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SBD
Admiral
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
Posts: 1022
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 Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:06 am Post subject: Libya Forged Documents and Purchased the Yellowcake for Iraq |
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Reports of French Involvement in Niger-Iraq Uranium Case Not Reliable Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily September 8, 2004 Wednesday
September 8, 2004 Wednesday
LENGTH: 3171 words
HEADLINE: Reports of French Involvement in Niger-Iraq Uranium Case Not Reliable
BODY:
Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. Reports in The Sunday Telegraph of London on September 6, 2004, cited Italian sources as having alleged that French Government officials were behind the creation of a dossier of largely forged documents which had highlighted the purchase of uranium by Iran from Niger. The documents were subsequently shown to have included forged material, thus discrediting the US policy decision to attack Iraq, which was to some extent based on the dossier.
However, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, which first traced the documents, stands by its original reporting of July 29, 2003, that the documents were the product of the Libyan External Services Organization (ESO), and not the French Government.
The Sunday Telegraph report, by journalists Bruce Johnston in Brussels and Kim Willsher in Paris, noted:
Italian diplomats say that France was behind forged documents which at first appeared to prove that Iraq was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium in Niger -- evidence used by Britain and America to promote the case for last year's Gulf war.
They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims.
They have passed to The Sunday Telegraph a photograph which they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" -- who cannot be identified for legal reasons -- meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels. "The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said.
"Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war."
According to an account given to The Sunday Telegraph, France was driven by "a cold desire to protect their privileged, dominant trading relationship with Saddam, which in the case of war would have been at risk".
The allegation, which has infuriated French officials, follows reports last month [August 2004] that "Giacomo" claimed to have been unwittingly used by SISMI, Italy's foreign intelligence service, to circulate the false documents.
GIS confirms that the source of the dossier going in to SISMI was "Giacomo" -- GIS was unwilling, for reasons of source sensitivity, to name "Giacomo" at the time of the original reporting -- but is now able to say that "Giacomo" is not, in fact, an individual, but a group of people, sometimes using the cover-name or codename "Giacomo". Moreover, the group is a criminal entity which provides excellent professional services to those who can afford their prices. The French intelligence services have used the group over the years, but so, too, has the Libyan Government (and the governments of other so-called "rogue states"), relying on "Giacomo" for a host of end-user certificates and export licenses and technology transfer permits, and the like, in order to expedite the Libyan (and allied) acquisition of forbidden technologies, materiel and specialty production goods.
It is possible that the sources which told The Sunday Telegraph of the alleged link were only aware of "Giacomo's" French connections, and not of its other, widespread links to governments, including Libya. However, the SISMI sources at the time told GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily that the "Giacomo" link which provided the Niger uranium dossier was, in fact, one which routinely provided material from Libya's ESO, and that it was understood by SISMI at the time that the source of the documents was Libya.
As well, there is a concerted rivalry now underway between the UK, Italy, France and the US for access to key Libyan energy resources and contracts, and it is possible that attempts to divert attention from Libya as the source of the uranium documents could well have also served the purpose of alienating France.
The original Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, July 29, 2003, Niger-Iraq Uranium Reports Involve Ongoing Libyan Deception Ops, is reprinted in full, below:
Exclusive Special Report
Niger-Iraq Uranium Reports Involve Ongoing Libyan Deception Ops
1. Highly-reliable sources within the Italian intelligence community have confirmed to this Service that the documents -- subsequently demonstrated to have been forgeries -- introduced by the US and UK governments showing a contact between the Nigerien and the Iraqi governments for the export of uranium were, in fact, produced by the Libyan Government. The documents were used in the State of the Union Address by US Pres. George W. Bush on January 28, 2003, and were widely interpreted as part of the casus belli underwhich the US-led Coalition attacked Iraq in March-April 2003.
2. The Libyan External Security Organization (ESO) passed on, in a single transaction and through a Libyan intermediary, a file of forged documents to Italy's SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare ). According to Italian sources, the documents appeared to be part of a larger, ongoing Libyan double-deception operation designed to discredit US decisionmaking and the US leadership. The documents were designed to take issues which were in fact verifiable -- or approximately verifiable -- by US intelligence agencies and then provide seemingly valid collateral documentation. By then exposing the "valid collateral documentation" as fake, the premise of the intelligence -- and the subsequent US policy -- would then be undermined and discredited.
