These Photos of Niger Uranium Forgeries Blow Libby, War Case Wide Open!
Clayton Hallmark | 09.11.2005 05:04 | Repression
Put the words NIGER FORGERIES and these photocopies (below) into the consciousness of Mr. and Mrs. America, and it could change the course of history. These 4 graphics are worth 4 million words. These are the cause/excuse for the Iraq war. They are not real (they are forgeries), but they are a REAL threat to the nation's existence! Why? Because they came from foreign sources. FOREIGN AGENTS HAVE BEEN DRIVING US POLICY. That is a bigger threat to America than knocking down the WTC, which "only" killed 0.014% of one metropolitan area. (Reminder: Bin Laden still is at large.) The $64-Million Questions: WHAT FOREIGNERS Made the Forgeries? WHAT AMERICANS SOLD OUT AMERICA by Using the Forgeries?
1. THE FIRST PART OF THE ARTICLE SHOWS THE CRUDE FORGERIES THAT ARE THE "NOBLE CAUSE" FOR WHICH WE ARE FIGHTING, AND SOME OF DYING, IN IRAQ.
2. THE SECOND PART IS A DETAILED TIMELINE OF HOW FIXED INTELLIGENCE BASED ON THE FORGERIES GOT US INTO THE IRAQ WAR -- ALSO HOW LEWIS LIBBY (NOW INDICTED) AND OTHERS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO COVER UP THE USE OF FORGERIES.
I am dedicating each forged page to a couple of the foreign countries involved in making and pushing these forgeries, and thus pushing the US into the Iraq war.
More serious crimes have been committed here than Lewis Libby (Cheney's assistant) fibbing to the FBIers. Some American citizens may be liable for treasonable crimes in connection with the procurement and transmittal of these. Then there are the additional crimes of covering up these original crimes (crimes like Libby is charged with). Some people are certainly liable for the unnecessary deaths of 2000-plus US soldiers in a trumped-up war based on these forgeries. Not to mention the genocide against 100,000 civilians, including victims of heinous white-phosphorous bombs in the pogrom against Fallujah in November 2004. God bless America! Why? Join the Army and be all the murderer you can be.
NOTE: IF THE SITE YOU ARE VIEWING DOES NOT SUPPORT GRAPHICS, PLEASE LOOK HERE:
HOW DO WE KNOW THESE PHOTOCOPIES ARE FORGERIES?
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_1 I dedicate this to Italy and Britain. Rocco Martino an ex-agent of Italian intelligence has admitted procuring the forgeries. General Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian intelligence, collaborated with back channels in the US government to get the forgeries into the right hands in the US Government so they could be used as "fixed" intelligence for war -- without leaving the "fingerprints" of their source (Martino, Italian intelligence, and others called out in this article). Britain received the forgeries before the US, and Tony Blair was the first to publicize them. Britain maintains a cover story that they had "independent intelligence," separate from the Niger uranium documents themselves, which story came in handy when it had to be admitted that the documents were forgeries.
* See the copy and note that the date of a Niger "ordonnance" cited in the alleged agreement ("Annexe 1") is off by 26 years. The "74" in "le ordonnance" (sixth line down) refers to the year 1974 while the text says "5 juillet 2000." You can easily discern such discrepancies for yourself, even though these documents are in French.
#file_1#
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_2 I dedicate this one to France and Belgium. France hired Martino in the first place to come up with evidence on WMD and on uranium missing from French mines in Niger. Martino worked through a "handler" (French secret-service manager) in Brussels, Belgium.
* Observe that, in an alleged letter dated July, 27, 2000, the president of Niger refers to the central African nation's constitution of May 12, 1965, but the constitution in place in 2000 was dated Aug. 9, 1999.
#file_2#
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_3 I dedicate this one to those arch enemies Iran and Iraq. Long before the Iraq war, the CIA asset and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi pushed for the US to replace Saddam Hussein with him. After the war started, the CIA dumped him when they found him spying for Iran.
* See that this letter allegedly signed by the foreign minister of Niger on Oct. 10, 2000, bears the signature of Allele Elhadj Habibou, who was actually foreign minister in 1988-1989.
* Note that the official letterhead used is obsolete and refers to a temporary state body, the Supreme Military Council, also obsolete.
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_4 I dedicate this to Niger and the CIA. One or more Niger citizens at the country's embassy in Rome supplied Rocco Martino the raw materials for fabricating the Niger forgeries. The CIA is not a sovereign state, it just acts like one -- a rogue nation. After decades of undermining foreign governments, the CIA didn't have the right skill sets to provide a warning to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Having dropped the ball big-time, they weren't about to drop any intelligence on WMD no matter how crudely forged. They let the Niger forgeries get past them. Or they let President Bush get away with falsely blaming them for this intelligence failure. CIA whistleblowers, patriots, where are you?
* The official letterhead used is obsolete and includes the wrong symbol for the presidency as well as a reference to the Council for National Reconciliation, which was defunct by the date of the correspondence.
#file_4#
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WHAT ABOUT LEWIS LIBBY AND KARL ROVE?
Dick Cheney's assistant, Libby, has been indicted for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury and for obstructing justice. He apparently lied (he is awaiting trial) to cover up his part in outing the CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. He and possibly Bush's assistant, Karl Rove, apparently (Rove hasn't been charged) outed Plame to get back at Wilson for exposing the Niger forgeries.
President Bush used the Niger forgeries as the main excuse for the Iraq war. The forgeries purport to show that prewar Iraq bought uranium from Niger (rhymes with "forger") to make bombs. Since invading Iraq, US forces have found no WMD, hence the need for covering up the Niger forgeries, who made them, who transmitted them, who used them to incite war, and how they did these things.
It's up to the FBI, to grand juries, and to whistleblowers to expose the answers to the questions just suggested. The US Congress won't do it. Senator Pat "Coverup" Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the intelligence committee, won't let the Senate expose the Niger-forgery crimes. This senator from the Waste Land of Oz is perhaps the most disingenuous man in the Senate, and a master of investigations that defuse intelligence-related scandals.
Meddling Foreign States are More Dangerous than Free-Lancers Like Bin Laden
The foreign meddlers -- and their American accomplices -- have helped to put us in a war that is sapping our strength. Our strength comes from our economy and our character. The twin charades -- Iraq and the war on terror (How do you war on a noun like "terror" or "drugs"?) -- are breaking down both.
The Niger forgeries you see PHOTOCOPIES of were made in Italy. For all of you American-fry lovers, the French paid an Italian, Rocco Martino, to procure them. And an agent of one pole of Bush's "Axis of Evil," Iran -- in the person of erstwhile CIA asset and spy for Iran, Ahmed Chalabi -- helped to secret them into the White House by the "back door." Our loyalest ally, Great Britain, vouched for them with "independent intelligence" they have not presented to this day. This last is the source of President Bush's 16 infamous words in the 2003 SOTU speech about the British government having evidence Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa. You see the British (French/Italian/Iranian/etc.) "evidence" on these pages. Who set us up, and why?
Duped and Complicit US Officials Used the Niger Forgeries
As an Excuse for War in Iraq and Big-Brother Methods at Home
The Niger forgeries are the very evidence the Bush Administration used to go to war. The war in turn is the reason the administration has abridged Constitutional rights in the US and basic human rights around the world, in the name of "wartime" security needs. (With demogogues and dictators, any time is wartime). The Niger unanium documents you see here are forgeries, but the external and internal threats to the nation are real and very serious. Fortunately there is an effective remedy: for law-enforcement officials to do their jobs, as US Attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Paul McNulty have been doing with their Washington, DC, and Eastern Virginia grand juries, with the help of some FBI agents. Remember that the FBI is politicized, especially at the top, which limits how well it can support law enforcement.
