You make a lot of claims based on evidence I've never seen. so let's see it.
"You make a lot of claims based on evidence I've never seen. so let's see it."
Yikes. A lot of this is kicking around in memory, and when you have to dig it up, it proves elusive. Here's the best I can do on short notice.
Most of this stuff is in the public domain, and has been kicked around at length here at FR, but it isn’t in the mainstream press all of the time. And, frankly, sometimes its when you pull disparate pieces of a picture together, a more interesting picture emerges.
France commissioned the phony documents, which were produced by the Niger embassy.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/justify/2004/0802niger.htm
This article blames a trickster, but careful reading points out two things; the French were in possession of real documents which they declined to mention during the controversy.
In any case, the “trickster” was on the French payroll, on a regular salary. He had provided real documents, which the French kept private, and then produced the supposedly fake ones with the help of the Niger embassy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/05/ixworld.html
Seymour Hersch claims that disgruntled CIA officers created the forgeries in order to “get” Bush, but that seems a little far-fetched. But we do know that Wilson claimed to have knowledge of them long before he ought to have had such knowledge.
But they were eventually passed through to the CIA, and its not hard to imagine how he got access.
Niger’s involvement in illicit uranium dealings is covered in this Financial Times article:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1161297/posts
The remark concerning Libyan uranium is there as well.
Wilson’s op-ed piece is important. Here he makes the remark that IAEA was monitoring the mines, which was not true.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm
He repeats that remark in other places that I can’t readily find.
Ambassador Zahawie’s visit to Niger is well known, written up here:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/terencejeffrey/tj20030730.shtml
Zahawie denied that his visit had anything to do with uranium, according to him it was just social.
Wilson mentioned it and the presence of other Iraqis in remarks that got into the CIA memo, but publicly in his op-ed piece did not mention it. Obviously, it was germane.
One article quotes Wilson as saying that Baghdad Bob had come to Niger. I don't know if thats accurate or not, but I do know about Zahawie, and apparently there were others.
The fact that IAEA was not monitoring the mines in Niger is covered here:
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20031001-101113-2642r.htm
Also the mention that permits are required to travel into the mining areas, and you can’t get a permit to go there. Wilson didn’t go, and neither can anyone else. So, in effect, there is no way for anyone to know what is mined there and where it goes.
The important points, to me, are the fact that despite all the reams of print about the false charges about Niger, in the end the charges are true. Iraq did come calling. Niger was involved in uranium smuggling. Wilson knew that the Iraqis had been to town. Despite the fact that the Iraqis said it was social, Niger officials said it was about uranium.
Despite the fact that Niger was doing contraband deals in uranium, CIA had no one on the ground there. They didn't know about it, and after Wilson’s trip there they still didn't know about it. CIA’s WMD specialists were more eager to disprove the charge than they were to investigate it.
You can’t investigate it from a hotel in the capital, obviously, you have to get access to company records, tap their phones, maybe follow the trucks, see which ships they load in to, where are those ships headed, do any of the trucks turn north for the Libyan border, do any of the ships stop off in Tunisia or Libya along the way, does any of the stuff shipped to Brazil get transshipped to Libya, and so on.
Neither Wilson nor the CIA knew any more about any of that after his trip. But we know, now, that uranium was being shipped to Libya off the books. CIA didn’t know, and maybe CIA didn’t want to know.