3. US officials in December 2002 publicly claimed that Niger had signed an agreement in 2000 to sell Iraq 500 metric tons of a concentrated form of uranium known as yellowcake. The British Government also presented the IAEA with "Nigerien state documents" that were to prove Nigerien-Iraqi attempts to trade in uranium after the UN embargo on Iraq strictly forbade this. This "documentation" was seen as a key element in the US-UK quest to prove that Iraq was still trying to develop nuclear arms. Niger had supplied Iraq with yellowcake for its nuclear program in the 1980s, which at that time was legal. The British and US governments had tried to prove that Niger recently agreed to resume those shipments, illegal since 1991. US officials claim that Iraq imported uranium from Niger even after 1998 and that more shipments were planned in 2000.<1> #Niger1
4. On March 8, 2003, Mohamed El-Baradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN agency, declared that the documentation used by Pres. Bush in his January 28, 2003, speech was forged. The statement by Mr El-Baradei seemed to exonerate the Niger Government in the matter of alleged uranium sales to Iraq, and the Prime Minister of Niger, Hama Hamadou, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, of London, and published on July 27, 2003, explicitly denied the allegations.
5. Libyan and other sources have told this Service that, in fact, yellowcake was being procured (or at least had been the subject of agreements) from Niger for Iraq during the embargo period, but by the Libyan Government. The yellowcake was being used for weapons development programs by Iraq and Libya (and possibly Egypt, one of the partners in the strategic weapons program) being conducted by joint teams in the Libyan facilities at Sabha and Kufra.<2> #Niger2 When asked whether the ESO documentation was designed to cover up and distract from Libyan involvement in the Iraqi nuclear program, one key Libyan source told this Service that this was only part of the objective. This Service was told that it was part of a broader plan, involving other documents and deception operations, designed to more comprehensively discredit US decisionmaking. This Service, on November 8, 2000, discussed how Iraq and Egypt had agreed with Libya in 1999 that Libya should act on behalf of all three countries to procure NoDong-1 strategic weapons-capable ballistic missiles from North Korea. The pattern for Libya-Iraq strategic weapons cooperation -- which had been evident even before that time -- was thus clearly established in the current context.
6. It seems clear that the Iraqi Government did not need to negotiate directly with the Government of Niger for the procurement of yellowcake. Had it done so, this fact would almost certainly have come to the attention of the Nigerian Intelligence Agency (NIA), given the closeness of Niger-Nigeria relations, and it apparently did not. However, Libyan procurement of fissile material on behalf of Iraq was less noticeable.
7. Italian sources confirmed to this Service that significant sections of the Italian Intelligence Community (IC) had been, at one time or another (including in this latest episode), working in cooperation with the Libyan Government and ESO, usually on the basis of payments made by the Libyans "for services rendered".
8. The question, at this stage, remains whether the Government of Niger was aware of the onward destination of some of the yellowcake provided to Libyan buyers, and whether or not the Libyan buyers significantly obfuscated their own identities in the procurement process. This would significantly impact how the US would deal with the Government of Niger. It should be expected that the US Government would also request assistance from the Nigerian Government in resolving the matter. The UK Government said that it had confirmation of the supply of yellowcake from Niger to Iraq from "other African intelligence services", independent of the Italian-routed false documentation.
Footnotes:
1. In the early 1980s, Con Coughlin's book, Saddam: King of Terror, noted, on p.188: "Before the war [Iran-Iraq] started, Saddam had been promised that the reactor would be ready to produce weapons grade material by July 1981. Although the French, responding to international pressure, were still dragging their feet on supplying Saddam with the enriched uranium necessary to power the Tammuz reactor cores ... Iraq was also engaged in a worldwide search for uranium. 120 tons were acquired from Portugal in 1980, and a further 200 tons from Niger."
2. Sabha, and the region around it, is home to the Libyan Strategic Industries complex and a variety of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical and biological material, laboratories and facilities. Global Information System (GIS) reported on January 7, 2002, that al-Kufra (aka al-Kafra) was the location of a warehouse on the road to Al-Sara military camp which included 1,800 barrels of chemical material and other biological materials which was transferred from Rabta and Tarhunah.
See Also:
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, November 8, 2000: Libyan NoDong SSMs Reported Targeting Southern NATO Sites and Israel.
