Behind the lies of Libby - the Italian job

[savemefromdumbya]

Under Libby's lies - smokescreen for some underhanded dealings?

After Sept. 11, the Italian intelligence service showed the documents to the CIA without disclosing their dubious origins, according to La Repubblica. Berlusconi met with President Bush in the White House on Oct. 15, 2001. In what La Repubblica concedes might be a coincidence, the CIA started circulating the forged Niger documents to other Washington agencies the next day.

Later in 2001, Italian operatives passed the same documents to British intelligence via Richard Dearlove, the Italian paper says.

By the summer of 2002, Pollari knew the documents were forged and the credibility of their source dubious, according to La Repubblica, but never said anything to his British and American counterparts. As The Post reported in July 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in March 2003 that the documents were forged......

There is one important difference between the DSM and La Repubblica stories. The Downing Street Memo itself did not identify the U.S. officials with whom Dearlove met in the summer of 2002. The La Repubblica series is more specific. It raises the question of whether Hadley deliberately circulated false information about Saddam's nuclear activities after his meeting with Pollari in September 2002.

Did U.S. officials intentionally "fix" intelligence reports with false information as a way to hype the danger of Iraq to the American public? And more specifically, did Stephen Hadley do the fixing?

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/

http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/sismicia/sismicia.html (translate using Babelfish) Altavista)

[FogerRox]

1. Book 'em DAno

[merbex]

5. You're dating yourself

I haven't seen that show in years!!

[Old and In the Way]

2. This is what I'm holding back the popcorn for.

IMHO, we are in Act 1 of a 2 Act play. The good stuff happens when we start focusing the lights on who manufactured the evidence. You already know the answer boys and girls....it's going to get tied back to Dick Cheney and probably Junior.

This manufactured evidence....anyone remember another situation last year having to do with forged documents?

IMHO, it was nver supposed to get this much attention. Rumors and transcriptions, bogus references linked to bogus references....attack the veracity, but forget about the messenger. Nothing to see here. Let the forgeries be exposed, but move on. They did their job....what else is there to see?

It's one thing to duped by bogus evidence and that was always the fallback position. But if you are the architects of the evidence used to justify an illegal and immoral war that has become our nation's undoing.....oooooh boy, is this going to be bad. I think this could make the Valerie Plame outing seem like a misdemeanor.

Here's a clue:
From Talking Points Memo-

Given the gravity of the case, it seems difficult to believe that the United States would tolerate Italy's non-cooperation. But what about when Martino came to the United States?

Martino travelled to the United States twice last year. He travelled under his own name and stayed in New York City where he provided interviews to me and two other journalists. By the time Martino made his second visit to the United States his name and his central role in the case had been reported in several Italian and two major British papers. Yet no effort was made to contact him or question him when he was in the US for several days.

Surely US law enforcement wouldn't need the permission of the Italian government to speak to Martino when he was on US soil.

How serious can an investigation be when there is no attempt to speak to the central person in the case?

==============================

Kind of sums it up, don't it? FBI was as determined to locate the source of the forgery as Bush was in finding the WH leaker...or the anthrax perp.

[savemefromdumbya]

3. I guess the Feds could look it all up on the web

there's so much stuff written about this. All they have to do is Google!

[A-Schwarzenegger]

4. I didn't know the Niger docs were being circulated a MONTH after 9-11

in Washington.

[Old and In the Way]

6. Secret energy meetings......oil field maps.......

all that was missing was a cause for war.

They were so busy planning their Iraqi invasion and oil concesions to their financial backers, who had time o worry about AQ warnings?