Italians Deny Role in Iraq Uranium Dossier

ROME - Italy's spy chief denied on Thursday that Italian intelligence had any hand distributing a dossier that claimed Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Niger, Italian lawmakers said.

Enzo Bianco, chairman of an oversight committee on secret services, told reporters that the intelligence chief, Nicolo Pollari, and Gianni Letta, a top aide to Premier Silvio Berlusconi, briefed a dozen top lawmakers after a newspaper report alleging Italy had passed the dossier to Britain and the United States knowing that it was a fake.

Bianco said the officials denied that SISMI, Italy's secret service, "ever had a role in the dossier that was supposed to have demonstrated that Iraq was in an advanced phase of possession of enriched uranium."

The United States and Britain used the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa to bolster their case for the war. The intelligence supporting the claim was later deemed unreliable.

Commission member Sen. Massimo Brutti told reporters after the closed-door session that the commission was told that the Italian secret services warned the United States in January 2003 that the dossier was fake.

But later, the senator called The Associated Press to retract that statement. He said that the commission was not told that the Italians had warned the Americans.

Brutti said he was confused by the barrage of reporters' questions when the lawmakers emerged from the briefing. He said when he had the opportunity later to check his briefing notes, he realized he had misspoke.

Brutti said what he meant to say was that the commission was told that a SISMI official, contacted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, about the dossier, told the U.N. agency that "those documents didn't come from SISMI, they weren't produced nor supplied by Sismi."

Much ado about nothing. It's getting more and more sickening that the idiots on the left who would never lift a finger to protect Americans from a real threat keep perpetuating this lie.

So who cares if this small bit of information wasn't 100% factual? What intelligence is? Most of the intelligence about Milosevic (genocide, hundreds of thousands dead in mass graves, etc.) turned out to be poppycock too. Do these same whiners have their panties in a wad about "Clinton lies"? No.

The evidence against Saddam is overwhelming. The UN documented his WMD programs. Libya's nuclear program was really Iraq's (Saddam outsourced it - that should get the left all in a tizzy) with help from North Korea. It now sits in Oak Ridge, TN.

Besides, Saddam violated every aspect of the Gulf War cease-fire agreement and that alone was enough to remove him from power. That along with the fact regime change in Iraq was official U.S. policy since 1998 as directed by Clinton and Congress.

All one has to do is read the Iraq War Resolution from 2002 along with the 17 UN resolutions to find more than enough justification.

On top of all that is the fact that the war on global terror has to have a battlefield somewhere and Iraq was the logical choice given it's central location. It also neatly bookends Iran along with Afghanistan. It shakes up Syria (does anyone think before the current battle in Iraq they'd have left Lebanon?), scares the crap out of Egypt, keeps Jordan in line and pushes the Saudis to get tougher.

Anyone else got a better idea beyond sitting in Afghanistan swatting flies and looking in caves and mountains? No one on the left does, that's for sure.

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