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily , July 28, 2003: Niger-Iraq Fissile Material Issue Escalates; More Expected.
As well, Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily carried the following report on July 15, 2004:
Special Report
New Attempt to Distract Niger Uranium Export Issue Away From Libyan Role
Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. New attempts are being made by officials from Niger to obfuscate the political picture with regard to the supply of Niger-originating uranium to Iraq. However, there is now a growing possibility that the reality that Niger supplied uranium to Libya, and that Libya hosted the Iraqi strategic weapons programs from about 1998 onwards, will be openly acknowledged by US and UK governments in the near future. The exclusive reporting on this matter by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs -- reporting which was either denied or ignored in the build-up to the Iraq War -- is increasingly being vindicated by other sources.
The BBC -- which has taken a consistently hostile position to the US and UK governments on the question of the Iraq war -- on July 14, 2004, quoted Niger's former Prime Minister, Ibrahim Mayaki as saying that Iraq did not try to buy uranium, contradicting US claims made in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mayaki said that no Iraqi delegation went to Niger while he was Foreign Minister or Prime Minister.
The story, timed to come out alongside the release of the 196-page report based on the enquiry into British intelligence on the build-up to the Iraq war by Lord Butler, was designed to denigrate all the intelligence which led to the US and UK governments' decision to attack Iraq over the question of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and systems. The UK Government has consistently stood by its story that Niger uranium was acquired by Iraq.
The US Government admitted that documents on which the assessment of Niger-Iraq uranium dealings were based were, in fact, forgeries which they had been given.
However, the Butler report, as well as the Mayaki quote failed to ask the basic questions:
1. Who provided the forged documents to the US, and why? and
2. Was the uranium sent to Iraqi WMD laboratories and facilities in Libya, rather than Iraq?
It is now known absolutely that Libya's External Security Organization (ESO), under the control of Moussa Koussa, who was the primary link to the US and British intelligence services in "normalizing" Libya's relations with the US and Britain, produced and delivered the forged documents to the Italian military intelligence organization, SISMI, for onward passage to the US. At an appropriate time, the Libyans ensured that the fact that the documents was forged was leaked to the Director-General of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El-Baradei, who then attacked the US assumptions on the Iraqi nuclear program by stating that the documents on which the US based its assessments were forged.
The reporting on this was produced by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily on July 29, 2003.
See:
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, October 1, 2002: Weapons Grade Uranium Moving in Middle East; Iraqi WMD and Delivery Development Being Undertaken in Libya .
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, July 29, 2003: Niger-Iraq Uranium Reports Involve Ongoing Libyan Deception Ops .
Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, December 22, 2003: Libyan WMD Programs, Long Cited by GIS, Admitted as Qadhafi Begins Rear-Guard Action to Stave Off US Attack .
The BBC noted on July 14, 2004: "An official report into UK intelligence supported the claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Although some documents backing up this claim were shown to be forgeries, the UK has not withdrawn the charge."
Indeed, as the original intelligence from GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs HUMINT sources showed in 2002 and 2003, Iraq was buying uranium, but not (or not just) from the DPRK (North Korea), where the UK Special Intelligence Service (SIS) and some sources believed, based on intercept intelligence.
The July 2004 US Senate report on the intelligence leading up to the Iraq invasion said that the Saddam Hussein Government may have tried to buy uranium from Africa, but seemed to indicate that this intelligence may have been overturned because -- with the discovery of the forged documents -- the allegations were withdrawn. However, the fact that no-one in either the media, or, apparently, the US or UK governments, followed the trail of the Libyan deception operation, the question of the acquisition of uranium, paid for by Iraq but delivered to Libya, was not raised publicly.
There is now some suggestion that the US Bush Administration will, in fact, raise the matter in September 2004.
Former Niger Prime Minister Mayaki told the BBC that he denied allegations in the US Senate report that he admitted meeting a delegation from Iraq in 1999. The report said that Mayaki expected to discuss uranium with the Iraqi delegation but managed to steer the conversation in another direction. But Mr Mayaki told the BBC that he had no recollection of such a meeting while he was in government from 1999-2001, and noted: "I think this could be easily verified by the Western intelligence services and by the authorities in Niger".
However, there is ample evidence of routine Libyan presence in Niger, and of Libyan acquisition of Nigerien uranium, as noted in earlier GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs reporting.
