Niger Forgeries Update: "When the US State Department finally gave ...

[understandinglife]

... international weapons inspectors its “evidence” that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was “funky” and “clearly a forgery”. Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the US government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the “Niger Forgeries” except the one paper they recognised as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phoney as the real thing.

Link:

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006160.php

I check for eriposte items at the left coaster every day.

The extensive documentation assembled at this site will contribute, hopefully soon, to the prosecution of Bush, Cheney and their neoconster fellow criminals.


Peace.

[understandinglife]

1. "Treasongate: The Niger Forgeries v. the CIA Intel Reports"

4. Conclusions

The IAEA letter of June 20, 2003, indirectly confirms my original conclusion: that, if the CIA and INR were not lying to the SSCI, then someone at SISMI (or SISMI-F, as I explained in that post) removed or altered overtly fraudulent information in the forgeries and then passed on selective extracts from them to the CIA in late 2001 and early 2002.

That said, SISMI is not the only group that is complicit in perpetrating and covering up this hoax. As I explained in Section 3, the Bush administration's own cover-up of their knowledge and complicity in this affair is barely understood and requires serious investigation.

Let me use this opportunity to repeat my call for a thorough investigation in the U.S. (and in Italy) of SISMI's role and the role of the Bush administration's perpetrating and whitewashing the Niger forgeries as well as the CIA's claimed ignorance about the bogus nature of the forgeries prior to the Bush 2003 SOTU.

Please encourage the media and your Democratic Senators and/or Congressional Representatives to launch an investigation into this scandal.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006162.php

Well, I've also begun sending links to all this information to:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5481072#5491706


Peace.

[understandinglife]

2. emptywheel on "The Niger Documents -- How They Did It"

The substantive American and British claims about Iraq acquiring uranium all relied on the Niger documents

eR looked through all the various reports (SSCI, Butler, Robb-Silberman, Taylor) and their cross references to show that all of the substantive claims that Iraq was trying to acquire, buy, or otherwise get uranium come back to the Niger forgery claims. There are a few red herrings--the claim that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Congo or Somalia--but eR shows them to be ridiculous claims that were never taken very seriously.

There was one other bit of intelligence that Niger fans used to "corroborate" the claim that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger--the report that Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican Wissam al-Zahawi visited Niger in 1999. Note, this tidbit--which was widely known among western intelligence agencies--was used and abused in a number of ways. Almost every time the connection is made, for example, the person using this tidbit ignores that al-Zahawi was visiting three other African nations on the same trip--it clearly wasn't a trip exclusively about uranium. The week of Joe Wilson's op-ed, Libby and Fleischer used the fact that one of Wilson's sources had mentioned a different contact with an Iraqi (which happened in Algiers) in 1999, and that Wilson himself had traveled to Niger for the CIA in 1999, to claim that Wilson was somehow involved as a go-between between Irag and Niger. But most of this abuse of the al-Zahawi is hocus pocus, using a real (albeit insignificant) piece of intelligence to hang a bunch of bogus theories onto.

<clip>

There was clearly cooperation from someone at SISMI to make the documents more useful to justify the Niger claim

This was one of eRiposte's huge breakthroughs (http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/005952.php -- and it's got some cool diagrams, so it's definitely worth clicking through). I mentioned that there were discrepancies between the SISMI intelligence and the forgeries. Well, it turns out that the discrepancies all relate to incorrect details. Effectively, the intelligence coming in from SISMI had corrected any details of the forgeries that would have revealed they were fake. So SISMI told CIA that Foreign Minister Nassirou Sabo had signed the uranium deal, even though the documents said Foreign Minister Allele Elhadj Habibo had signed it, because Sabo was the Foreign Minister at the time of the alleged deal. SISMI was basically correcting any incorrect data so the intelligence would be more plausible to the CIA.

In other words, eRiposte has shown that someone at SISMI and some people in the Bush Administration were aware these were forgeries from the very start -- from October 2001. The SISMI person effectively edited out the information that would reveal the forgeries as fakes. And someone in the US knew that the Global Support document would also reveal their game (and also, I think, Bolton's office knew they were forgeries and intervened to prevent them from being vetted).

Link:

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/12/the_niger_docum.html#more

One can only hope that Mr. Fitzgerald is way deep in all of this and that that has much to do with why Judge Tatel wrote the opinion he did and why 8 pages of that opinion were redacted.


Peace.

[understandinglife]

3. dKos: "Now why on earth would the US hold back the one document which was

... most obviously a forgery? A logical conclusion would be that they knew that the document would be immediately identified as a forgery and thus undercut the case for war.

If true, this fact makes the case for consciousness of guilt. It is further evidence that the WMD case for war was not made upon mistakes and errors of judgment, but rather upon deliberate lies.

Link:

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/1/173623/419

Any doubt why from Bush, to Cheney, to the WHIGers, to .... might have been a bit p'o'd with Amb Wilson should now be readily obvious.

However, as this bit of news emerged, I become ever more convinced that outing Valerie P. has implications and intentions way beyond stomping Wilson.

In fact, the 'get Wilson' scenario has always seemed a too convenient cover for what outing Valerie P. was meant to achieve.

At the time of the outing, I think Bush and the neoconsters never expected a Fitzgerald in their future, and were maniacally focused on destroying anyone within the intelligence community who would challenge them on all the lies they intend(ed) to tell to wage aggressive war on Syria, Iran, ....

It IS Tribunal Time In The United States Of America -- and these folk are actually already DOING IT:

http://www.bushcommission.org/call-charter.htm

Let's give them all the support we can -- more on that shortly, here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x25267


Peace.

[Wordie]

4. FBI has reopened their investigation!!!!!!!!!!! It is happening!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-niger3dec03,0,4700538.story?coll=la-home-headlines

<snip>
After talking with committee members, FBI officials decided to pursue "additional work" on the case, likely exploring the origins of the forgeries and whether the documents had been created specifically to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein.

"This is such a high-profile issue for a lot of reasons, and we think it's important to make sure there aren't lingering questions," said an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W. Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "There's always a chance that you do a little more investigating and you uncover something you hadn't seen before or you hadn't realized."

eriposte's work has had an effect!!!! Hallalujah!

This is one of the biggest things I have ever read on DU.