Sorokossack and DUer fantasists have been having heart palpitations for two years about the origin of the forged documents purporting to prove an attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium in Niger. The fantasy involves a neocon cabal being the ultimate "source" of the forgeries which were (again, within the fantasy) primary evidence for the "Bush Lied, People Died" case. The forgeries also played a part in Jumpin' Joe Wilson's "Excellent African Adventure" and have been used by him as part of the justification for his wife's exercise in nepotism in suggesting that he possessed the competency to investigate anything more than the ease with which information may be extracted from a "covert operative".
The FBI now reports that they concur with the Italian government's initial assertion that the documents were produced by a petty scamster solely for pecuniary motive. The lefty's fantasy has been driven by a series of articles in the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" (think of a cross between the National Enquirer and The Nation) by a couple of journos who combine Josh Marshal's reputation for accuracy in prediction with Sydney Blumenthal's style and wit. I've read the series in La Repubblica and the Italian journo's reliance upon "anonymous" sources with a political ax to grind is worse than the Times. No proof, no substance, no facts - just the suggestion of a tenuous web woven with the gossamer threads of innuendo.
The chief neocon figure attacked by both the lefties and the Italian journos is Michael Ledeen who bears the terrible burden of actually being fluent in Italian AND being one of the supposed architects of the Cheney groups "rush to war" effort. In fact, Michael Ledeen's only sin is being an articulate and informed voice with the mental capacity to identify and address the dangers that Saddam and the Mad Mullahs in Teheran pose(d) to the security of the United States.
Jay Rockefeller's assinine comment concerning the "thoroughness" of the FBI investigation is going to keep the Sorokossack's hopes alive and will help sustain the Democrats limping smear campaign for a bit longer but those of us who are actually sane may lay this issue aside with confidence.
Unless one wants to make an assertion as to the FBI's competence, of course. It will be interesting to watch the Dems claim that the FBI was incompetent in their investigation of the provenance of the forgeries while asserting that the FBI did a great job in investigating Libby.
UPDATE
Terrye raises a question in comments concerning continuing investigations and Jay Rockefeller. Rockefeller exposed the Dem hand in this infamous memo which outlines what passes for strategic political thought among top Democrats.
UPDATE
My thanks to Roger for highlighting this piece and welcome to those of you visiting. Please, take a look around and say hi to some of the other contributors.
46 comments:
Rick,
I especially like the trap for the left that you call attention to in your last paragraph!
Jamie Irons
Who knew that Ledeen was a covert administration official??
Rick:
What does Rockefller suggest? Is the taxpayer to foot the bill for one investigation after another until someone comes up with one the Democrats like?
Good question, Terrye. I added an update that explains the thimblewit's ratiocinations concerning "investigations". The Dems haven't even mastered checkers and they keep trying to play 3D chess.
According to Mac Ranger at http://macsmind.blogspot.com/; AJ Strata at http://strata-sphere.com/blog/; and Tom McGuire at http://justoneminute.typepad.com/, there is much more to this story than just the FBI report. I recommend checking these bloggers out to see if their predictions bear fruit.
There was also a bit of right-wing fantasy about the forgeries...that they were concocted by CIA or ex-CIA to damage Bush.
I'm glad the investigation is complete. I question the timing though. (not really...much)
The main thing to remember about the forgeries is that they are a red herring.
It's the twisting of things into their opposite that is driving me crazy about the Left.
Oh, btw, Ledeen is fluent in Italian but the forgeries were in French. I think Roger L pointed that out.
The 'hamhanded forgeries" only have importance in the Alterman reality. Find a reference by any administration official to these specific documents and I would argue the point of their importance.
If you actually check out the forgeries entrance into the discusiion you'll wind up on the NYT e-page of July 6, 2003 under the signature of the very dimwitted Joe Wilson (Liar, Ordinary).
Keep clapping, Tinkerbelle will die if you don't.
mark:
You know what? If the left had been half as interested in getting answers to Saddam's wmd capacity a decade ago as they are in creating weird ass little conspiracy theories today we would not be having this discussion.
So much for reality based community.
As for Wilson, it would have been alot easier to let him go back to obscurity if the press had not been his biggest freaking fan club.
The forgeries were not mentioned in the SOTU. To imply that they were is to uncritically accept Joe Wilson's fantasy without reference to British intelligence reports that specifically address the fact that the forgeries did not play any part in their intelligence assessment that Hussein had sought to purchase uranium in Africa. The Brits stand by their intelligence today as firmly as they did when the provided the assessments used by the President in the SOTU.