US military forces are not defending America in Iraq: they are working to secure an oil supply. The real defenders of America right now are any honest law enforcers here in the USA.
LAWS WERE BROKEN IN CONNECTION WITH THESE DOCUMENTS. When the precise law violations are detected and prosecuted, the threat -- foreign control of the US and Big Brother control of our people -- will diminish. I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's right-hand man, has just been indicted for lying about his role in getting revenge on the man who exposed the Niger forgeries as false in the first place -- former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV. The revenge consisted of the White House unmasking for reporters Wilson's wife, an agent of the CIA with the cover name Valerie Plame. This ruined her career and her projects on WMD intelligence, arguably the kind of intelligence the US most needs and the kind that should have prevented the unnecessary Iraq war. Someone has to pay a personal price in jail time and fines for the immense cost of Iraq to the US. The price the perps pay should by immense as well.
Fitzgerald's grand jury did not indict Karl Rove or Dick Cheney; but, then, his investigation continues. He may get some of these people for worse crimes than Libby's charged with -- for example, for deliberately revealing the identity of an undercover US agent and for using these phony Niger uranium documents to play with Americans' security.
SOME EXAMPLES OF FOREIGN (NOT JUST ISRAELI) MEDDLING IN US POLICY THAT MIGHT SOON BE PROVED...
Meanwhile, another grand jury, Paul McNulty's, has indicted a Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, for passing US secrets to Israeli agents working for AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. McNulty has more recently obtained indictments against two employees of AIPAC for obtaining the information.
According to a 2004 story in the Washington Post, the FBI interviewed officials in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon -- including Cheney aides David Wurmser and John Hannah, former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- to determine if they were involved in the security leaks McNulty is investigating. These are some of the people to blame for starting an unnecessary war.
The FBI wants to know if the above war advocates leaked confidential information to Israel, AIPAC, AND the Iraqi exile/Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was a CIA asset who had hoped for the US to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with Chalabi. Chalabi reportedly had a hand in the Niger forgeries, hoping like many other factions to use them to justify a war against Iraq. Apparently his loyalties were with Iran rather than Iraq. Shortly after the war started, the US broke with Chalabi for leaking US secrets to Iran, and the new Iraqi government wants to arrest him.
TALLY SO FAR OF FOREIGN MEDDLERS IN US GOVERNMENT -- 5: ITALY, FRANCE, BRITAIN, IRAN, IRAQ
But wait!...There's more! The New York Times (Douglas Jehl, October 28, 2005) reports that some US officials believe the Niger uranium documents were forged in Niger's embassy in Rome in "a moneymaking scheme" (the beneficiaries of which the report didn't name). This could be another cover story, to cover up the possibility that the documents were designed to hijack American foreign policy.
At any rate, someone reported to the Rome police that between January 1 and 2, 2001, someone broke into the Niger embassy there and stole letterheads and official seals. The photocopies on this page resulted. The paper and seals supposedly were used to produce the Niger forgeries you see here. The burglary and the theft of the letterheads and seals were an inside job -- someone from Niger -- according to recent reports out of Italy.
BUT WAIT!...THERE'S MORE!
I have already given you Italy, France, Britain, Iran, Iraq and Niger -- but, just for staying with me, I am going to add two more great all-around knives in the back (two more manipulators of US foreign policy)!
The only person who admits to getting the Niger forgeries through unofficial channels is the Italian espionage soldier-of-fortune Rocco Martino. He's as far back as any one can trace the forgeries. He says he got them in late 2001 from a lady at the embassy. Some have suggested the CIA's Milan chief of station (COA) Robert Seldon Lady, the Rome COS Jeffrey Castelli, or other CIA operatives helped forge the documents or get them to Martino. Are these CIA people the entrepreneurs of the "moneymaking" Niger forgery scheme?
Martino says he delivered the Niger forgeries to the French secret service, whom he was working for then, through a "handler" (French secret-service officer) in Brussels, Belgium.
So in addition to the cutting-edge interveners I already give you, I am now throwing in two more -- CIA and Belgium -- making a grand total of 8! That's 8 great states in one "little bitty" package that have attempted to steer US foreign and domestic policy through the use of the 4 amazing forgeries you see here! A veritable United Nations of meddlers in the vital sovereign affairs of the United States, all in one small article and 4 easy downloads! (The CIA IS effectively a latent sovereign state with a great concentration of power, and that is an incredible menace in itself.)
Now, you would think that be plenty to offer in just one short article -- 8 sovereign states including the CIA to cut a path to war, and 4 easy downloads.
BUT WAIT!...HERE'S MORE
In addition to the foreign kibitzers and the CIA, you have a complete parallel, clandestine government in the United States in addition to the official, Constitutional one you learned about in your formal education. It is a government of back-channels like the Pentagon's Stovepipe, and black ops like the Iran-contra one Oliver North ran under Reagan's nose from the White House basement in the 1980s. America apparently didn't learn its lesson from that. In fact, many of the Iran-contra alumni are back on the job in the Bush administration. For this shadow government, you can add 1 to my tally of 8, or you can add as many back-channels and black ops as can be identified -- and the Niger-forgery history shows there are many.
The New York Times may be "America's paper of record," but is is to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html that one must turn to find out about the US back-channels, since Times reporters like Judith Miller are back-channel mediums themselves. (She should still be in jail, in my opinion.)
TIMELINE
YEARS 1999-2000 Rocco Martino is a double-agent for the French secret service and the Italian intelligence agency SISMI, even though SISMI had officially fired Martino stealing money for himself (not much more than any opportunistic intelligence agent might do). The French find out that someone has been working abandoned French mines in Niger. They want to find where the uranium is going and consult Martino.
Martino, needing intel to sell to the French, asks his old friend at SISMI, Antonio Nucera, for help. Nucera introduces him to a lady or Lady ("La Signora") who is a SISMI asset (spy) at the Rome embassy of Niger (Niger rhymes with forger). She in turn enlists the cooperation of a Niger employee of the embassy, Zakaria Yaou Maiga, and the three conspire to obtain materials at the embassy to sell to the French.
JANUARY 1, 2001 The little gang simulates a break-in and burglary at the embassy and steals letterhead and some document stamps, the kind that make documents official as a notary stamp does.
The gang types and stamps the amateurish forgeries you see here, including:
Forged letters
Forged contracts
A memorandum of understanding for Niger to supply Iraq some uranium in 2000
An 2-page agreement, as an attachment to the memorandum
About 17 pages in all
Martino conveys the dodgey dossier to the French. The French are the first to get it and immediately see that it is a forgery, having obvious mistakes as shown above. That doesn't stop them from paying him.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Nineteen people -- ostensibly Islalmic fanatics -- crash a few planes, knock down the a few buildings in New York and part of the Pentagon, and kill about 0.014 percent of the population of Metropolitan NYC. In response, the Bush administration decides not just to launch preemptive wars and a war on terror -- but to throw out over 2000 years of Western civilization, jettisoning its heritage of human rights and resorting to torture and other crimes of King Herod. In Silvio Berlusconi's "Clash of Civilizations," we immediately run away from ours.
In the wake of 9/11, Bush is empowered to carry out his family's vendetta against the Hussein family (practically parading the heads of Saddam's sons on sticks), and the Italian president Silvio Berlusconi seeks to serve his master some intelligence for the vendetta. Berlusconi and the CIA chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, ask the new (effective Sept. 27) SISMI chief, Nicolo Pollari, to get some goods on Saddam.