Former US Federal Prosecutor John Loftus in May 2004 confirmed on Fox News some of the earlier 2002, 2003 and 2004 reporting by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs that Libya had hosted the Iraqi nuclear program, and further detail was added to this in the June 2004 book by GIS Senior Editor Yossef Bodansky, The Secret History of the Iraq War . Loftus, however, failed to note the Niger connection which was literally verified by the deception operation mounted by the Libyan ESO. Loftus told Fox News interviewer Eric Shawn:
Loftus: "I was told about this amazing wiretap where British Intelligence overheard a call from North Korea to Libya saying, 'My god, if the Americans ever go into Iraq, they're going to find out about our nuclear program. And who's going to pay all the Iraqi nuclear scientists in Libya if Saddam falls?'"
Shawn: "You're saying before the war there were Iraqi nuclear scientists working on a potential bomb in Libya before we launched this [war in Iraq]?"
Loftus: "Yeah. This was a treaty signed by a man called Ali Sobree. He was the Foreign Minister of Iraq. And he went to [Libyan leader Mu'ammar al-] Qadhafi and they worked out a whole protocol. Qadhafi would donate a hollowed out mountain in Libya; Iraq would provide the nuclear scientists, and North Korea would provide the uranium. And they would literally make a factory for nuclear weapons. And once that factory was complete, we had lost the war on terrorism. People don't realize that even a small nuclear weapon can kill 300,000 people. That's one hundred 9-11's. So that's why we put [garbled] bin Laden on the back burner -- we were really focusing on getting the Ali Sobree protocol -- we had to smash that ring."
Shawn: "Now when you talk about Saddam and the war on terror ... your indication is that [US] President [George W.] Bush understood this after 9-11 and he was mostly concerned about a nuclear bomb from Libya or Iraq or Iran."
Loftus: "Eric, that's EXACTLY it. Within a month after 9-11, British wiretaps showed that we had a MAJOR risk. Nuclear weapons in terrorist's hands would be devastating. And that's why the President said: 'OK, we're gonna shift the emphasis from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. We're gonna go into Iraq - that's where the evidence is - we have to capture Ali Sobree."
Later in the interview Loftus noted:
"It was THE major strategy. Qadhafi has now confirmed he is going to hand the Ali Sobree protocols over to the United States. Sobree, himself, is now in US custody and he is already scheduled as one of the first three witnesses in the trial of Saddam Hussein."
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SBD |
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Uisguex Jack
Rear Admiral
Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 613
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| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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Holy Cripes! Loftus remains the most reliable of sources.
I don't see it mentioned there, I did not know though he had been a prosecutor. I know him as a lawyer who works with ex spooks to get things cleared from the agency before said retired spooks publish their memoirs.
His books count among the most informative I've read. |
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DADESID
Seaman
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 157
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| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Is there a link? The moonbats won't believe it without a link. |
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:01 pm Post subject: |
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http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml
| Quote: | Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France
By Bruce Johnston in Rome
(Filed: 19/09/2004)
The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
Italian judicial officials confirmed yesterday that Mr Martino had previously been sought for questioning by Rome. Investigating magistrates in the city have opened an inquiry into claims he made previously in the international press that Italy's secret services had been behind the dissemination of false documents, to bolster the US case for war.
According to Ansa, the Italian news agency, which said privately that it had obtained its information from "judicial and other sources", Mr Martino was questioned by an investigating magistrate, Franco Ionta, for two hours. Ansa said Mr Martino told the magistrate that Italy's military intelligence, Sismi, had no role in the procuring or dissemination of the Niger documents.
He was also said to have claimed that he had obtained the documents from an employee at the Niger embassy in Rome, before passing these to French intelligence, on whose payroll he had been since at least 2000.
However, he reportedly also added that he had believed that the documents in question were genuine, and to have never suspected that they had been forged. "Martino has clarified his position and offered to deliver to the magistrates the documents which confirm his declarations," his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, told Ansa.
It was not possible to contact Mr Martino through his lawyer yesterday. Contacted by The Telegraph, Mr Ionta politely declined to comment, but did not deny that the questioning had taken place. The Interior Ministry in Rome, which had also expressed keen interest in the Telegraph article, refused to comment on the matter.
