references. The Bush administration now had its causus belli.
HAROLD RHODE
According to the SSCI, unnamed foreign intelligence agency... provided an initial report to the US shortly after 9/11 and then another with more detail in February 2002. Connect the dots: Rhode comes back to Washington; tells Cheney. Cheney says, interesting. After the New Year, 2002, Cheney calls CIA: "Whats this about Niger?" According to Roger Morris:
January 2002: In cables cleared by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice... Washington asks the US ambassador to Niger to uncover any possible Iraqi purchases of uranium. After talks with senior Nigerien officials and French executives in the uranium mining operations, along with a still wider investigation by the embassy, including the CIA, the ambassador reports back that there is no evidence of such dealings, and no reason to suspect them.
Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Niger "vacation", etc...When Wilson returns, he is debriefed at CIA, but he does not submit a written report. The CIA does not submit a specific report about Wilson's trip; but it does
discredit the Iraq/Niger/uranium story:
the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador's report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken place, a senior administration said. Note that it is true that Cheney did not know that Wilson was being sent by the CIA, nor did he later receive any report by Wilson or mentioning Wilson by name. Also in February, Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., then-deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, is sent to Niger to evaluate the uranium question. Both Fulford and US ambassador to Niger Barbra Owens-Kirkpatrick debunk the idea. o
In spite of the evaluation by CIA, by March Bush is
saying, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." Cheney, the same month, tells Congressmen that it's a matter of when, not whether, and on March 24 appears on three talk shows, stating that Saddam is pursuing nuclear weapons.....Also in March,
British Cabinet member Robin Cook records disturbing meetings with Blair over US determination to go to war.
Blair comes to Texas to confer with Bush in April. Perhaps because of the questionable nature of the Niger info, the chosen tactic to justify war is, instead, the provocative bombing campaign begun in May. Saddam is too smart, this doesn't seem to work. Saddam also undercuts the UN pathway/WMD argument by agreeing to admit UN inspectors. Cook recalls that this step, which should have prevented war, was viewed negatively by the US/UK tandem. So, by summer of 2002, the US appears ready to invade without futher ado. The head of British intelligence meets with US officials: Without overt acts by Saddam, Blair argues that legal justification/UN is needed: Let's "fix the facts" means putting lipstick on the pig that is the Niger forgeries. By fall, they seem to have come up with a campaign of deceit...It starts with the assertion on August 26, 2002 by Vice President Cheney that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons along with its other phantom so-called “weapons of mass destruction.”
In London, Tony Blair spoke on September 24, 2002, for the first time on the attempts of Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium from Africa. Bush soon began to drive in the nail using the same argument. Remember, Martino had delivered the phony dossier this was based on to the US embassy in Rome over a year before. The US State Department and CIA rejected it and even Panorama had debunked it. The Pentagon, too, knew it was false, of course, but the Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle Defense Policy Board axis plus Bush and Cheney and their respective aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby ...went with it anyway.
Immediately, the UN wants to see these documents. No surprise there. But the US, which is supposedly trying to convince the UN to act, won't give them up for scrutiny until after both the Congress and the US public are convinced that war is necessary:
The documents had been sought by U.N. inspectors since September 2002 and they were delivered by the United States and Britain last February [2003].
They are immediately identified as frauds by the UN in March, 2003, after the SOTUS, but by that time it is too late to stop Bush. SSCI: "March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the INVO" (i.e., the IAEA).
In the intervening months between September, 2002 (when the documents are unveiled by Blair), and the SOTUS 4 months later, even without the prying eyes of the UN, the WH and Pentagon are struggling to maintain the credibility of the Niger forgeries, because of the CIA. The material is mentioned in the National Intelligence Estimate, but discredited in a disconnected footnote. The false information gets into the draft of the October Cincinnati speech, but is yanked by CIA insistence. In January, the material is resurrected and placed into the SOTUS. Some sort of discussion ensues, and the "500 tons" is removed, and "Niger" is changed to "Africa", in an attempt to at least temporarily obscure the notorious origins of the information.
Within a week, Powell addresses the UN, and completely omits any mention of the documents. The UN denounces the papers as forgeries. By May, Wilson is planting stories that the documents were long known to be fake, and finally in July, Rice and other WH officials admit the "mistake." George Tenet and the CIA, who had correctly assessed the information from the beginning, and notified others in the administeration, and fought the inclusion of the material in speeches, were made to bear the blame.
It is apparent from this narrative that the Niger forgery was the foundation of the campaign to sell the US on the pre-determined invasion of Iraq, and that this material had been debunked for a year before Wilson ever took off for his "junket" in Niger. The stonewalling done by Bush and especially Cheney must include not only discrediting Wilson, but also manufacturing a reasonable scenario in which Cheney requests information on Niger, yet never gets it. The way this is done is by focusing on Wilson himself, rather than on the information given them by CIA.