FALL 2001 General Pollari’s SISMI possesses copies of the Niger forgeries assembled by Rocco Martino and Antonio Nucera (Nucera, Martino's friend, was still working for them). SISMI shows the Niger forgeries -- but does not give a copy -- to the CIA's Castelli in Rome.
Rocco Martino delivers actual copies of the Niger forgeries to Sir Richard Dearlove’s MI6 (em-eye-six) in London. The Brits are ahead of the CIA in Rome, which only got to view, not keep, copies of the forgeries.
FALL 2001 IN THE USA
A CIA field officer in Rome, probably the chief of station, Castelli, sends the CIA in Washington a memo "that Italian intelligence permitted him see some papers documenting the attempt by Iraq to acquire 500 tons of uranium ore from Niger" (I quote here from the Repubblica article). Apparently the Italian SISMI was pushing these forged Niger documents off onto Castelli as authentic.
BACK IN THE USA
OCTOBER 15, 2001 (APPROX.) George W. Bush receives Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the White House.
The CIA in Washington makes its first report on the memo it received from its Castelli in Rome. The Washington report is merely an acknowledgment that Italian intelligence has a dossier based on the the Niger forgeries (forgeries the CIA doesn't have and Castelli has only seen) on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger.
FALL 2001 (WASHINGTON) CIA analysts in Washington report that Castelli's memo from Rome is "somewhat limited" and is "lacking in necessary detail." The State Departments intelligence analysts (under Greg Thielmann) report that the Italian intelligence referred to in the Castelli memo is "highly suspect." Remember, the US supposedly still does not have a copy of the forgeries the intelligence is based on, the forgeries presented here.
-------------------HERE'S WHERE THE BACK-CHANNEL COMES INTO PLAY.-----------------------
FALL 2001 (ROME) Since the Italian warmongers have been rebuffed by American intelligence agencies, the normal channel for intelligence on WMD -- and still wanting to ingratiate themselves with the American government (American warmongers) -- they turn to political operatives in Washington, the back-channel. These include:
- Dick Cheney's and Paul Wolfowitz's White House Iraq Group
- The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (the "Stovepipe") created by Wolfowitz
- The office of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice
All of the above have been infiltrated by Israeli agents, as indictments such as Larry Franklin's show. Trials and more possible indictments should bring out more on Israeli infiltration and influence.
AFTER OCTOBER 15, 2001 Italy's defense minister arranges for Pollari to meet in Rome with Pollari's old bridge (card game) buddy Michael Ledeen, an Israel First, anti-Muslim, US neoconservative -- and, like so many other administration neocons, a Republican operative linked back to the Iran-contra black-ops affair of the 1980s. Ledeen is Karl Rove's foreign policy advisor -- Bush's brain's brain -- and he is coming to Rome to look for an excuse for war. He comes not as an official of the US government but as a "scholar" of a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute and, according to Repubblica, at the request of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.
DECEMBER 2001 There's a meeting in Rome attended by Ledeen, SISMI's Pollari, Italy's Minister of Defense, the now-indicted Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode -- a member of the Office of Special Plans, Ledeen's protege, and Chalabi's (the Iraqi-exile, Iran-spy) close associate. The Americans need a cause for war and Pollari just happens to have one something -- a DOSSIER on Martino's Niger forgeries. BUT NOT THE FORGERIES THEMSELVES.
THE US DOESN'T HAVE THE NIGER FORGERIES YET -- ONLY CASTELLI'S MEMO AND POLLARI'S DOSSIER -- AND WON'T GET THE SOURCE DOCUMENTS (THE FORGERIES) UNTIL ABOUT A YEAR LATER.
EARLY 2002 Ledeen reports back to the neocon cabal in Washington and informs Wolfowitz of Pollari's dossier. Wolfowitz tells Cheney, and Cheney asks the CIA to look into it.
LATE FEBRUARY 2002 Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV (husband of an undercover CIA agent going by the cover name of "Valerie Plame") goes to Niger to check on uranium sales to Iraq. He does it at the request of the CIA, which was responding to Cheney's questions) and for free. Wilson and the US Ambassador to Niger report that the sales are unlikely.
EARLY 2002 (WASHINGTON) The parallel intelligence conduit (DOD's Stovepipe, which is outside the regular US intelligence chain) distributes Pollari's back-channel dossier (not the forgeries yet) to the regular intelligence agencies, including the following. State Department intelligence tells the CIA the info in Pollari's dossier is implausible, referring among other things to an impossible amount of uranium mentioned in the dossier.
CIA headquarters, however, possibly influenced by having missed warnings signs of the 9/11 attacks, does not discount Pollari's dossier.
JULY 23, 2002 (LONDON) "DOWNING STREET MEMO" / "FIXED" INTELLIGENCE A full eight months before the invasion, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers meet. Notes are taken and a memo written (the Downing Street Memo) that will go public only long after the war starts.
Included in the note-taker's account was an assessment by the chief of British intelligence, after returning from a visit to Washington, that: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The WMD part is the Niger forgeries.
MID-2002 Pollari meets his opposite number Tenet near the McLean, VA, headquarters of the CIA. They seem to mistrust each other.
SUMMER 2002 Making an end run around Tenet and the CIA, Pollari holds has an ongoing dialog with Demon-Eyes Rice's office and the Wolfowitz/Feith Office of Special plans at the Pentagon.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2002 Pollari is movin' on up in the US, to the White House. There he meets with Rice's No.2 in the National Security Advisor's office, Stephen Hadley.
SEPTEMBER 2002 In its September 12-19 issue, the Berlusconi-owned Panorama weekly magazine claims that Iraq has bought uranium from African and has attempted to buy aluminum tubes, used in centrifuges for making bomb-grade uranium, from Germany.
SEPTEMBER 2002 Pollari tells the Italian Parliament -- possibly an even more compliant representative body than the US Congress -- that he has no proof of the Niger-uranium claim.
30 DAYS LATER Pollari tells Parliament, no, he DOES after all have documentary evidence of uranium sales and attempted centrifuge sales. Italy's intelligence chief is like Will Rogers, apparently -- all he knows is what he reads in the papers (like his boss's Panorama).
SEPTEMBER 24, 2002 (LONDON) British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- advance man for the Grim Reaper, Bush -- speaks for the first time on attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain Uranium from Africa. This charge is based on the Niger forgeries that you see here, which Britain obtained about a year earlier. The US had Castelli's (CIA chief in Rome) memo on the forgeries through regular channels, had Pollari's (SISMI chief) dossier on Iraq-Niger-uranium through the neocons' illegitimate back-door channels (Ledeen, Wolfowitz), and had official CIA and State Department reports on the reports -- layers and layers of hearsay -- but the US did not have the actual forgeries, yet.
DISSEMINATION OF THE ACTUAL FORGERIES -- MARTINO THE SECOND-STORY MAN BECOMES A BACK-DOOR MAN
OCTOBER 2002 With SISMI's Pollari still trying to get the Niger uranium hoax to fly, Rocco Martino, the lead forger who already has given the forgeries to the British MI6, sells them to Elisabetta Burba, a correspondent for -- Panorama. Despite the affiliation with Berlusconi's propaganda sheet, she plays the honest reporter -- the antithesis of the media whoring of Judith Miller of the New York Times and Robert Novak -- and declines to spread the lies in the forgeries.
However, Berlusconi's trusty Panorama editor-in-chief sends the Niger forgeries to the US embassy in Rome. Now, finally, the actual Niger forgeries are in American hands, apparently for the first time.
