from RainDog
And SISMI was the source for the yellowcake forgeries
And SISMI was the source for the yellowcake forgeries
This is Sy Hersh's "Stovepipe" article in the New Yorker. Worth re-reading in light of this new information. btw, I think that someone fed Hersh disinformation which he included in the article, in light of the current investigation. This article is the one that mentions the "former disgruntled CIA employees" who faked the report and didn't think Cheney, Rumsfield, Condi, blah, blah would believe it. I think that information was given to Hersh to cover for who really planted the forgeries. ymmv.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact "...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials."
(why did Hersh use the passive voice when writing about who was responsible for setting up the OSP?)
In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit...
None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie’s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as “yellowcake.” (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)
The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. “I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,” a C.I.A. consultant told me, “but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.” No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it... "
...the article has much more, including Cheney's interest in the uranium claim. Also remember, it was unprecedented that Cheney spent so much time at the Pentagon meddling in CIA work, from other reports.
Also includes Cheney trying to get money for Chalabi and the Iraqi defectors who were providing so much "useful" information for the OSP.
from seemslikeadream
AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops
The right-wing government of corrupt billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, including Martino, was a big supporter of an Iraq war. Moreover, we know that the forged documents falsely purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger originated with a former SISMI agent. Watch the reporting of Josh Marshall for more on this SISMI/Ledeen/Rhode connection.
But journalist Matthew Yglesias has already tipped us to a key piece of information. The Niger forgeries also try to implicate Iran. Indeed, the idea of a joint Iraq/Iran nuclear plot was so far-fetched that it is what initially made the Intelligence and Research division of the U.S. State Department suspicious of the forgeries, even before the discrepancies of dates and officials in Niger were noticed. Yglesias quotes from the Senate report on the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger:
"The INR nuclear analyst told the Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document – a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium – mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as 'completely implausible.' Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document , the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates."
Journalist Eric Margolis notes of SISMI:
"SISMI has long been notorious for far right, even neo-fascist, leanings. According to Italian judicial investigators, SISMI was deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy’s democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured. Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, other extreme rightist groups trying to destabilize Italy, the Washington neocon operative, Michael Ledeen, and the Iran-Contra conspirators. SISMI works hand in glove with U.S., British and Israeli intelligence. In the 1960s and 70s, SISMI reportedly carried out numerous operations for CIA, including bugging the Vatican, the Italian president’s palace, and foreign embassies. Italy’s civilian intelligence service, SISDE, associated with Italy’s political center-left, has long been a bitter rival of SISMI. After CIA rejected the Niger file, it was eagerly snapped up by VP Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who were urgently seeking any reason, no matter how specious, to invade Iraq. Cheney passed the phony data to Bush, who used it in his January 2003 address to the nation in spite of warnings from CIA. . . ."
So Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode, all of them pro-Likud operatives, just happen to be meeting with SISMI (the proto-fascist purveyor of the false Niger uranium story about Iraq and the alleged Iran-Iraq plot against the rest of the world) and corrupt Iranian businessman and would-be revolutionary Ghorbanifar in Europe. The most reasonable conclusion is that they were conspiring together about the Next Campaign after Iraq, which they had already begun setting in train, which is to get Iran.
more
http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3467The SISMI connection is what is new and potentially explosive
from allemand
"In late 2001, the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents --- those later identified as forgeries --- and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the ‘security consultant’ on an on-going basis.
She mixed those documents in with authentic documents which she had access to in the course of her work at the embassy. She then passed those documents --- again, a mix of authentic and forged ones --- to the ‘security consultant’."
<...> (earlier)
"What’s long been known about the Niger documents is that an Italian ‘security consultant’ tried to sell them to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba. Burba’s editor at Panorama, in turn, instructed her to take them to the US Embassy in Rome. That is how they came into the hands of the American government."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_08_01.php#003235"The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. <...> Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. <...> The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html Iran-Contra II? Fresh scrutiny on rogue Pentagon operation -Josh Marshall
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=784906#788314
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