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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...

It was one of the biggest of the American pre-war blunders. Iraq, documents showed, had tried to buy uranium from Niger. The papers, though, soon proved to be false. But who forged them? Now, a new article in an Italian newspaper says that the Italian government was heavily involved. Remember the Niger "yellow cake" scandal? Back in the days before the US invasion of Iraq, nobody except of course the UN weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq, was really sure whether Saddam had the Bomb or not. US President George W. Bush was desperately looking for some shred of...

Flirting with Fascism Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right. By John Laughland On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used...

ROME - The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday. Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman. She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials...

Russo Martino, the man behind the forged documents indicating Saddam had purchased uranium from Niger, which Joseph A. Wilson falsely claimed he had seen and warned the Administration about, has come forward and admitted that he did this in the pay of France to undermine the British and American justification for the war in Iraq: 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...

An Open Letter to the Press: Tell the Truth About Joseph Wilson10/24 07:50 PM I sent an e-mail like this to a reporter who is covering the Plame investigation. I'll let you know if I get a response. In the meantime, feel free to send this e-mail to reporters you see peddling Wilson canards: Why do you and many other reporters persist in using the following stock description Joseph Wilson: Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration's Iraq policy by disputing the possibility that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium fuel from...

Jailed Reporter Miller Seeks Shield Law By KEN RITTERAssociated Press Writer October 18, 2005, 1:23 PM EDT LAS VEGAS -- New York Times reporter Judith Miller defended her decision to go to jail to protect a source and told a journalism conference Tuesday that reporters need a federal shield law so that others won't face the same sanctions. Miller was jailed 85 days for refusing to reveal the source who disclosed the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. "Ultimately we protect sources so people will come forth -- so people will know," she told the national conference of the...

Iran claims biotech breakthrough allows it to produce its own yellowcake Iran has announced a breakthrough in its nuclear program that could end Teheran's dependence on foreign suppliers for nuclear fuel. The Iranian Atomic Energy Organization said scientists have succeeded in purifying uranium ore found in Iranian mines. The method would substantially decrease costs in the production of concentrated uranium oxide, the first stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Since 1999, the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization has been attempting to use biotechnology to purify uranium from mines. Officials said scientists mastered the technique of using microbes to produce yellowcake. Officials...

WASHINGTON — Toward the end of a steamy summer week in 2003, reporters were peppering the White House with phone calls and e-mails, looking for someone to defend the administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ..... Wilson's accusations were based on an investigation he undertook for the CIA. But he was seen inside the White House as a "showboater" whose stature didn't warrant a high-level administration response. "Let him spout off solo on a holiday weekend," one White House official recalled saying. "Few will listen." In fact, millions were riveted that Sunday as Wilson — on NBC's...

Ambassador Greg Schulte:The U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency says there is plenty of evidence Iran is building a nuclear weapon. In an interview with VOA, Gregory Schulte said Iran is entitled to nuclear technology, but not for military purposes. Ambassador Schulte has been in Vienna only a few weeks but has already experienced a special IAEA board meeting and is preparing for the next U.N. report on Iran's nuclear program. IAEA experts now say investigations confirm Iran's story that traces of weapons grade uranium were imported on contaminated equipment from Pakistan and not domestically produced. So does...

THE foreign secretary Jack Straw sought to distance Britain yesterday from comments by President George W Bush that he would not rule out a military strike against Iran. It came as diplomats gave warning that British attempts to solve the crisis prompted by Tehran’s resumption of its nuclear programme last week were doomed to failure. Bush raised the temperature by giving an interview to Israeli television from his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Asked if he would consider force, he replied: “All options are on the table.” He added: “The use of force is the last option for any president and...

Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken. Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte. Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to...

July 28, 2005 — Mayor Daley is denying that he had any knowledge of a memo regarding the Hired Truck investigation that was improperly leaked to the city's Law Department and others. That memo contains the names of city employees who are cooperating with the government's investigation into City Hall corruption. Two big questions Thursday night: What, if anything, will U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who also handled the highly publicized CIA leak case in Washington D.C., do about a leak in the City Hall corruption case in Chicago? And even if Mayor Daley didn't see the list, why would a...

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was very upset last week that the US had shipped about 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and other radioactive material out of Iraq for disposition in the US. One would think that the IAEA would have appreciated our work in assisting them in the implementation of the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in this particularly volatile region of the world. But one would be wrong. The actions, or more appropriately, the inactions of the IAEA regarding Iraq since the end of Gulf War I, betray the agency’s true agenda....

The current game in Washington is to pretend that nobody knew who Joe Wilson's wife was. I have to admit that I haven’t been very attentive to the news lately, mainly because I just got a job in Joe Wilson’s office. He takes care of the missus -- shhhh! -- while I plan his “investigations.” Next week he’s off to Disney World to “find Mickey.” Look for his upcoming op-ed in the New York Times, tentatively entitled, “What I Found in Orlando.” My current favorite hobby is pretending that -- unlike everyone in Washington -- I actually didn’t know who...

AFFIDAVIT OF JAMES H. DONNER My name is James H. Donner, and I am 19 years old. No one has paid me for these statements. No member of the RNC, no one from the Bush administration, and no one from FreeRepublic.com has solicited this information. For the past three and a half years, I have delivered pizza to the home of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame as well as to the homes of many others in the neighborhood. I live on the next street. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Plame worked for the CIA. It was no secret. Wilson...

MARADI, Niger (AP) -- Nasseiba Ali is the face of hunger in Niger. The 20-month-old girl weighs just 12 pounds, and her eyes are clouded at night, one of the symptoms of her chronic malnourishment. Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that so many other children are dying because the world was slow to respond. "I thought we would not make it safely," Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking several hours with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding...

They say all roads lead to Rome. Well, this one certainly does. It's a road that starts in Paris, at the door of Iranian arms dealer and Mossad double agent Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man known to the CIA as an "intelligence fabricator". It's a road that runs through Niger uranium mines, past a Genoan fascist organization operating as a parallel Italian intelligence network with ties to Rocco Martino, and down the streets of Milan, where a CIA operative, now considered a fugitive at large by Italian authorities, once operated. Ultimately, however, it is a road that does not end in...

We interrupt this scandal to ask a question that, due to it’s “explosive” nature was never asked when the story broke almost exactly a year ago… What were 500 tons of yellow cake uranium still doing at the nuclear research center of Al-Tuwaitha in Iraq when American tanks rolled into Bagdhad? The fact that the material was under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for more than a decade opens an entirely different line of questioning: Is the entire group of United Nations bureaucrats running the IAEA legally insane? These issues are somewhat separate from the Plame-Wilson-Rove...