Mr Martino is said by diplomats to have come forward of his own accord and contacted authorities in the Italian capital following the earlier article in the Telegraph. They said he had written a letter of resignation to the French DGSE intelligence service last week.
According to an Italian newspaper report yesterday, members of the Digos, Italy's anti-terrorist police, removed documents from Mr Martino's home in a northern suburb of Rome on Friday afternoon.
"After being exposed in the international press, French intelligence can hardly be amused or happy with him," one western diplomat said. "Martino may have thought the safest thing was to hand himself over to the Italians." Investigators in Rome suspect that Mr Martino was first engaged by the French secret services five years ago, when he was asked to investigate rumours of illicit trafficking in uranium from Niger. He is thought to have then been retained the following year to collect more information. It was then that he is suspected of having assembled a dossier containing both real and bogus documents from Niger, the latter apparently forged by a diplomat.
In September 2002 Tony Blair accused Saddam of seeking "significant quantities" of uranium from an undisclosed African country - in fact, Niger. US President George W Bush made a similar claim in his State of the Union address to Congress four months later, using information supplied by MI6.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed doubts over some of the documents' authenticity, however, and declared them false in March 2003.
In July, the White House withdrew the president's claim, admitting that it was based on inaccurate information. British officials still say that their intelligence about Iraqi uranium purchases was supported by a second, independent source. |
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 2:46 am Post subject: |
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SBD - Here is the link to your article:
(p.s. - we are on the same wavelength - I received an email about this this morning from a friend - I just realized I posted on FR and so did you 
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Iraq/Sep0804.htm |
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kimberly
PO2
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 377
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:41 am Post subject: |
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I'm just jumping into trying to understand this whole mess and ran across this this morning. I'm not certain yet how it ties into the whole story since I haven't gotten a very good feel for it yet, so I'm not sure how relevent it is. You all are always on top of things so it may just be old news.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html
November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi
From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
(on a side note: a stupid question....I know nothing about this publication, but it seems a rather damaging article from a conservative magazine?) |
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Uisguex Jack
Rear Admiral
Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 613
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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I've read thru this three times and am fascinated and greatfull for the work, SBD.....
I went over to the Free Rep. site and could not find the article?
My concern now lays with just how Genuine to you think Quadaffi's cooperation thus far is? Do you think he's still got a couple of rabbits in his hat, or do you think the invasion of Iraq truelly did get him to turn around.
Just how much refined uranium do they now have?
On another point, does any one out there know where I can find a link to some video of Quadaffi's 'Babe Squad' when they were jogging all over Prince Charles's estate a year back. The stuff where they looked like a security detail for Dean Martin in a 'Matt Helm' film. I was trying to describe this to someone and have only been able to find still photo's of them, there must be video out there some place. |
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Anker-Klanker
Admiral
Joined: 04 Sep 2004
Posts: 1033
Location: Richardson, TX
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject: |
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I have to admit to being a bit dense on all this. I've read and re-read the above information, and am not quite sure what the relevance or importance is. Most of this information is pretty old (though some of it is new to me). Is this information just part of a continued investigation into the real history of the yellow cake documents, or is it supposed to be somehow relevant to the current Plamegate affair? If anyone who is really on top of this could offer a brief contextual explanation, I'd be very grateful.
There has been so much disinformation spewed by the CIA and MSM on this whole Plamegate affair, it is very, very important - I think - to once in a while try to return to basics. I particularly find this statement to be misleading:
| Quote: | | From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, ... |
As I've said on here before, the day she started reporting to Langley on a regular basis - driving through the front gate and walking in the front door, literally or figuratively - she ceased to be covert. This event preceded her supposed outing by Robert Novak by some good bit of time.
Her recommending her husband to take a trip to Niger is not the act of a covert agent either. It's the act of a middle-manager functionary in the main stream of the non-covert arm of the CIA. So revealing her role in this sordid affair is not the "outing" of a covert agent (even a former one) either.
Insofar as I can determine, or remember, it was the CIA, Joe Wilson, and the MSM that first revealed that she had once been a covert agent. Certainly not the WH, not Libby, not Rover and not Cheney.
Where am I wrong? |
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Navy wife
Research Director
Joined: 09 Aug 2004
Posts: 353
Location: Arlington, VA & Ft. Worth, TX
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 6:27 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Kimberly,
This was an interesting article, but I'd sure like to know more about this Philip Giraldi. I did a quick Google search for his name and there were some links to his articles found on blog sites such as JustinLogan.com that appeared to be quite anti-Bush, anti-conservative. One of Logan's postings was called "Dip***** for Bush." That kinda tells where he is coming from, doesn't it!
