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'Forgers' of key Iraq war contract named
According to NATO sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.
The documents, which emerged in 2002, were used in a US State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons programme to build the case for war. They were denounced as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shortly before the 2003 invasion.
The revelation spawned a series of conspiracy theories, most alleging that the British, Italians, or even Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, had had a hand in forging them to back the case for war.
The story was still reverberating around Washington last week, with claims that President George W Bush had authorised the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent whose husband cast doubt on the Niger link ...
<snip>
----------------------------------http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
April 09, 2006
A new article on the Niger forgeries is now up online in Sunday London Times.The claim actually isn't a new one. It's been rattling around Italy for at least a year, and reported in a few Italian publications aligned with the current government. The basic argument is that the Niger forgeries were the work of two employees at the Nigerien embassy in Rome, the consul, Adam Maiga Zakariaou and Laura Montini, his assistant. And the motive was money.How did these two come to forge the documents?According to the story in the Times, Montini was put together with ex-Italian intelligence gent Rocco Martino by a serving SISMI Colonel named Antonio Nucera. After putting the two together, Nucera fades from the scene. But Montini goes to work for Martino providing purloined documents from her place of work.Then Montini and her boss, the Nigerien consul, learn that Martino works for the French and there's a lot of money in it for everyone involved if they can 'find' documents shedding light on Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger. Thus the forging begins and the rest, as they say, is history.That is, needless to say, a very condensed version of the story. So read the piece in the Times for the full details.Now, remember, this version of events is the work of an Italian government 'investigation'. And all evidence suggests that the Italian government has very dirty hands in this whole affair, acting at least as the purveyor of the forgeries and possibly their creator as well.There are a slew of holes in this story; and you don't need to be too deep into the arcana of the story to see them.First, consider Nucera's role. He's a colonel in SISMI, Italian military intelligence. He puts the two key players together. They're also former SISMI employees. But that's just a coincidence. Neither Nucera nor SISMI have any role in what happened. He was just trying to help out a couple old friends ...Montini actually says different. She gave an as-yet-unpublished interview in which she alleges that Nucera provided her with the forgeries, with the instructions to turn them over to Martino.Here's another point to consider. If the Italians really have this all figured out, and if the Italian government isn't implicated in any way, why have Montini, the Nigerien consul and Martino never been arrested or accused of any crime? Each is now in Italy. No charges have ever been brought against any of them.There are various other holes and contradictions in this story. But there's one big one that you only need to read the papers to see. According to the story in the Times, the documents go from the Nigerien Embassy to Martino, to the French and then to the UK. Martino later sells them to an Italian journalist just a few months before the war.Only, that's not how it happened.It's a simple chain of custody issue. Read up on the story and you'll find that the US didn't get the documents from the British or from the French. They got them from ... right, SISMI. The Italians sent details of the documents and then text transcriptions of them to Washington in late 2001 and early 2002. And everyone else got them, either directly or indirectly, from the Italians as well.Once you add that fact to the mix you realize the story in the Times just doesn't add up.This is the cover story concocted by the Italian government. It wasn't a very good one eighteen months ago and it's no better now.
------------------Wayne Madsen Report, April 9, 2006
The Sunday Times of London, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication, is running a report today that states that the infamous Niger yellowcake uranium documents used by the Bush administration to justify the attack on Iraq were forged by Niger's consul in Rome, Adam Maiga Zakariaou, and the Nigerien ambassador's personal secretary, Laura Montini, code named La Signora and said to be an agent of the Italian SISMI intelligence service. The Times spins the story that Zakariaou and Montini forged the documents for money, thus diverting attention from the obvious political reasons behind the forgery.
The Times' report also repeats the allegation, denied by ex-French DGSE intelligence agents like Alain Chouet and Jacques Nadal, that ex-SISMI middleman Rocco Martino, the person who passed on the documents to an unnamed "intelligence organization," was actually an agent for French intelligence.
This allegation, like the recent one about the forgeries being the work of a Nigerian diplomat, have been repeated in several well-known neo-con media outlets, including neo-con web sites. It is also a clear attempt by the neo-cons, who never miss a chance to display their racist colors, to blame the forgeries on a black African.
