OK, got it. You’ll notice that the whole article poo-poo’s the idea of uranium smuggling, so the assumption is that this episode couldn’t be real. Still, Niger shipped uranium to Libya with no one’s knowledge, so you have to keep that in mind whenever you read that Niger, the French, Cogema, IAEA, would never let that happen. It happened.
quoting:
A month later, however, the Navy issued an intelligence report saying a large quantity of uranium from Niger was being stored in warehouses in the West African nation of Benin, and was destined for Iraq. The report included the name and phone number of a West African businessman coordinating the deal, someone supposedly willing to provide further information.
The Senate found that the C.I.A. never contacted the businessman. ‘’No one even thought to do that,’’ an agency official told the Senate committee. A month later, an American defense attaché finally went to the Benin warehouses and found only bales of cotton.
Marron, it is funny how the NTY cannot connect the dots. You would think an editor would put two of his best reporters on the case of “Accounting for the Yellow Cake, the Job CIA Couldn't Do” I still don't know how much Yellow Cake Niger sold during the Saddam Period and who the buyers were. Does anyone know how Libya got its supply?
The NYT has done much damage in this WOT. I'm beginning to think citizens of the free world need to file class action suits against the NYT starting with Eastern Europeans suing the NYT for Walter Duranty’s false reports. Duranty knowingly misinformed the Free World with purposefully filed false reports that made it easier for the US and Britain to give Eastern Europe to Russia. What makes it worse the NYT brass knew the reports were false. To this day, as the NYT lie, people by the millions die.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp
“I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (”An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
In his masterwork about Stalin's imposed famine on Ukraine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” Robert Conquest has written:
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty’s denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé “Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow,” S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty’s Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, “the recommendation fell by the wayside.”