I'm not familiar with the American Conservative and this article certainly doesn't support a conservative viewpoint, in my opinion!
SBD, can you come up with some background on this man? Could he be one of the disgruntled CIA folks who have been mentioned in other postings? |
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SBD
Admiral
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
Posts: 1022
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 7:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Navy wife wrote: | Hi Kimberly,
This was an interesting article, but I'd sure like to know more about this Philip Giraldi. I did a quick Google search for his name and there were some links to his articles found on blog sites such as JustinLogan.com that appeared to be quite anti-Bush, anti-conservative. One of Logan's postings was called "Dipshits for Bush." That kinda tells where he is coming from, doesn't it!
I'm not familiar with the American Conservative and this article certainly doesn't support a conservative viewpoint, in my opinion!
SBD, can you come up with some background on this man? Could he be one of the disgruntled CIA folks who have been mentioned in other postings? |
A wuick search finds that the ex-CIA Giraldi gave an interview to www.antiwar.com which to me does not seem like a very conservative website. In this interview he says it was Ladeen who was behind the documents.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=2426_0_1_0_C
SBD |
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kimberly
PO2
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 377
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Navy wife wrote: | Hi Kimberly,
This was an interesting article, but I'd sure like to know more about this Philip Giraldi. I did a quick Google search for his name and there were some links to his articles found on blog sites such as JustinLogan.com that appeared to be quite anti-Bush, anti-conservative. One of Logan's postings was called "Dip***** for Bush." That kinda tells where he is coming from, doesn't it!
I'm not familiar with the American Conservative and this article certainly doesn't support a conservative viewpoint, in my opinion!
SBD, can you come up with some background on this man? Could he be one of the disgruntled CIA folks who have been mentioned in other postings? |
Hi! (long time no talk to, lol)
I thought the same thing and it looks like SBD came up with some information. Part of the reason I posted it here for further info was because I found it else were being used by the LL as some kind of 'proof' that at least one conservative publication 'sees' their side of things...lol. |
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Navy wife
Research Director
Joined: 09 Aug 2004
Posts: 353
Location: Arlington, VA & Ft. Worth, TX
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:40 pm Post subject: |
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You are right, Kimerbly! It's been a long time!! Thanks, SBD, for the link to the Antiwar.com web site. Here's an interesting quote from that link:
| Quote: | | But where did they originate? Giraldi's partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, "You'd be very close," in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them. |
It would appear that Cannistraro might be a conservative if he served under Reagan?
Who is this Michael Ledeen who is being fingered as the source of the forged documents? My goodness, I hope and pray those things did not originate in the USA. |
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Navy wife
Research Director
Joined: 09 Aug 2004
Posts: 353
Location: Arlington, VA & Ft. Worth, TX
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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Just reading through this thread and the name Michael Ledeen jumped out at me. I remembered reading a column just a few days ago by Michael Ledeen. I was doing research on the Senate Intelligence report and came across this article about Wilson. I had it bookmarked for my little research project.
| Quote: | Michael Ledeen
July 12, 2004, 9:41 a.m.
The Great Intelligence Committee Report
Some mysteries remain unsolved.
Wow, more than 520 pages. As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?
The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?
Whatever the explanation, you should know that the text does not always conform to the talk-about-the-text. The text, for example, is at pains to say that the report does not deal with the "accuracy" of the intelligence. That will come later (barely five minutes later in the case of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who looked as if he'd just leapt out of a sauna and hadn't had time to towel off I hadn't seen an American politician sweat like that since the glory days of Milhous). This report is said to focus on the intelligence "process" that is, how information was gathered, analyzed, and provided to policymakers.
What a fine idea. But Rockefeller, at the press conference with Senator Roberts, was not happy about it. You could see that the poor man wanted, oh so desperately, to scream "Bush Lied!!!," but he couldn't go all the way. However, he certainly strained at his leash. Listen to this, for example:
The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was in this Senator's opinion, was exaggerated by the Bush administration officials, was relegated to that second phase, as yet unbegun...
But in the very next breath, it turns out that it has begun.