ITALIAN INTELLIGENCE NOW HAS SLIPPED THE NIGER FORGERIES -- THE RATIONALE FOR THE IRAQ WAR -- INTO AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE BY ANOTHER BACK DOOR (THIS TIME, MARTINO AND PANORAMA) SO AS TO LEAVE NO FINGERPRINTS. But at least American intelligence finally has the "real" thing (if you can call these forgeries that).
OCTOBER 16, 2002 (WASHINGTON) The State Department distributes the Martino/Pollari Niger forgeries (Martino had made them in early 2001, and Berlusconi and Pollari had been pushing them ever since) at a meeting with the regular intelligence agencies, including four CIA officials.
The forgeries are very crude as you can see. The CIA men could see that they would be an embarrasment to Cheney and his fellow warmongers. Fortuitously, the forgeries disappear for three months. Fortunately (or unfortunately for the neocons) they are found in an internal audit ordered by the CIA inspector-general.
JANUARY 28, 2003 "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Sixteen little words in President Bush's State of the Union speech that will coexist with famous presidential words like "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (FDR). Contrast the terrorizing words of a demagogue with the reassuring words of a great, benevolent president. Bush begins inciting the nation to war based on the crude forgeries you see here.
FEBRUARY 2003 The month before the Niger forgeries are used to start the Iraq war, the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN needs just hours spread over 10 days to debunk these forgeries, which professionals and amateurs in the intelligence game -- a journalist, ambassadors, the Rome CIA chief, CIA and State Department analysts in Washington -- already had debunked. There is no way Bush and his administration could have believed their own lies about these forgeries. Bush lied -- people died.
Joseph Wilson, on assignment from the CIA, had reported back a year before that the documents were signed by Niger officials who were no longer in government (we showed this mistake with the photocopy) and that they probably were forged.
The IAEA finds ridiculous errors (demonstrated with the graphics above) that I could have found myself in a few hours of Googling (if I had had the forgeries), including the wrong Niger constitution, the wrong Niger foreign minister, an obsolete stolen letterhead, and a wrong date based on an ignorance of Niger ordinance designations.
MARCH 19, 2003 Bush launches the American Blitz (pumps his hand, up and down, gleefully as children die in their beds) against military and civilian targets in Iraq, softening up the Iraqi army, and children, for the US Army and Marines.
THE NEED FOR A COVERUP: HAVING USED FORGED DOCUMENTS TO START A WAR, THE ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE SOMETHING IT EVENTUALLY WILL NEED TO COVER UP.
JULY 6, 2003 Seeing the horrors of war that his honest debunking report on Niger uranium should have prevented, Joseph Wilson writes an article in the New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa." What he didn't find was uranium sales to Iraq. What he did find was that the copies you see are forgeries. The White House decides to discredit and punish Joseph Wilson. The cowards go after his wife.
"KILL THE MESSENGER": THE NIGER FORGERIES NOW ARE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER AND THE OBJECT OF A COVERUP. The forgeries show that the war is unnecessary and President Bush lied the nation into it.
JULY 14, 2003 Wilson's CIA wife is unmasked as that White House organ, the columnist Robert Novak, publishes an article that says "two senior administration officials" (ostensibly Lewis Libby and Karl Rove) told him Wilson's wife, whom he identifies as Valerie Plame a [CIA] operative on weapons of mass destruction." Her cover as a WMD investigator is blown, her career ruined, and what started as the White House's illegitimate search for WMD ended up with the White House sabotaging the CIA's legitimate WMD search.
JULY 14 AND 17, 2003 Mathew Cooper of Time writes that government officials have told him Wilson's wife is a CIA official monitoring WMD.
SEPTEMBER 29 TO 30 The US Department of Justice informs White House counsel Alberto Gonzales it is investigating the unmasking of an undercover CIA employee by administration officials.
DECEMBER 30, 2003 Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney in Chicago, is named as special counsel to conduct a grand jury hearing in Washington to see if any crimes were committed in naming Plame.
MAY 21, 2004 Fitzgerald's grand jury asks Cooper and Time to give up evidence and documents. They refuse.
AUGUST 9, 2005 US District Judge Thomas Hogan finds Cooper and Time in contempt of court.
AUGUST 12-14, 2004 The grand jury summons Judith Miller, a warmongering reporter for the New York Times who had talked to government officials about Plame. She joins Cooper in refusing to cooperate.
AUGUST 24, 2004 Cooper agrees to testify after Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby (later indicted), releases Cooper from a promise of confidentiality.
REMEMBER: ALL OF THIS COURT WRANGLING IS OVER THE "OUTTING" OF VALERIE PLAME, JOSEPH WILSON'S WIFE, IN RESPONSE TO WILSON'S HAVING DEBUNKED THE NIGER-FORGERIES WAR RUSE IN A NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2004 The grand jury issues another subpoena to Cooper for further information, but Cooper and Time refuse to cooperate.
OCTOBER 2004 TO JUNE 2005 Miller, Cooper, Time, and the Times engage in legal wrangling that goes all the way to the US Supreme Court, to avoid giving evidence that they say violates freedom of the press and confidentiality agreements they had made.
MAY 2005 (LONDON) The London Sunday Times publishes the secret "Downing Street Memo." A national security aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair had produced a memo based on a meeting between Blair and his top advisers on July 23, 2002 (described above), and someone had leaked the memo to the paper. The memo shows that what the British government knew was not what Bush had said (that Iraq bought uranium in Africa) but the opposite -- intelligence was "fixed" to justify a planned war.
JUNE 27, 2005 The Supreme Court refuses to hear the cases of the Time and New York Times reporters.
JULY 1, 2005 Time turns over Cooper's notes, emails, and other documents as Cooper and Miller refuse to reveal sources.
JULY 6, 2005 Judge Hogan sends Miller to jail for refusing to reveal her source (who eventually turns out to be Libby).
JULY 15, 2005 Karl Rove testifies to the grand jury that he learned Plame's identity from journalists and then discussed it with Cooper without using Plame's name.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2005 Miller is released from jail after agreeing to testify. She says her source (later revealed to be Libby) released her from her promise of confidentiality.
SEPTEMBER 30 TO OCTOBER 12 Miller testifies on three days to the grand jury. She turns over notes about a phone call with Libby that she supposedly had neglected to mention before (obstruction of justice?).
OCTOBER 14, 2005 Rove testifies to Fitzgerald's grand jury for the fourth and final time.
OCTOBER 16, 2005 Miller reports on her testimony in her paper (the NYT) and says Libby told her Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) unit. Libby had tried to cripple the very unit that should have been able to save us the "trouble" of going to war in Iraq.
OCTOBER 19, 2005 The AP reports that Karl Rove's grand jury testimony also implicated Libby as someone who told reporters Mrs. Plame-Wilson worked for the CIA. Libby has been ratted out and set up to take the fall for others in the administration.
OCTOBER 25, 2005 The NYT implicates Dick Cheney by saying that he is the one who told Libby of Mrs. Plame's identity in the first place (June 2003, before the White House found it necessary to get Joe Wilson and Plame).
OCTOBER 28, 2005 Fitzgerald announces that the grand jury has voted to indict Libby but not Rove.
NOVEMBER 2005 Other government officials and reporters COMPLICIT IN THE PLAME OUTING remain indicted.
NOVEMBER 2005 Important questions about WHO PROCURED THE NIGER FORGERIES FOR THE US, and how and why, remain unanswered.
Other big questions remain, such as WHO USED THEM TO START THE WAR and HOW AND WHY DID THEY DO IT? DID PRESIDENT BUSH LIE, deliberately and knowingly, to start the war? Should he be impeached? Imprisoned? Is lying us into war to be his main legacy?