Politics is a tough business and the Wilson's were counting on Kerry to block for them with regard to Joe's lies and his wife's nepotistic decicision to urge that her husband be sent at government expense to do a little log rolling for his personal consulting firm in Niger. Counting on Kerry has never made anyone any healthier or wealthier - wiser, yes.
There is more to come on Wilson, Mark - and the Alterman reality folks aren't going to like it at all.
Hey, I didn't know you guys were all hanging out here.
Good blog!
PJ
Mark,
My apologies for not issuing a warm YARGBie welcome to our comments section. There will always be someone here willing to engage inhabitants of the Alterman Reality in general discourse on a relatively polite basis. If you run accross any extraterrestrials on your side of the veil, let them know that they too are welcome to visit.
Peter,
I understand that Monday may bring a bit of clarification concerning French involvement with the Niger docs. I don't believe that Wilson was paid for the trip. There is some question concerning him having used taxpayer paid transportation to conduct personal business pertaining to his consulting firm. To date, that is purely speculative although it must be noted that his only previous experience concerning uranium ore production would probably have come from his dealings with COGEMA - the Canadian headquartered French consortium which operates mines both in Niger and in Gabon - where Wilson served as ambassador prior to his leaving the foreign service for "personal" reasons.
Mark,
How many times have you seen any intelligence service reveal sources, means or methods? The Venona project wasn't declassified for 50 years.
Secrecy just seems to be one of the drawbacks to having Secret Services. Amazingly enough.
Mark:
Actually Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in December 1998 and he also wrote the Iraqi Liberation Act calling for the removal of Saddam from power. To say he had nothing to do with the invasion when his own man Pollack was writing a book justifying the invasion of Iraq and everything Clinton did only made confrontation more likely is disengenuous.
I was a Democrat back then and I never doubted Saddam had the weapons and I remember watching Clinton on TV when he explained the danger of Saddam and the necessity of bombing Iraq and I thought then that it was only a matter of time.
I also remember Al Gore saying in 2002 that it was time we dealt with Saddam on our terms. And Clinton did support the invasion.
Now these people are trying to act as if they were out of town that week visiting a sick aunt and had nothing to do with any of this.
I think that after 9/11 with that intel, the knowledge that Saddam had tried to kill a president, that he harbored terrorists [one of which had been involved in the 1993 attack on the WTC] and Saddam's continued refusal to comply that Gore or Clinton either one would have done just what Bush, Blair and Howard did.
For the life of me I do not udnerstand why and how people who call themselves liberals can be so dead set against democracy in Iraq.
Mark:
The difference between the situation in 2002-2003 and that in 1998 was this combination of factors not earlier present:
September 11, the beginning of an announced campaign of terrorism against the United States by Al Queda;
The successful removal of Al Queda from its main base in Afghanistan;
The diaspora of Al Queda remnants throughout the Middle East, including to Iraq;
The increased efforts of Hussein to rid himself of the pesky inspections and get the UN supervision lifted;
Hussein's unwillingness to conform to either the letter or the spirit of a plethora of UN resolutions;
Continued intelligence showing that Hussein had unaccounted for chemical and biological weapons delivery systems;
Continued intelligence showing Hussein still wanted to develop nuclear weapons.
Under those cirumstances, none of which were believed by most informed people to be controversial at the time, it seemed unwise to allow Hussein to remain in power.
Vn - memory is hazy as to the details, but didn't we discover during that period the Norks had cheated - ramming home the rather large downside to a perennial 'wait and see' attitude?
Rick,
A nice post on a topic the Moveon.org folks outwit themselves on. It is fascinating how something like their Ledeen wet dream (i.e., an articulate spokeperson for democracy in Iran is really a conniving warmonger, so therefore the deomcracy thing in Iraq is really a front to grab oil so that we can cause global warming that will require people to buy special safety pods made only by Halliburton which will be protected from prosecution by "machine gun Sammy" Alito...) fades into the background when the slow work of fact checking sends up a flare.
Do any of the moonies publicly retract anything said that is inflammatory and false? Instead it's go back to the "...disarming Saddam was the reason for war." How soon some forget that big brave Bill lobbed cruise missiles at Saddam's suspected WMD facilities and that we were already at war with Iraq, and that Bill and the Dems (including Jay Rockefeller) were threatening to send troops over there (before 9/11 ever happened) and that we had imposed no fly zones and sanctions over a country we had never signed a truce with or they forget Bush's speech to the UN in 2002 arguing for compliance from Saddam or his removal for a complex set of reasons or actually listened to the rest of the 2003 SOTU speech beyond the 16 words or that the 16 words did not say what the moonbats keep saying they say or that many were the same folks who had been calling for an end to the sanctions they then said were working and should be left in place, and ignore the Oil for Palaces prgram, etc.