We've done a little bit of work on the number three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether... And was he running a private intelligence failure, which is not lawful. (emphasis added)
I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I love that "private intelligence failure" bit, as if only the CIA is entitled to intelligence failure. On the other hand, it's appalling and disgusting to have this senator hint of something "not lawful" on the part of the undersecretary of defense for policy, especially when said senator's own fat report totally exonerates Feith of the nasty rumors that have been circulated by the likes of Seymour Hersh, Joshua Marshall, and other camp followers for many months.
Then Rockefeller went on to lament that the report didn't really explain "the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence officials were asked to render judgments," implying that administration officials bullied the analysts into saying what the president wanted to hear. Not so. The report explained that there was certainly pressure, but that pressure came from the real situation from the knowledge that error might lead to the death of many Americans not from policymakers demanding that intelligence officials get the analysis just right.
In fact, for those few people who actually read the report, there's a pretty big story around page 357, on which we learn that Chairman Roberts got upset at the many anonymous leaks alleging pressure to "cook" the intelligence in the run-up to the war. So he, along with his House counterpart, Porter Goss, "made a public call for officials to come forward and contact the Committee if they had information" about such pressure. Roberts issued that call at least nine different times, but "the Committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure...or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so..."
So Rockefeller should either put up or shut up. If the report is wrong, he put his signature on a lie. If it's right, he should stop talking as if he lived in an alternate sauna...I mean universe.
It's even worse than that, because the report does talk about pressure, but it's the opposite of what Rockefeller and the Hate Bush crowd was hoping for. It turns out that the CIA pressured some analysts into agreeing with its view of the aluminum tubes which it said were headed for uranium-enriching centrifuges but could easily have been for rockets. And it wasn't the Pentagon that ran its own private intelligence "failure" but the CIA, which kept the experts at the Department of Energy who were specialized in such matters out of that particular loop.
For those who follow the debates over this stuff, I think the plethora of reported contacts between al Qaeda biggies and Iraqi-intelligence officials is sufficient to convince any open-minded person that there was enough to worry about.
The best part of the report is the thorough discrediting of former Ambassador Wilson, who duped just about every self-proclaimed "investigative journalist" in America. Wilson is the husband of a CIA officer who was sent by the CIA to Niger to check on an allegation based at least in part on some documents given to the American embassy in Rome that Saddam's minions had approached the Nigeriens with a request for uranium. Wilson had told everyone that the Nigeriens had denied it, and he personally told the Washington Post and others that the documents in question were probably forgeries because names and dates were wrong.
Well, the report says that Wilson had not seen the documents, so he couldn't have had any serious basis for claiming that names and dates were wrong. Worse yet, the Nigeriens told him about an Iraqi delegation that had gone there in '99, and that the Niger's prime minister "believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium." As the Wall Street Journal elegantly put it, Iraq asked to expand trade, and Niger had only two exports: uranium and goats.
The Wilson story gets even better. He had sworn that his CIA wife had had nothing to do with his appointment as special emissary, but the report quotes a memo from his wife recommending him for the post. And Wilson had chewed out the vice president for standing by the claim, famously made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that British intelligence had reported Iraqi requests for uranium from Niger. Wilson said, in effect, the veep knew of my report but he just dissed it. Not true. "CIA's briefer did not brief the vice president on the report (that Iraqis had indeed discussed uranium in Niger), despite the vice president's previous question about the issue."
Oh, I see. The vice president of the United States asks for information about the story. The CIA sends this lout to Niger. He hears from the prime minister of the place that the story is true, and reports as much to the CIA (while saying the opposite to the pressies). And the CIA never bothers to tell Cheney. Is this not a scandal? What have I missed? Maybe somebody should tell Senators Rockefeller and Roberts that the CIA is supposed to answer such questions. They often don't, by the way. I can tell you that two senior administration officials asked the CIA, five months ago, about a report that Iraqi officials had arrested two people in the act of transporting a barrel full of uranium from Iraq to Iran. There is still no answer. If we're really interested in the intelligence "process," this sort of silence has to stop.
Anyway, back to Wilson. The whole journalistic universe was in heat over the Niger story, because Wilson had convinced them that it was a hoax, based on forgeries. All kinds of celebrated journalists, from Hersh on up, presented theories about the origin of the forgeries, as if that were the issue. But it wasn't. Throughout it all, the British government continued to say that they had evidence, that they still believed in that evidence, and that they believed the story was true.