Also, WHAT REPORTERS and government officials have OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE by impeding grand jury and FBI investigations? They need to be indicted. Libby is not the only one.
What other crimes have been committed, and by whom, in covering up the Niger forgeries?
What role have FOREIGN STATES and agents played in connection with the Niger forgeries? Have Americans committed treason, espionage, or similar crimes in connection with the Niger forgeries? How can another war based on fixed intelligence be prevented?
2. THE SECOND PART IS A DETAILED TIMELINE OF HOW FIXED INTELLIGENCE BASED ON THE FORGERIES GOT US INTO THE IRAQ WAR -- ALSO HOW LEWIS LIBBY (NOW INDICTED) AND OTHERS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO COVER UP THE USE OF FORGERIES.
I am dedicating each forged page to a couple of the foreign countries involved in making and pushing these forgeries, and thus pushing the US into the Iraq war.
More serious crimes have been committed here than Lewis Libby (Cheney's assistant) fibbing to the FBIers. Some American citizens may be liable for treasonable crimes in connection with the procurement and transmittal of these. Then there are the additional crimes of covering up these original crimes (crimes like Libby is charged with). Some people are certainly liable for the unnecessary deaths of 2000-plus US soldiers in a trumped-up war based on these forgeries. Not to mention the genocide against 100,000 civilians, including victims of heinous white-phosphorous bombs in the pogrom against Fallujah in November 2004. God bless America! Why? Join the Army and be all the murderer you can be.
NOTE: IF THE SITE YOU ARE VIEWING DOES NOT SUPPORT GRAPHICS, PLEASE LOOK HERE:
HOW DO WE KNOW THESE PHOTOCOPIES ARE FORGERIES?
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_1 I dedicate this to Italy and Britain. Rocco Martino an ex-agent of Italian intelligence has admitted procuring the forgeries. General Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian intelligence, collaborated with back channels in the US government to get the forgeries into the right hands in the US Government so they could be used as "fixed" intelligence for war -- without leaving the "fingerprints" of their source (Martino, Italian intelligence, and others called out in this article). Britain received the forgeries before the US, and Tony Blair was the first to publicize them. Britain maintains a cover story that they had "independent intelligence," separate from the Niger uranium documents themselves, which story came in handy when it had to be admitted that the documents were forgeries.
* See the copy and note that the date of a Niger "ordonnance" cited in the alleged agreement ("Annexe 1") is off by 26 years. The "74" in "le ordonnance" (sixth line down) refers to the year 1974 while the text says "5 juillet 2000." You can easily discern such discrepancies for yourself, even though these documents are in French.
#file_1#
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_2 I dedicate this one to France and Belgium. France hired Martino in the first place to come up with evidence on WMD and on uranium missing from French mines in Niger. Martino worked through a "handler" (French secret-service manager) in Brussels, Belgium.
* Observe that, in an alleged letter dated July, 27, 2000, the president of Niger refers to the central African nation's constitution of May 12, 1965, but the constitution in place in 2000 was dated Aug. 9, 1999.
#file_2#
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_3 I dedicate this one to those arch enemies Iran and Iraq. Long before the Iraq war, the CIA asset and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi pushed for the US to replace Saddam Hussein with him. After the war started, the CIA dumped him when they found him spying for Iran.
* See that this letter allegedly signed by the foreign minister of Niger on Oct. 10, 2000, bears the signature of Allele Elhadj Habibou, who was actually foreign minister in 1988-1989.
* Note that the official letterhead used is obsolete and refers to a temporary state body, the Supreme Military Council, also obsolete.
#file_3#
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GRAPHIC: NIGERY_4 I dedicate this to Niger and the CIA. One or more Niger citizens at the country's embassy in Rome supplied Rocco Martino the raw materials for fabricating the Niger forgeries. The CIA is not a sovereign state, it just acts like one -- a rogue nation. After decades of undermining foreign governments, the CIA didn't have the right skill sets to provide a warning to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Having dropped the ball big-time, they weren't about to drop any intelligence on WMD no matter how crudely forged. They let the Niger forgeries get past them. Or they let President Bush get away with falsely blaming them for this intelligence failure. CIA whistleblowers, patriots, where are you?
* The official letterhead used is obsolete and includes the wrong symbol for the presidency as well as a reference to the Council for National Reconciliation, which was defunct by the date of the correspondence.
#file_4#
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WHAT ABOUT LEWIS LIBBY AND KARL ROVE?
Dick Cheney's assistant, Libby, has been indicted for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury and for obstructing justice. He apparently lied (he is awaiting trial) to cover up his part in outing the CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. He and possibly Bush's assistant, Karl Rove, apparently (Rove hasn't been charged) outed Plame to get back at Wilson for exposing the Niger forgeries.
President Bush used the Niger forgeries as the main excuse for the Iraq war. The forgeries purport to show that prewar Iraq bought uranium from Niger (rhymes with "forger") to make bombs. Since invading Iraq, US forces have found no WMD, hence the need for covering up the Niger forgeries, who made them, who transmitted them, who used them to incite war, and how they did these things.
It's up to the FBI, to grand juries, and to whistleblowers to expose the answers to the questions just suggested. The US Congress won't do it. Senator Pat "Coverup" Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the intelligence committee, won't let the Senate expose the Niger-forgery crimes. This senator from the Waste Land of Oz is perhaps the most disingenuous man in the Senate, and a master of investigations that defuse intelligence-related scandals.
Meddling Foreign States are More Dangerous than Free-Lancers Like Bin Laden
The foreign meddlers -- and their American accomplices -- have helped to put us in a war that is sapping our strength. Our strength comes from our economy and our character. The twin charades -- Iraq and the war on terror (How do you war on a noun like "terror" or "drugs"?) -- are breaking down both.
The Niger forgeries you see PHOTOCOPIES of were made in Italy. For all of you American-fry lovers, the French paid an Italian, Rocco Martino, to procure them. And an agent of one pole of Bush's "Axis of Evil," Iran -- in the person of erstwhile CIA asset and spy for Iran, Ahmed Chalabi -- helped to secret them into the White House by the "back door." Our loyalest ally, Great Britain, vouched for them with "independent intelligence" they have not presented to this day. This last is the source of President Bush's 16 infamous words in the 2003 SOTU speech about the British government having evidence Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa. You see the British (French/Italian/Iranian/etc.) "evidence" on these pages. Who set us up, and why?
Duped and Complicit US Officials Used the Niger Forgeries
As an Excuse for War in Iraq and Big-Brother Methods at Home
The Niger forgeries are the very evidence the Bush Administration used to go to war. The war in turn is the reason the administration has abridged Constitutional rights in the US and basic human rights around the world, in the name of "wartime" security needs. (With demogogues and dictators, any time is wartime). The Niger unanium documents you see here are forgeries, but the external and internal threats to the nation are real and very serious. Fortunately there is an effective remedy: for law-enforcement officials to do their jobs, as US Attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Paul McNulty have been doing with their Washington, DC, and Eastern Virginia grand juries, with the help of some FBI agents. Remember that the FBI is politicized, especially at the top, which limits how well it can support law enforcement.
US military forces are not defending America in Iraq: they are working to secure an oil supply. The real defenders of America right now are any honest law enforcers here in the USA.