It was this same mindset that was used by the neo-cons, including George W. Bush, to suggest that Saddam Hussein was conspiring with Africans to obtain a nuclear weapon. And it is the same "plantation mindset," egged on by the neo-con commentators, authors, pundits, that pervades the Republicans on Capitol Hill who treat some African American members of Congress as hired help who are supposed to identify themselves before gaining admittance to the "white clubhouse."
In the neo-con playbook, black and brown people are bad, Muslims are evil, whites of two of the three Abrahamic tradition religious sects are good.
It's that simple -- and don't dare disagree with it.
The disinformation being pumped out by the neo-cons is no surprise to Cold War-era U.S. intelligence agents who tracked similar Soviet disinformation campaigns -- some involving the very same characters involved in the current neo-con disinformation antics. Leonid Shabarshin, the head of the First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the KGB, stated that the purpose of the Soviet disinformation program was to compromise political figures and organs of the press.
Today's neo-cons learned well from their one-time Soviet colleagues -- active and ex-KGB agents who emigrated to Israel and the United States during the 1970s and 80s and who subsequently penetrated the Mossad, the Pentagon, and neo-con think tanks in the United States, Britain, Italy, and other countries.
These disinformation specialists continue to ply their trade in purveying lies and train other up-and-comers in the same art in pursuit of the neo-con cause.
Forged documents like the Niger "yellowcake" papers are the norm, not the exception, in an Africa rife with forged documents and international criminal cartels involved in uranium, diamond, gold, weapons, and currency smuggling
During the recent American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting in Washington, a similar disinformation campaign began. Several neo-con outlets reported that two colleagues of outed CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson listed her non official cover firm, Brewster Jennings and Associates, on their on-line resumes. This was clearly an attempt to once again spin the falsehood that "everyone knew" Plame's covert status, as well as the mission of her cover company. It was no coincidence that the AIPAC meeting brought together most of the key members of Scooter Libby's Defense Fund, which has an interest in downplaying the damage caused by the Plame/Brewster Jennings revelations.
WMR reported on the disinformation background to the Niger and the less-reported Congolese forgeries last October:
The neo-cons who are behind the Niger forgeries that were used as justification for the war in Iraq have been aided by former KGB officers who honed their African forgery trade during the Cold War. A number of these KGB officers are now Israeli citizens who are working closely with a special activities unit in Ariel Sharon's office. The former KGB agents, having left the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s when a neo-con cell first nested in Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office and then migrated to the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, now work for Likud and specialize in creating forgeries, especially those attributed to African countries. These Israeli former KGB agents work closely with neocon units in Rome, Washington, and London. The State Department once maintained a full-time office dedicated to proving Soviet generated documents as forgeries. The documents were always easy to detect since the forgeries were crude and the information contained within them was capricious.
Some of these KGB agents now work for the neo-cons in Israel and the United States.
----------------------------http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05303/596897.stm30 October 2005, Los Angeles Times
... Among its claims, La Repubblica has suggested that the head of Italy's military secret service, Nicolo Pollari, disseminated the false information to the Bush administration on orders from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a loyal ally eager to give Bush a helping hand.La Repubblica reported, and Bush administration officials confirmed to the Los Angeles Times, that Mr. Pollari met with then-deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002. Mr. Hadley later took the blame for including the incorrect claim in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Mr. Pollari went directly to Mr. Hadley, as well as to other administration neo-conservative contacts, because CIA agents in Rome were rebuffing his overtures -- apparently not considering the documents to be credible, La Repubblica reported.
Mr. Pollari will go before a closed hearing of the Italian parliament this week to explain his role. The Berlusconi government has repeatedly denied that SISMI, as the military intelligence service is known, fabricated the now-discredited dossier.
"The government flatly denies any truth to the allegations, as per our communiques issued in July 2003 and August 2004," an official statement said last week. The newspaper reports are "false and devoid of all foundation," the government said.
