Posted on 10/24/2005 10:14:17 AM PDT by churchillbuff
The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.
This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.
Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.
Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.
The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.
Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.
This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.
And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.
The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.
It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.
But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.
Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.
The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.
There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.
Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.
If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.
If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.
Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.
And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."
The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.
Do you have your champagne ready to crack open?
ROFL at your tagline!!
I missed something, is the time line changing for a final decision.
Hard to give much credence to a story that does not even get Joe Wilson's name right..............
Dennis Kucinich couldn't open an umbrella.
He must have the dumbest constituents in America.
wasn't there an admission about two years ago that these docs were forged by some crackpot at Cal-Berkley??
Carry this message to the Dummies:
“ For the last five years liberals and their media whores have had many fake orgasms and have declared many fake victories about the end of President Bush, but it ALL ended up with you lefties being crushed by the bitter reality and utter defeat. This time is no different even if Rove gets indicted. You are not going to win in 2006 and nor in 2008 because the majority of the American voters do not elect socialist left wing kook to govern them. It is just an impossibility that will not happen.”
Maybe we'll get the answer to the question of how ilson knew the dates were all wrong on the documents several months before the US had the documents.
If Fitzgerald is chasing after the forged Niger yellowcake documents, he may catch some 'rats (if he wants to). I'm convinced they were planted by opponents of the war to discredit the real intelligence.
Pardon me, but Kucinich is not in the house. What kind of crappy article is this?
I've yet to see one, and I will no longer be clicking on threads this poster starts here.
UPI must be soooo glad that the Sod'emite is still around, so he can be re-installed to his rightfull place as President of Iraq.
Same for Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, they were all right after all.
How long before GW is put on trial in Iraq by Sod'emite.
Walker, an expert on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs, spent 25 years at Britain's The Guardian newspaper, where he was Moscow bureau chief, U.S. bureau chief, European editor and assistant editor. . .
So, it's hardly a stretch to figure that this guy is an America-hating leftist. But you could have deduced that by yourself simply by reading the article and noting all of the false or "shaded" statements and the mistaken conclusions that litter the piece...
Yes he is. 10th CD in Ohio.
This churchillbuff dude is a loser. The fact he even mentions the inclusion of the yellow cake from Africa statement in the presidents SU speech without mentioning that the president said it was attained from British Intel, who to this day stand behind their claim, shows this guy for the Bush hater he truly is.
UPI spin aside, if true, this means the cabal may be the target of the investigation. The elements of it would very likely include current and past CIA employees and operatives, possibly the French intellegence agency(according to the Italians), Jos. Wilson et Frau (she is on leave from Langley), certain press fellow travelers, the DNC, etal.
The only way the forged docs. have relevance is that Wilson mentioned them when he "misspoke". They do not otherwise fit into the timeline.
So someone in a foreign country forged a document. Big deal. That document was not the only reason for going to war with Iraq. The primary reason for going to war against Iraq was that Saddam had, for 12 years, refused to comply with U.N. resolutions, and it was clear the U.N. wasn't going to do anything about it.
The Docs. ARE a big deal if you are trying to take down a sitting President during wartime, and you are getting the help of foreign Nationals to do it.
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