LAWS WERE BROKEN IN CONNECTION WITH THESE DOCUMENTS. When the precise law violations are detected and prosecuted, the threat -- foreign control of the US and Big Brother control of our people -- will diminish. I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's right-hand man, has just been indicted for lying about his role in getting revenge on the man who exposed the Niger forgeries as false in the first place -- former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV. The revenge consisted of the White House unmasking for reporters Wilson's wife, an agent of the CIA with the cover name Valerie Plame. This ruined her career and her projects on WMD intelligence, arguably the kind of intelligence the US most needs and the kind that should have prevented the unnecessary Iraq war. Someone has to pay a personal price in jail time and fines for the immense cost of Iraq to the US. The price the perps pay should by immense as well.
Fitzgerald's grand jury did not indict Karl Rove or Dick Cheney; but, then, his investigation continues. He may get some of these people for worse crimes than Libby's charged with -- for example, for deliberately revealing the identity of an undercover US agent and for using these phony Niger uranium documents to play with Americans' security.
SOME EXAMPLES OF FOREIGN (NOT JUST ISRAELI) MEDDLING IN US POLICY THAT MIGHT SOON BE PROVED...
Meanwhile, another grand jury, Paul McNulty's, has indicted a Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, for passing US secrets to Israeli agents working for AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. McNulty has more recently obtained indictments against two employees of AIPAC for obtaining the information.
According to a 2004 story in the Washington Post, the FBI interviewed officials in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon -- including Cheney aides David Wurmser and John Hannah, former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- to determine if they were involved in the security leaks McNulty is investigating. These are some of the people to blame for starting an unnecessary war.
The FBI wants to know if the above war advocates leaked confidential information to Israel, AIPAC, AND the Iraqi exile/Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was a CIA asset who had hoped for the US to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with Chalabi. Chalabi reportedly had a hand in the Niger forgeries, hoping like many other factions to use them to justify a war against Iraq. Apparently his loyalties were with Iran rather than Iraq. Shortly after the war started, the US broke with Chalabi for leaking US secrets to Iran, and the new Iraqi government wants to arrest him.
TALLY SO FAR OF FOREIGN MEDDLERS IN US GOVERNMENT -- 5: ITALY, FRANCE, BRITAIN, IRAN, IRAQ
But wait!...There's more! The New York Times (Douglas Jehl, October 28, 2005) reports that some US officials believe the Niger uranium documents were forged in Niger's embassy in Rome in "a moneymaking scheme" (the beneficiaries of which the report didn't name). This could be another cover story, to cover up the possibility that the documents were designed to hijack American foreign policy.
At any rate, someone reported to the Rome police that between January 1 and 2, 2001, someone broke into the Niger embassy there and stole letterheads and official seals. The photocopies on this page resulted. The paper and seals supposedly were used to produce the Niger forgeries you see here. The burglary and the theft of the letterheads and seals were an inside job -- someone from Niger -- according to recent reports out of Italy.
BUT WAIT!...THERE'S MORE!
I have already given you Italy, France, Britain, Iran, Iraq and Niger -- but, just for staying with me, I am going to add two more great all-around knives in the back (two more manipulators of US foreign policy)!
The only person who admits to getting the Niger forgeries through unofficial channels is the Italian espionage soldier-of-fortune Rocco Martino. He's as far back as any one can trace the forgeries. He says he got them in late 2001 from a lady at the embassy. Some have suggested the CIA's Milan chief of station (COA) Robert Seldon Lady, the Rome COS Jeffrey Castelli, or other CIA operatives helped forge the documents or get them to Martino. Are these CIA people the entrepreneurs of the "moneymaking" Niger forgery scheme?
Martino says he delivered the Niger forgeries to the French secret service, whom he was working for then, through a "handler" (French secret-service officer) in Brussels, Belgium.
So in addition to the cutting-edge interveners I already give you, I am now throwing in two more -- CIA and Belgium -- making a grand total of 8! That's 8 great states in one "little bitty" package that have attempted to steer US foreign and domestic policy through the use of the 4 amazing forgeries you see here! A veritable United Nations of meddlers in the vital sovereign affairs of the United States, all in one small article and 4 easy downloads! (The CIA IS effectively a latent sovereign state with a great concentration of power, and that is an incredible menace in itself.)
Now, you would think that be plenty to offer in just one short article -- 8 sovereign states including the CIA to cut a path to war, and 4 easy downloads.
BUT WAIT!...HERE'S MORE
In addition to the foreign kibitzers and the CIA, you have a complete parallel, clandestine government in the United States in addition to the official, Constitutional one you learned about in your formal education. It is a government of back-channels like the Pentagon's Stovepipe, and black ops like the Iran-contra one Oliver North ran under Reagan's nose from the White House basement in the 1980s. America apparently didn't learn its lesson from that. In fact, many of the Iran-contra alumni are back on the job in the Bush administration. For this shadow government, you can add 1 to my tally of 8, or you can add as many back-channels and black ops as can be identified -- and the Niger-forgery history shows there are many.
The New York Times may be "America's paper of record," but is is to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html that one must turn to find out about the US back-channels, since Times reporters like Judith Miller are back-channel mediums themselves. (She should still be in jail, in my opinion.)
TIMELINE
YEARS 1999-2000 Rocco Martino is a double-agent for the French secret service and the Italian intelligence agency SISMI, even though SISMI had officially fired Martino stealing money for himself (not much more than any opportunistic intelligence agent might do). The French find out that someone has been working abandoned French mines in Niger. They want to find where the uranium is going and consult Martino.
Martino, needing intel to sell to the French, asks his old friend at SISMI, Antonio Nucera, for help. Nucera introduces him to a lady or Lady ("La Signora") who is a SISMI asset (spy) at the Rome embassy of Niger (Niger rhymes with forger). She in turn enlists the cooperation of a Niger employee of the embassy, Zakaria Yaou Maiga, and the three conspire to obtain materials at the embassy to sell to the French.
JANUARY 1, 2001 The little gang simulates a break-in and burglary at the embassy and steals letterhead and some document stamps, the kind that make documents official as a notary stamp does.
The gang types and stamps the amateurish forgeries you see here, including:
Forged letters
Forged contracts
A memorandum of understanding for Niger to supply Iraq some uranium in 2000
An 2-page agreement, as an attachment to the memorandum
About 17 pages in all
Martino conveys the dodgey dossier to the French. The French are the first to get it and immediately see that it is a forgery, having obvious mistakes as shown above. That doesn't stop them from paying him.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Nineteen people -- ostensibly Islalmic fanatics -- crash a few planes, knock down the a few buildings in New York and part of the Pentagon, and kill about 0.014 percent of the population of Metropolitan NYC. In response, the Bush administration decides not just to launch preemptive wars and a war on terror -- but to throw out over 2000 years of Western civilization, jettisoning its heritage of human rights and resorting to torture and other crimes of King Herod. In Silvio Berlusconi's "Clash of Civilizations," we immediately run away from ours.
In the wake of 9/11, Bush is empowered to carry out his family's vendetta against the Hussein family (practically parading the heads of Saddam's sons on sticks), and the Italian president Silvio Berlusconi seeks to serve his master some intelligence for the vendetta. Berlusconi and the CIA chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, ask the new (effective Sept. 27) SISMI chief, Nicolo Pollari, to get some goods on Saddam.
FALL 2001 General Pollari’s SISMI possesses copies of the Niger forgeries assembled by Rocco Martino and Antonio Nucera (Nucera, Martino's friend, was still working for them). SISMI shows the Niger forgeries -- but does not give a copy -- to the CIA's Castelli in Rome.
Rocco Martino delivers actual copies of the Niger forgeries to Sir Richard Dearlove’s MI6 (em-eye-six) in London. The Brits are ahead of the CIA in Rome, which only got to view, not keep, copies of the forgeries.