----------------------------Journalist/spy Michael Smith writes:"Then in the spring of 2000 [Montini] gave [Martino] a genuine document concerning a visit to Niger by Wissam Zahawie, Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican. Martino’s DGSE paymasters expressed great interest and he told her how much more money his masters would pay for a copy of [the GEUNINE] Nigerian contract to sell uranium to Iraq ...""The IAEA had a copy ... the July 6 2000 letter from Zahawi, the Iraqi Vatican attache, regarding the attempt to purchase the uranium, which they will not pass on to anyone because the French who provided it told them not to. MI6 had a copy which they were famously not allowed to pass on to the CIA ... The French of course also had a copy but they are the ones stopping MI6 and the IAEA from passing it on. We also know that the IAEA believed it to be genuine and that it was not part of the forged Martino documents because these were not passed to the IAEA until 4 February 2003 whereas the IAEA interviewed Iraqi officials about the Zahawi letter on 20 January 2003, and did not believe their denials. The Butler Inquiry deemed it to be credible and confirmed it had nothing to do with the faked documents."Nigergate II: The Strange Case of the Burglar Who Didn’t Want Money
The revelations in today’s Sunday Times that two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome forged documents apparently proving Niger was selling uranium to Iraq are unlikely to end the conspiracy theories that swirl around the Niger Affair, and not just because the investigation into the Plamegate affair will run and run. There are still a number of minor mysteries that require further investigation, particularly two burglaries in Rome, one at the Niger embassy over the 2001 New Year’s holiday and one at the home of the Niger consul on January 31, 2001. Both break-ins baffled the Italian police, not least because the burglar didn’t seem to be interested in taking any money.
Secrets and Lies
It has always been astonishing to me that there has been so much controversy over the claim by President George Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that “the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no friend of Bush and the fraudulent way in which he and Tony Blair took us to war. But as I have often said, and I am going to say again, those now infamous “16 words” were probably the only accurate comment on Iraqi WMD that the president made in the run-up to war.
------------------
**Michael Smith, who joined Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times in 2005, previously worked as senior defence and espionage reporter for the UK's Telegraph, another emphatically conservative paper. He was an intelligence operative for the British Army and has reported from behind enemy lines, when for instance he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army in Croatia to report on their fight against the Yugoslavian government. Further, he is the author of several well received books on espionage history. It is his experience in these matters that led to his being selected by his anonymous source, a British "Deep Throat" highly placed in the UK's intelligence community ... Smith admits to voting Conservative his whole life.
http://www.michaelsmithwriter.com/about.html
Michael Smith writes on defence and security issues for the Sunday Times and New Statesman. He left school at 15 to join the British Army and after service with the Royal Artillery became a member of the army's Intelligence Corps monitoring terrorist and Soviet Bloc communications. Smith studied Arabic at the army's own specialised training unit, before working for three years in the Middle-East collecting intelligence on terrorists operating in Syria, Iraq and the Lebanon. He also took part in Britain's secret war against communist rebels in Oman, as part of a small unit providing intelligence for British special forces. Smith then spent four years in Europe, becoming a German interpreter and producing reports on the activities of the East German armed forces.He left the army in 1982 to join the BBC Monitoring Service, the British equivalent of the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, where he began his career in journalism. Smith left the BBC in 1990 to become a newspaper journalist. He wrote on eastern Europe for the Financial Times and the Sunday Times before joining the Daily Telegraph, where he was Defence Correspondent and covered a number of wars and international conflicts.
He reported on the 1991 Gulf War and various conflicts in the Balkans - twice going into Kosovo under fire to meet up with the Kosovo Liberation Army during the 1999 war. More recently, he has reported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He now writes on defence and security issues for the Sunday Times and New Statesman.
He is an expert on special forces and intelligence with extremely good contacts inside Britain's intelligence and special forces community and a track record of breaking stories that have previously been kept top secret. This was graphically demonstrated with the so-called Downing Street Memos, which showed how President George W Bush and Tony Blair agreed to use military force to bring about regime change in Iraq in April 2002 - something that was illegal under international law - more than six months before votes in either Congress or the UN were deemed to have authorised the allied invasion.
Smith is the author of a number of books on intelligence and special operations including "The Spying Game: The Secret History of British Espionage," which revealed details of how MI6 and members of the British Special Boat Service were operating inside Basra throughout the 2003 war in Iraq. His other books include the UK number one bestseller Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park; The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park and the Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers; and "Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews," which led to Israeli recognition of the former MI6 officer Frank Foley as Righteous Among Nations, the same award granted to Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. Michael Smith lives near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire with his wife Hayley and their children.
By "coincidence," MI6 agent Smith, who "exposes forgeries," is in the business of promulgating "purportedly authentic" documents himself.
The Downing Street memos: fake but accurate?
http://conservativeeyes.blogspot.com/2005/06/another-rathergate_19.html
The eight memos — all labeled “secret” or “confidential” — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters has another great post:
"Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.
"Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible."The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows."www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
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