It is a really good blog you guys from Roger's place have created.
I have to say with people like Valerie Plame and her hubby doing the intel it is no small wonder things were screwed up.
BTW, does anyone really know what happened to the weapons?
I know Hans Blix said there was a "presumption" that the weapons existed, but if they were indeed destroyed, when and where?
How hard would it have been to smuggle the wmd out of the country?
I certainly do not know but it would seem to me that it would be easier for the Iraqi regime to move the weapons than for so many people to be wrong.
I remember Madeline Albright saying her greatest fear was not that there were no weapons, but that there were and if so, where are they now?
barry:
Hello. Yes, they do love to chase their fluffy little tails don't they?
Whatever will they do and whoever will they hate when Bush goes back to Texas.
They say they can not wait, but in truth they will find that once Bush is gone they will still be toads.
loony little toads.
Mark is making his points without much snark. There are people living in the Alterman Reality who are capable of doing so and not deserving of reactionary response. Yet.
Hi, Barry. Thanks for the compliment. We're having a good time here and still having a good time at Roger's. Can't beat it.
Mark,
My mention (not Roger's) of Ledeens ability to speak Italian ties to the Alterman Reality version that it was his 'close' contacts within Sismi who generated and tried to pass off the Nigeri forgeries.
As to Wilson's experience in Africa, nobody denies that he was ambassador to Gabon and that being a Francophone probably helped out in that respect. I believe that '20 years experience' may be an overstatement and I believe that his overall competence to assess the uranium extraction process is totally dependent upon his relationship with COGEMA during his stint in Gabon. All of that will play out a little at a time over the coming months. As will his Saudi connections.
Yeah that's some real perspective. Some petty crooks throw out the bait and the administraion cites it in a run up to war. How adept of them.
It always amazes me how resolution 1441 simply disappears down the left's memory hole.
Has Saddam complied he'd still be in power. The only reason he didn't comply was because he had something to hide. I strongly suspect we found what he was hiding - a full fledged program to develop nuclear weapons. Ha, ha you say, we didn't find nuthin in Iraq.
But Iraq was not a good place to develop WMD. The UN was snooping around the place and the US had a distressing tendency to bomb things that looked suspicious.
So, Saddam out-sourced his nuclear program to Libya. That was discovered around the time it was obvious the jig was up for Saddam.
Try googling "Libya Iraq joint weapons programs"
Wow, some opinions really are embarassing. I'd say the so-called hatred is alve and well here in wingerville. There are no cabals. Not necessary when everything is right out in the open demial and all. Amazing pretzel logic.
Um seems to me the left, if you can call Bill Clinton "left", looked at the same evidence provided by the same motly assortment of Iraqi defectors and other "intelligence" peddlers (as did the CIA) and even in his darkest Monica days in the summer of 1998 didn't succumb to the PNAC boys' siren song open letter inviting him to remove Saddam by any means necessary with their full support when he really could have used a diversion.
---------------------------------
"Just consider the facts," Bill Clinton urged.
"Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports. For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM. In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more. Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth."
Clinton was on a roll:
"Now listen to this: What did it admit? It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability--notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And might I say, UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.
Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door. And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it. "
More Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century," he argued. "They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."
---------------------------------
A little honesty is in order. As this article documents Clinton was clearly opposed to the regime of Saddam. In fact, in 1998 Democrats supported a resolution calling for military action against Iraq.
It would be much more accurate for Democrats to argue that all the Republican whining about Clinton playing "wag the dog", to divert attention from the 60 million dollar blowjob investigation, limited his actions.
Neither party is blameless in the mistakes that led up to 9/11. Also, until 9/11, neither party would have had the public support for an invasion.
This Plame business is just as silly, and just as damaging, as Republican screaming "diversion" every time Clinton did respond to Iraq or al Queda. Both Parties would be well served to spend more time keeping their eyes on the prize.
"I strongly suspect we found what he was hiding - a full fledged program to develop nuclear weapons. Ha, ha you say, we didn't find nuthin in Iraq."
Imagine it Igor. Don't let reality hit you in the keister. Doesn't look there's much danger of that, Heh!
Mark,
Do you have something to say beside, "I'm right and you're wrong, neener-neener"?
Perhaps I missed this, but has Wilson ever publicly explained why he left out of his (in)famous op-ed the small detail that Niger's former prime minister admitted to him that Iraq attempted to purchase yellowcake from Niger in late 1999?