FALL 2001 IN THE USA
A CIA field officer in Rome, probably the chief of station, Castelli, sends the CIA in Washington a memo "that Italian intelligence permitted him see some papers documenting the attempt by Iraq to acquire 500 tons of uranium ore from Niger" (I quote here from the Repubblica article). Apparently the Italian SISMI was pushing these forged Niger documents off onto Castelli as authentic.
BACK IN THE USA
OCTOBER 15, 2001 (APPROX.) George W. Bush receives Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the White House.
The CIA in Washington makes its first report on the memo it received from its Castelli in Rome. The Washington report is merely an acknowledgment that Italian intelligence has a dossier based on the the Niger forgeries (forgeries the CIA doesn't have and Castelli has only seen) on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger.
FALL 2001 (WASHINGTON) CIA analysts in Washington report that Castelli's memo from Rome is "somewhat limited" and is "lacking in necessary detail." The State Departments intelligence analysts (under Greg Thielmann) report that the Italian intelligence referred to in the Castelli memo is "highly suspect." Remember, the US supposedly still does not have a copy of the forgeries the intelligence is based on, the forgeries presented here.
-------------------HERE'S WHERE THE BACK-CHANNEL COMES INTO PLAY.-----------------------
FALL 2001 (ROME) Since the Italian warmongers have been rebuffed by American intelligence agencies, the normal channel for intelligence on WMD -- and still wanting to ingratiate themselves with the American government (American warmongers) -- they turn to political operatives in Washington, the back-channel. These include:
- Dick Cheney's and Paul Wolfowitz's White House Iraq Group
- The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (the "Stovepipe") created by Wolfowitz
- The office of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice
All of the above have been infiltrated by Israeli agents, as indictments such as Larry Franklin's show. Trials and more possible indictments should bring out more on Israeli infiltration and influence.
AFTER OCTOBER 15, 2001 Italy's defense minister arranges for Pollari to meet in Rome with Pollari's old bridge (card game) buddy Michael Ledeen, an Israel First, anti-Muslim, US neoconservative -- and, like so many other administration neocons, a Republican operative linked back to the Iran-contra black-ops affair of the 1980s. Ledeen is Karl Rove's foreign policy advisor -- Bush's brain's brain -- and he is coming to Rome to look for an excuse for war. He comes not as an official of the US government but as a "scholar" of a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute and, according to Repubblica, at the request of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.
DECEMBER 2001 There's a meeting in Rome attended by Ledeen, SISMI's Pollari, Italy's Minister of Defense, the now-indicted Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode -- a member of the Office of Special Plans, Ledeen's protege, and Chalabi's (the Iraqi-exile, Iran-spy) close associate. The Americans need a cause for war and Pollari just happens to have one something -- a DOSSIER on Martino's Niger forgeries. BUT NOT THE FORGERIES THEMSELVES.
THE US DOESN'T HAVE THE NIGER FORGERIES YET -- ONLY CASTELLI'S MEMO AND POLLARI'S DOSSIER -- AND WON'T GET THE SOURCE DOCUMENTS (THE FORGERIES) UNTIL ABOUT A YEAR LATER.
EARLY 2002 Ledeen reports back to the neocon cabal in Washington and informs Wolfowitz of Pollari's dossier. Wolfowitz tells Cheney, and Cheney asks the CIA to look into it.
LATE FEBRUARY 2002 Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV (husband of an undercover CIA agent going by the cover name of "Valerie Plame") goes to Niger to check on uranium sales to Iraq. He does it at the request of the CIA, which was responding to Cheney's questions) and for free. Wilson and the US Ambassador to Niger report that the sales are unlikely.
EARLY 2002 (WASHINGTON) The parallel intelligence conduit (DOD's Stovepipe, which is outside the regular US intelligence chain) distributes Pollari's back-channel dossier (not the forgeries yet) to the regular intelligence agencies, including the following. State Department intelligence tells the CIA the info in Pollari's dossier is implausible, referring among other things to an impossible amount of uranium mentioned in the dossier.
CIA headquarters, however, possibly influenced by having missed warnings signs of the 9/11 attacks, does not discount Pollari's dossier.
JULY 23, 2002 (LONDON) "DOWNING STREET MEMO" / "FIXED" INTELLIGENCE A full eight months before the invasion, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers meet. Notes are taken and a memo written (the Downing Street Memo) that will go public only long after the war starts.
Included in the note-taker's account was an assessment by the chief of British intelligence, after returning from a visit to Washington, that: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The WMD part is the Niger forgeries.
MID-2002 Pollari meets his opposite number Tenet near the McLean, VA, headquarters of the CIA. They seem to mistrust each other.
SUMMER 2002 Making an end run around Tenet and the CIA, Pollari holds has an ongoing dialog with Demon-Eyes Rice's office and the Wolfowitz/Feith Office of Special plans at the Pentagon.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2002 Pollari is movin' on up in the US, to the White House. There he meets with Rice's No.2 in the National Security Advisor's office, Stephen Hadley.
SEPTEMBER 2002 In its September 12-19 issue, the Berlusconi-owned Panorama weekly magazine claims that Iraq has bought uranium from African and has attempted to buy aluminum tubes, used in centrifuges for making bomb-grade uranium, from Germany.
SEPTEMBER 2002 Pollari tells the Italian Parliament -- possibly an even more compliant representative body than the US Congress -- that he has no proof of the Niger-uranium claim.
30 DAYS LATER Pollari tells Parliament, no, he DOES after all have documentary evidence of uranium sales and attempted centrifuge sales. Italy's intelligence chief is like Will Rogers, apparently -- all he knows is what he reads in the papers (like his boss's Panorama).
SEPTEMBER 24, 2002 (LONDON) British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- advance man for the Grim Reaper, Bush -- speaks for the first time on attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain Uranium from Africa. This charge is based on the Niger forgeries that you see here, which Britain obtained about a year earlier. The US had Castelli's (CIA chief in Rome) memo on the forgeries through regular channels, had Pollari's (SISMI chief) dossier on Iraq-Niger-uranium through the neocons' illegitimate back-door channels (Ledeen, Wolfowitz), and had official CIA and State Department reports on the reports -- layers and layers of hearsay -- but the US did not have the actual forgeries, yet.
DISSEMINATION OF THE ACTUAL FORGERIES -- MARTINO THE SECOND-STORY MAN BECOMES A BACK-DOOR MAN
OCTOBER 2002 With SISMI's Pollari still trying to get the Niger uranium hoax to fly, Rocco Martino, the lead forger who already has given the forgeries to the British MI6, sells them to Elisabetta Burba, a correspondent for -- Panorama. Despite the affiliation with Berlusconi's propaganda sheet, she plays the honest reporter -- the antithesis of the media whoring of Judith Miller of the New York Times and Robert Novak -- and declines to spread the lies in the forgeries.
However, Berlusconi's trusty Panorama editor-in-chief sends the Niger forgeries to the US embassy in Rome. Now, finally, the actual Niger forgeries are in American hands, apparently for the first time.
ITALIAN INTELLIGENCE NOW HAS SLIPPED THE NIGER FORGERIES -- THE RATIONALE FOR THE IRAQ WAR -- INTO AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE BY ANOTHER BACK DOOR (THIS TIME, MARTINO AND PANORAMA) SO AS TO LEAVE NO FINGERPRINTS. But at least American intelligence finally has the "real" thing (if you can call these forgeries that).
OCTOBER 16, 2002 (WASHINGTON) The State Department distributes the Martino/Pollari Niger forgeries (Martino had made them in early 2001, and Berlusconi and Pollari had been pushing them ever since) at a meeting with the regular intelligence agencies, including four CIA officials.
