Niccolo Polari was at that Rome meeting, where the Niger forgeries were concocted and then passed back to Rumsfeld. Another notorious participant at that meeting was Manucher Ghorbanifar (weapons dealer and real dirty Iran-Contra Reagan player). What was HE doing there? My guess: That was the hatchery for a plan to PLANT nuclear weapons IN Iraq, to be "discovered" by the U.S. troops who were hunting for them, thus to "confirm" all the lavish anticipation built up by the Bushwhacks and by Pentagon operatives such as Judith Miller* (New York Slimes) that such weapons would be found. I tend to think, these days, that the plan was to place the weapons on route to Iran (from Iraq), or from Iran (to Iraq) and to thus expand the war, then and there, right across the border into Iran, chasing those planted weapons.
Either way--planted weapons found in Iraq or in Iraq involving Iran--the foiling of such a plan is my guess for what was really behind Cheney-Rumsfeld's outing of the entire CIA counter-proliferation project (Valerie Plame's project), putting U.S. counter-proliferation agents and contacts around the world in peril of their lives. I think it's likely that one of those agents or contacts acted to foil the movement of the weapons, and thus foiled a plan to plant them in Iraq. Cheney-Rumsfeld were left flat-footed. No weapons of mass destruction. All that buildup for nothing! They must have been furious. David Kelly was murdered in the middle of all this which points to him as the possible foiler of the plan.
Ten years in prison for Polari, on an entirely different charge? Interesting. I tend to doubt, though, that he will see the inside of a prison, any more than Cheney or Rumsfeld will, or Pope Benedict. (I figure somebody's got hard evidence on Benedict, but, unlike a lot of people, I think it may be related to the new Vatican banking scandal, not his coverup of the child abuse.) As to Polari, Italians, who tend to be much better informed than our people are, about horrors like the Iraq War, maybe resent their intelligence chief being such a tool, and maybe will put him in prison--but frankly I expect Miami to have a new Italian resident soon (or maybe Bogota? John Kerry said that Colombia is "the model for Latin America," so maybe they need some model dirtbags to fill out the expatriate community.) (Gawd, Kerry! Did you really say that? I still can't believe it--but it's in black and white.)
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*Judith Miller was David Kelly's last correspondent, before he was found dead near his home in England, under highly suspicious circumstances. They exchanged emails on his performance before a British intelligence committee that week, at which, visibly upset, he had waffled on his charge that the Blairites had "sexed up" the evidence for WMDs in Iraq. This was the brief email exchange in which he wrote to Miller (on the day he died) about the "many dark actors playing games" (he didn't explain this). My feeling about this latter is that he meant it ironically--that is, that he suspected that she was one of the "dark actors" and perhaps the one who had fingered him to British intelligence as the BBC whistleblower. She had written to say he had done well before the committee according to a "fan" of his who had reported to her; he replied, rather curtly, it seems to me, about "the many dark actors."
Miller and Kelly were colleagues and had written a book together about germ warfare. He was a top British WMD expert and a UN weapons inspector in Iraq (also in Russia). He had supported the Iraq war but then seemed to turn sharply against it, in May 2003, two months after the invasion. It should also be noted that Miller accompanied the U.S. troops who were supposedly hunting for the phantom WMDs in Iraq, and was so involved in the search that she annoyed local commanders by trying to direct it. She claimed to have a signed commission from Donald Rumsfeld giving her authority in that situation. She must have been bitterly disappointed that her "big scoop" didn't materialize. She herself had been instrumental in building up the phantom WMDs.
Kelly, for his part, had gone along with the "Dodgy Dossier" (the "sexed up" case for WMDs in Iraq), but had participated in internal scientific dissent that it was overdone. Later he seemed to regret the "Dodgy Dossier," at which point (May '03) he began whistleblowing, anonymously, to the BBC, thereby became a hunted man and ended up (very probably) murdered, followed by the Hutton report coverup. Many British experts--doctors, coroners, MPs and others--have called for a re-opening of that investigation, most recently last week. There is considerable evidence that he was "suicided" and he may have been one of the victims of Cheney-Rumsfeld's vendetta against the CIA's counter-proliferation project, and perhaps THE one who had foiled their phony WMD scheme (if they had one). He had friends and contacts in Iraq, from his UN inspections, and was in a position to have heard tell of odd weapons movements.
Note: The above narrative is theory--my theory--of the series of events that led to Kelly's death. There are no solid facts about a plan to plant WMDs in Iraq, though there were several intriguing reports--one of them a report about Manucher Ghorbanifar, that he allegedly disguised himself and tried to lure a CIA agent to a location in Iraq where he said that transported nukes had irradiated their carriers, and another separate report that a group toting nukes had met with "friendly fire" out in the desert. My theory makes sense of a lot of things that happened in the spring and summer of 2003, especially July 2003--for instance, the Plame outing and Kelly's death within 3 days of each other, both events intimately connected to the WMDs that weren't in Iraq, and the Bushwhacks' heavy investment in there being WMDs in Iraq. What wouldn't they have done to make it seem true? And what wouldn't they have done to anyone who foiled such a plan, or whom they believed had foiled their plan? But it's the sort of thing that won't be verifiable for many decades, by which time all the "dark actors" will be beyond human justice.
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