The Brits were right: It was true, as Wilson undoubtedly realized. Thanks to a couple of articles in the Financial Times over the past few weeks, we know that several European countries had reason to believe it. The "forgeries" were a total red herring, they had nothing to do with the price of eggs, and thus Seymour Hersh's breathless spasm in which he theorized that the forgeries were created by a bunch of ex-CIA "old boys" in order to gull Cheney so they could then "expose" him is idiocy. And Joshua Marshall's narcissistic echo chamber, broadcasting "Bush lied" 24/7, is another. (I am obliged to reveal that I have an intense personal contempt for Mr. Marshall, who slimed me and my wife and my daughter on the basis of lies and suppositions, and has yet to acknowledge it, let alone apologize.)
Before we leave the Wilson story, here's another mystery: Why did the Bush administration apologize for the16 truthful words the president pronounced? Why was poor Steve Hadley sent out to take the fall for...telling the truth? There are two obvious possibilities. One is that, somehow or other, our leaders decided that the CIA had indeed been gulled by a forgery. The other is that politics trumps truth once again, the story was painful to them, and they decided they'd rather run away than tell the painful truth. But it's peculiar, don't you think?
Penultimate observation: The report tells us several times that we had no human sources "collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" (there's that awful language again), and we are told that this was the result of "a broken corporate culture and poor management." And why, pray tell, was the "corporate culture" broken? The committee doesn't probe this very deeply, and they are right to avoid it, because the Congress is the main culprit in this sad story.
No one has seen fit to point out that, thanks to the depredations of President Bill Clinton and Senator Robert Torricelli a few years back, the CIA had been told to avoid working relationships with persons of dubious human-rights records. Well, it would be hard to find a high official in Saddam Hussein's Iraq who didn't have a really rotten human-rights record. So, even if the agency had an olive-skinned case officer, fluent in Iraqi Arabic, capable of penetrating the Baathist state, he would probably have had to deal with some real monsters in order to get real secrets. If you were the CIA, you'd have avoided that one. Remember that Torricelli's scorched-earth campaign was the result of a CIA case officer talking to a Guatemalan paramilitary type who killed people from time to time.
On this one, I hold Congress and Clinton guilty. The CIA didn't have a broken culture it had a lunatic overseer in the legislature and a cowardly customer in the White House.
Finally, we come to the really big question, and the weird answer of the committee. The big question is this: How could every serious intelligence agency on earth have come to believe there were WMDs in Iraq when (as the current article of faith has it) there were none? Senator Roberts likens it to a global epidemic. The CIA got it wrong and then infected all the others. A worldwide virus, so to speak. The WMD flu, if you will.
I don't buy it. I don't think the French were swayed by the CIA. I don't think the Israelis and the Russians were infected by our views. I think this is like the David Kay theory of WMDs. Remember? He said that Saddam really believed he had some, because all his guys lied to him about it. He didn't actually have WMDs at all, because the Iraqis had failed, and they feared for their lives if Saddam found them out, and so they lied, and he bought the lies.
These are pretty complicated theories, you must admit. What about a simpler approach? Let's say that there were WMDs. Then, in the disgracefully long period between Afghanistan and Iraq, Saddam, knowing he was gonna be overrun, exported some (mostly to Syria and Iran), destroyed some, and hid some.
That's my story, and I'm sticking with it for the time being. I'm sticking with it because I know as Senator Roberts and the committee staff know, because I told them that there are very credible reports of WMD sites, but the CIA chooses not to go look at them. Since I told my own story I've learned about others, one of which comes from a very high-ranking former official of the American government. I'm also sticking with it because the Polish government insists that their guys in Iraq found warheads with chemical weapons, even though a CENTCOM press release denies it, and because Zarkawi's killers arrived in Jordan with large quantities of chemical weapons. And because I don't believe the Iraqis would have bought all those funny suits that protect you from chemical and biological weapons unless they had such weapons and expected to use them.
Enough already.
Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen is Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. |
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200407120941.asp
Is this the same Ledeen they say forged the docs???
_________________
I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:43 pm Post subject: |
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Shawa-
Sorry to ask this, but where do you see a reference to someone named Ledeen? I can't find it.
Thanks- |
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