The forgeries are very crude as you can see. The CIA men could see that they would be an embarrasment to Cheney and his fellow warmongers. Fortuitously, the forgeries disappear for three months. Fortunately (or unfortunately for the neocons) they are found in an internal audit ordered by the CIA inspector-general.
JANUARY 28, 2003 "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Sixteen little words in President Bush's State of the Union speech that will coexist with famous presidential words like "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (FDR). Contrast the terrorizing words of a demagogue with the reassuring words of a great, benevolent president. Bush begins inciting the nation to war based on the crude forgeries you see here.
FEBRUARY 2003 The month before the Niger forgeries are used to start the Iraq war, the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN needs just hours spread over 10 days to debunk these forgeries, which professionals and amateurs in the intelligence game -- a journalist, ambassadors, the Rome CIA chief, CIA and State Department analysts in Washington -- already had debunked. There is no way Bush and his administration could have believed their own lies about these forgeries. Bush lied -- people died.
Joseph Wilson, on assignment from the CIA, had reported back a year before that the documents were signed by Niger officials who were no longer in government (we showed this mistake with the photocopy) and that they probably were forged.
The IAEA finds ridiculous errors (demonstrated with the graphics above) that I could have found myself in a few hours of Googling (if I had had the forgeries), including the wrong Niger constitution, the wrong Niger foreign minister, an obsolete stolen letterhead, and a wrong date based on an ignorance of Niger ordinance designations.
MARCH 19, 2003 Bush launches the American Blitz (pumps his hand, up and down, gleefully as children die in their beds) against military and civilian targets in Iraq, softening up the Iraqi army, and children, for the US Army and Marines.
THE NEED FOR A COVERUP: HAVING USED FORGED DOCUMENTS TO START A WAR, THE ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE SOMETHING IT EVENTUALLY WILL NEED TO COVER UP.
JULY 6, 2003 Seeing the horrors of war that his honest debunking report on Niger uranium should have prevented, Joseph Wilson writes an article in the New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa." What he didn't find was uranium sales to Iraq. What he did find was that the copies you see are forgeries. The White House decides to discredit and punish Joseph Wilson. The cowards go after his wife.
"KILL THE MESSENGER": THE NIGER FORGERIES NOW ARE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER AND THE OBJECT OF A COVERUP. The forgeries show that the war is unnecessary and President Bush lied the nation into it.
JULY 14, 2003 Wilson's CIA wife is unmasked as that White House organ, the columnist Robert Novak, publishes an article that says "two senior administration officials" (ostensibly Lewis Libby and Karl Rove) told him Wilson's wife, whom he identifies as Valerie Plame a [CIA] operative on weapons of mass destruction." Her cover as a WMD investigator is blown, her career ruined, and what started as the White House's illegitimate search for WMD ended up with the White House sabotaging the CIA's legitimate WMD search.
JULY 14 AND 17, 2003 Mathew Cooper of Time writes that government officials have told him Wilson's wife is a CIA official monitoring WMD.
SEPTEMBER 29 TO 30 The US Department of Justice informs White House counsel Alberto Gonzales it is investigating the unmasking of an undercover CIA employee by administration officials.
DECEMBER 30, 2003 Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney in Chicago, is named as special counsel to conduct a grand jury hearing in Washington to see if any crimes were committed in naming Plame.
MAY 21, 2004 Fitzgerald's grand jury asks Cooper and Time to give up evidence and documents. They refuse.
AUGUST 9, 2005 US District Judge Thomas Hogan finds Cooper and Time in contempt of court.
AUGUST 12-14, 2004 The grand jury summons Judith Miller, a warmongering reporter for the New York Times who had talked to government officials about Plame. She joins Cooper in refusing to cooperate.
AUGUST 24, 2004 Cooper agrees to testify after Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby (later indicted), releases Cooper from a promise of confidentiality.
REMEMBER: ALL OF THIS COURT WRANGLING IS OVER THE "OUTTING" OF VALERIE PLAME, JOSEPH WILSON'S WIFE, IN RESPONSE TO WILSON'S HAVING DEBUNKED THE NIGER-FORGERIES WAR RUSE IN A NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2004 The grand jury issues another subpoena to Cooper for further information, but Cooper and Time refuse to cooperate.
OCTOBER 2004 TO JUNE 2005 Miller, Cooper, Time, and the Times engage in legal wrangling that goes all the way to the US Supreme Court, to avoid giving evidence that they say violates freedom of the press and confidentiality agreements they had made.
MAY 2005 (LONDON) The London Sunday Times publishes the secret "Downing Street Memo." A national security aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair had produced a memo based on a meeting between Blair and his top advisers on July 23, 2002 (described above), and someone had leaked the memo to the paper. The memo shows that what the British government knew was not what Bush had said (that Iraq bought uranium in Africa) but the opposite -- intelligence was "fixed" to justify a planned war.
JUNE 27, 2005 The Supreme Court refuses to hear the cases of the Time and New York Times reporters.
JULY 1, 2005 Time turns over Cooper's notes, emails, and other documents as Cooper and Miller refuse to reveal sources.
JULY 6, 2005 Judge Hogan sends Miller to jail for refusing to reveal her source (who eventually turns out to be Libby).
JULY 15, 2005 Karl Rove testifies to the grand jury that he learned Plame's identity from journalists and then discussed it with Cooper without using Plame's name.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2005 Miller is released from jail after agreeing to testify. She says her source (later revealed to be Libby) released her from her promise of confidentiality.
SEPTEMBER 30 TO OCTOBER 12 Miller testifies on three days to the grand jury. She turns over notes about a phone call with Libby that she supposedly had neglected to mention before (obstruction of justice?).
OCTOBER 14, 2005 Rove testifies to Fitzgerald's grand jury for the fourth and final time.
OCTOBER 16, 2005 Miller reports on her testimony in her paper (the NYT) and says Libby told her Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) unit. Libby had tried to cripple the very unit that should have been able to save us the "trouble" of going to war in Iraq.
OCTOBER 19, 2005 The AP reports that Karl Rove's grand jury testimony also implicated Libby as someone who told reporters Mrs. Plame-Wilson worked for the CIA. Libby has been ratted out and set up to take the fall for others in the administration.
OCTOBER 25, 2005 The NYT implicates Dick Cheney by saying that he is the one who told Libby of Mrs. Plame's identity in the first place (June 2003, before the White House found it necessary to get Joe Wilson and Plame).
OCTOBER 28, 2005 Fitzgerald announces that the grand jury has voted to indict Libby but not Rove.
NOVEMBER 2005 Other government officials and reporters COMPLICIT IN THE PLAME OUTING remain indicted.
NOVEMBER 2005 Important questions about WHO PROCURED THE NIGER FORGERIES FOR THE US, and how and why, remain unanswered.
Other big questions remain, such as WHO USED THEM TO START THE WAR and HOW AND WHY DID THEY DO IT? DID PRESIDENT BUSH LIE, deliberately and knowingly, to start the war? Should he be impeached? Imprisoned? Is lying us into war to be his main legacy?
Also, WHAT REPORTERS and government officials have OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE by impeding grand jury and FBI investigations? They need to be indicted. Libby is not the only one.
What other crimes have been committed, and by whom, in covering up the Niger forgeries?
What role have FOREIGN STATES and agents played in connection with the Niger forgeries? Have Americans committed treason, espionage, or similar crimes in connection with the Niger forgeries? How can another war based on fixed intelligence be prevented?
Clayton Hallmark