Well how do you account for no evidence of a follow up? I know you want to play up the 1999. In three years. And the attempt was unsuccessful and incomplete.
I understand, Wilson was hiding that because he wanted them to get the yellowcake. What a pack of nutcases.
that's an answer??
Mark
What you're missing is that the forgeries had NOTHING to do with the 16 words.
The 'debunking' of the forgeries had NOTHING to do with Wilson. He debunked nothing himself.
The various intel departments and agencies were sceptical that Niger actually sold yellowcake to Iraq anyway!!
But they certainly suspected that Saddam was TRYING.
You cannot make a case for/against war on some forgeries that played NO PART in the case.
Unfortunately those forgeries are a big part if not the entire basis of the 16 words: "The British government, has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Mark, are you even faintly trying to keep up on this? You're asserting that the forgeries were a big part of the statement; the British government's own report says they weren't. Do you have some evidence that the they were? What?
Is the explanation hysterical blindness?
mark
"instead of desperately trying to smear Wilson?"
The administration had to figure out what the HELL was going on first. There was NO report with Wilson's name on it that they could wave around.
Because Wilson had debunked nothing the CIA just added a few lines concerning the fact a sale was improbable but there was an attempt in 1999 to open trade talks which the former Interior Minister had assumed meant yellowcake.
Even this snippet did not have Wilson's name on it.
That's how UNIMPORTANT Wilson was.
Are you under the impression that the intelligence behind Iraq consisted of a dozen items and anything there that could discredit Wilson could be found quickly?
The reason the administration couldn't immediately discredit Wilson on the facts of his trip was that Wilson was so damned unimportant he didn't even show up in the system.
Markg8,
We turned over the documents to the IAEA with a specfic disclaimer as to their reliability:
February 4, 2003: State Department officials give the IAEA the information the agency requested about Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger, telling the agency that it "cannot confirm these reports and [has] questions regarding some specific claims."
Tony Blair disposed of the assertion with reference to the forgeries thusly:
Q6. [125879] Lynne Jones (Birmingham, Selly Oak): On 3 July, the Government finally admitted that they had not passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency the evidence on which the Prime Minister based his statement to the House that we know that Saddam has been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Is the Prime Minister not concerned that the failure of the source of that intelligence to pass it on to the IAEA for scrutiny constitutes a breach of article 10 of Security Council resolution 1441, and would he still use such words of absolute certainty today?
The Prime Minister: I stand by entirely the claim that was made last September. Let me make two points to my hon. Friend. First, as she knows, the intelligence on which we based that was not the so-called forged documents that have been put to the IAEA. The IAEA has accepted that it received no such forged documents from British intelligence: we had independent intelligence to that effect. Secondly, it may be worth pointing out to the House and to the public that it is not as if the link between Niger and Iraq was some invention of the CIA or Britain. We know that in the 1980s Iraq purchased more than 270 tonnes of uranium from Niger. Therefore, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility—let us at least put it like that—that Iraq went back to Niger again. That is why I stand by entirely the statement that was made in the September dossier.
That thread won't hold, Mark.
Furthermore, Wilson led people to believe (note the questions of reporters at the time) that Cheney had sent him, received his 'report', then ignored it.
Upon requesting info from the CIA, the CIA came back with the fact this group within the bowels of the CIA had, with his wife's involvement, sent Wilson to Niger, without Cheney's knowledge.
No report to Cheney's office was ever made specifically concerning Wilson's trip.
That's what the administration had to work with. It took much much longer to sort out all the details.
The reason the administration said they shouldn't have included the 16 words was not because they were false, but because citing foreign intelligence didn't belong in the SOTU.
We had intelligence of our own.
mark has long since demonstrated that he is impervious to logic; however, in case there are others out there of his persuasion but interested in thinking i'll ask this simple question again: Wilson reported to the CIA that Niger's former prime minister admitted to him that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake from Niger in late 1999; how then can you explain the fact that he omitted this fact from his NYT "tell all" op-ed? Unless he has alzheimmers, i cannot imagine an innocent explanation for this oversight. Think about it.
Also, if you have trouble with this one, think about why, by comparison, you are so willing to disbelieve Libby, based on the facts there (for facts, read the actual indictment).
In the end, this is not about that stuff out there; it's about what is going on in your own head.
"But they certainly suspected that Saddam was TRYING."
No they didn't. It was a longshot chance at best and longshots rarely pay off, hence the CIA sent the envoy Wilson to see what he could find based on his connections. Now you folks are so against Wilson personally that you discount his connections, credentials, his trip and continue to adhere to the argument from ignorance that because he didn't find evidence of a sale that there still was nonetheless.
