Conscious Effort to “Clean-up” Niger Docs -Josh Marshall

[kpete]

Very interesting news out of Italy this morning, and news which appears to confirm a theory advanced recently by a poster at theleftcoaster.com (big coup for him, about which I'll explain more later). As you know, I've reported that the second report from Italian intelligence to the CIA about the Niger-Iraq story, the report in February of 2002, was a text transcription of what would later turn out to be one of the forged documents.

But there's one more small detail, reported this morning in La Repubblica. The report sent over from Italy removed the out-of-date names (one of the key reasons they were spotted later as forgeries) and replaced them with the correct names. In other words, there seems to have been a conscious effort to cover up the fact that the documents were bogus, to clean them up, as it were.

This raises a number of questions, which I'll try to address in a subsequent post. I'm running between meetings this morning. But for now one more detail.

La Repubblica has confirmed that three days after SISMI sent its original report to the CIA on October 15th, 2001, Nicolo Pollari himself followed up with another report on October 18th. This follow-up was in response to a CIA query about the quality of the sourcing behind the report on the 15th.

Pollari told the CIA that the report was quite credible and that the information originated with a woman working for SISMI in the Niger Embassy in Rome.
More soon on what this all means. -- Josh Marshall

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/