I think you may be on to something.
Joe and Jaqueline have a connection through Gabon. I'm beginning to think that Niger and the forged documents are a misdirection. A classic red-herring.
Is it possible that Saddam was getting his yellow-cake Uranium from Gabon? If he were, wouldn't it make sense to set up a discredible deal with Niger to distract attention?
Both Joe and Jaqueline have French connections and are on Gabon's payroll. I think we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
JANUARY 2003 : (AL ZAHAWIE, "RETIRED IN JORDAN" - IS RECALLED BACK TO BAGHDAD, IRAQ; HE IS TAKEN TO MEET UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS) But last January, al-Zahawie was summoned back to Baghdad for what he had expected would be a request to help Iraq's Foreign Service plan for deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's planned visit to the Vatican. Instead, upon landing in Baghdad, al-Zahawie was taken to meet with UN weapons inspectors. Five inspectors interviewed him in a 90-minute session, he says."They asked why I went [to Niger], why I was chosen, when I left Rome and whether there were any other Iraqi diplomats at the Vatican," he says. "But then they asked who had the seal of the embassy and where I had left it." That's when al-Zahawie got wind of some kind of foul play. Italy had handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his presence in Niger. But the inspectors were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it. "If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* My note: How would he know the 'tell-tale sign' if they refused to show the letters to him? Shades of Joe Wilson's foreknowledge of the docs?]
And Cannistraro's as well. Geez...al-Zahwawie (from the Niger Embassy in Rome where the break-in occurred), Wilson and Cannistraro all seem to have knowledge of something they couldn't have possibly seen at the time...coincidence? Or collusion?