Reasonable people, which none of you are, disagree. His findings were not absolute and he says so. No evidence and degree of difficulty governs where to place ones chips.
There's no cabal, just an administration using the same faulty logic as you guys. Nothing new there. Sayonara.
markg8
"The UN inspectors weren't finding anything in their surprise visits based on the best intelligence we gave them and reported pretty good cooperation from the Iraqis."
Please review the report submitted by Hans Blix to the UN in January 2003.
It matches the information which Bush gave in his State of The Union address about unaccounted for WMD. It also discusses in detail the lack of cooperation which Iraq was providing to the inspectors.
Lastly, as Blix himself notes, it was not the objective of the inspectors to either find or fail to find WMD. It was their purpose to ascertain whether or not Iraq was cooperating with the investigation. The report makes it perfectly clear that it was not.
It is also neccessary to point out that the inspectors were only allowed into Iraq on account of the presence of an army poised on its borders. That also seems to contradict the proposition that Iraq was engaged in voluntary compliance with the terms of the cease-fire.
markg8
"Showing his guys a stretch of desert where they say they dumped some of it out wasn't cutting it. But Saddam wasn't exactly an ace bookkeeper."
Your selective quotations are highly misleading.
Here is a more representaive sample of what Blix had to say.
"Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace"
Do you understand that, Mark?
"Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it"
That is the cause of war, right there. It was that acceptance which the inspections were to test. It was not the role of the inspections to prove or disprove the existence of WMD in Iraq. How do I know this? Because Blix himself says so, in another portion which you glossed over.
"Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1441 states that this cooperation shall be "active." It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items."
Blix goes on to list several areas where Iraq had still not accounted for different types of WMD.
The failure of Iraq to comply with the terms of 1441 was the immediate cause of the invasion.
As for showing a patch of desert where WMD were destroyed, that is exactly what was supposed to happen. The destruction of WMD would leave traces in the soil which the inspectors could have verified. Your concern for Saddams poor bookkeeping skills is touching though.
You also skip over the point that the inspectors were allowed in only when an army was assembled on Iraq's border, a point which Blix notes here;
"For nearly three years, Iraq refused to accept any inspections by UNMOVIC. It was only after appeals by the secretary-general and Arab states and pressure by the United States and other member states that Iraq declared on 16 September last year that it would again accept inspections without conditions."
Iraq was not cooperating with the disarmament process, in violation of the cease-fire agreement. What more needs to be said?
markq8
"..it's a pretty safe bet that Bush had Saddam in mind for a quick little mission to accomplish that would give him the political capital he needed to push through the rest of his agenda."
No need to imagine some hypothetical conspiracy. It turns out that regime change in Iraq was actually official US government policy, since 1998. So while it is indeed a "pretty safe bet" that Saddam was a marked man, that status had nothing to do with any sinister "agenda" on the part of Bush.
"The rest of your comment,proves that there had been a nuclear capability"
Boy what funky thinker. Nothing could be further from the truth as everything has shown during, and since they didn't even have conventional weapons capability. This is the saddest thing I've ever heard. It's simply unbelieveable that people are this twisted by ideology as to defy all reason.
"Sinister" is a label of emotion designed to deflect criticism of the prima facie case Bush wanted this all along no matter what. That's astandard propaganda technique.
mark
"..criticism of the prima facie case Bush wanted this all along no matter what"
As I already pointed out, and as you (once again) ignored, getting rid of Saddam was actually the official policy of the US government as far back as 1998. So claiming that Bush wanted this "all along" is not exactly a damming claim, even if true. And you offer very flimsy grounds for even that proposition.
You also have yet to address the point that Iraq was in violation of the cease-fire agreement which ended the first Gulf War, and refused to accept the need for disarmament.
You can either accept that, or you can reject it and offer arguments for why you think Iraq was not in violation. But please do not continue to dodge the issue.
Peter,
Well, I did invite Markg8 to ask along any extraterrestrials that he ran accross in the Alterman Reality.
Minor false assertions may not be significant in themselves,but when they add up they tell you the bona fides of those who assert them.A simple check of the facts using this wonderful medium would establish that the Isrealis were flying USA hardware and not Mirages,a weapon system they were not supplied after the 67 war,when they bombed the Iraqui reactor at Oserick.Our apologist for the butcher of the Kurds and Shia has no credibility.
markg8
What is the relevance of the Duelfer Report to the case for war in March 2003?
None.
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