Niger Yellowcake Uranium Forgeries

[Luke_Wilbur]

This topic was sent to me by a person who did not want his name or origin revealed. Due to other time constraints I posted this on the boards for the public to find out the facts to this story.

 

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Most Americans have never heard of Michael Ledeen, but this man may be the main reason why United States troops are in Iraq. Prof Ledeen is also believed to be in regular contact with Karl Rove.

 

"The two met after Bush's first election," the Washington Post reported, quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that "any time you have a good idea, tell me". "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric," noted the newspaper.

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/15860/

 

Michael Ledeen (born August 1, 1941) is an expert on U.S. foreign policy and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His political ideas, informed by his background in history and philosophy, have influenced or inspired the Bush administration. Ledeen is a contributing editor to the National Review and the Jewish World Review, and a resident scholar (Freedom Scholar) at the American Enterprise Institute. Ledeen was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and he continues to serve on the JINSA Board of Advisors. Leeden is also considered by many to be a U.S. neoconservative.

 

Ledeen was a major figure in the biggest foreign policy scandal of the Ronald Reagan administration. As a secret agent of National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, Ledeen vouched for Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, and along with Oliver North, met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and officers of Mossad and the CIA to arrange the illegal weapons-for-hostages deal with Iran that would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

 

He was a contract employee of the Office of Special Plans in Douglas Feith's "separate government" at the Pentagon, the "Lie Factory" where the talking points were put together to frighten the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

 

His ties to SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency which gave the forged documents back to the US in 2002 go way back.

 

In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, when asked by Ian Masters if Ledeen was the source of the forged memo that claimed that Iraq had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger replied "you'd be very close."[2]

 

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the American Conservative magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton guessed whether that was Ledeen, Giraldi confirmed it and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."[3]

 

He attended a series of meetings in Italy with Israeli spy Larry Franklin, Harold Rhode, who "practically lived out of Ahmad Chalabi's office," Ledeen's old Iran-Contra buddy, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and SISMI's director around the time that the information surfaced.

 

Joshua Micah Marshall has written that all information about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger came from the forged documents, though the documents themselves weren't given to the US until October 2002, and that it's clear a SISMI asset at the Niger embassy in Rome was given the forgeries by SISMI people in the first place before she funneled them back to them and then us:

 

The intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later...

 

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence...

 

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

 

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named..."

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson has strongly implied that Ledeen is the one.

 

Another former CIA agent, former head of counter-terrorism under Reagan, Vincent Cannistraro, has answered the question of whether Ledeen was involved with, "You'd be very close."

 

The Berlusconi weekly "Panorama" published an article by Elisabetta Burba in which she tells her version of how she got the Niger documents, realized they were false, and on advice from her editor-in-chief, turned copies over to the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002. She asserts that she received seventeen pages of documents and a Niger codebook from 1967

 

Attached are copies of the forged Nigerien documents published in Italy 27 July 2003.

niger_docs.pdf

[Guest Freetospeak]

Joseph Wilson, on assignment from the CIA, had reported that the documents were signed by Niger officials who were no longer in government and that they probably were forged. That is why the White House was against him.

[Guest TrueBrit]

Officials in the Bush administration sought to punish any persons challenging their disinformation (Annan, ElBaradei, and Wilson)

[Guest Human]

Well!!! at least no one is looking at Latin America.

[Guest Ispy]

The stakes involved in the Ledeen dossier are much more significant than the particular incident around the yellowcake. You need to start your focus on his involvement.

[Guest FreetoSpeak]

Officials in the Bush administration sought to punish any persons challenging their disinformation (Annan, ElBaradei, and Wilson)

I know United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that the invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN charter. But, how was he punished by Bush and Cheney?

[Guest U Figure it out]

I suppose I should be grateful that it works at all, but I had been trying for several days — intermittently, of course — to get to the late James Jesus Angleton, onetime chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Division, and it just wasn't working.

 

ML: Yeah, thanks for returning my calls. Have you seen these stories about the "Italian Connection" to the Niger Documents?

 

JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn't know your French was good enough (odd sound here, couldn't really tell if it was the usual cough or a spectral laugh)...

 

ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they accused me of schlepping them, not forging them. But I'm talking about a different lot: The ones that say that the Italian intelligence service never transmitted the documents to us.

 

JJA: Yes, I saw some of that here and there. Both an Italian parliamentary oversight commission and the FBI concluded that the Italian secret service didn't provide the United States with the infamous forged documents. They came through the State Department, do I have that right?

 

ML: A typical CIA fiasco, it seems. The documents were taken to the U.S. embassy by an Italian journalist (funny how there's always a journalist, isn't it?). One of the Lefties (who has a different version of the story almost every day) thinks the documents were brought to the Embassy by the guy who was peddling them all over the place. CIA people in Rome saw them, but didn't transmit them to Langley, and the agency didn't properly evaluate them until they were exposed as forgeries by the U.N.

 

JJA: That's the guy whose name sounds like a professional wrestler? Rocco or something?

 

ML: Yes, Rocco Martino. You're thinking of Antonino Rocca, who was the wrestling champion before WWF was invented. Skinny guy who bounced all over the ring.

 

JJA: Right. Good memory for a man your age.

 

ML: So you read the stories?

 

JJA: Yes I did, and there's something in there that really tickled me, and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

 

ML: Yeah, the French connection.

 

JJA: The French connection is right. Rocco Martino wasn't working for the Italians at all. He had, in the past, but they'd ditched him, and in this little caper he was paid by French intelligence. He got them the contact inside the Nigerien embassy in Rome, and he peddled them all around, to the Brits, to our government, even to CBS News. He swears he didn't forge them. Nobody seems to know who forged them.

 

ML: And your question is?

 

JJA: My question is whether the French were running one of their little disinformation stings on the United States.

 

ML: Well the moonbat Lefties — from Italy to the U.S., often working in tandem — have been saying for months that it was an Italian forgery designed to help President Bush justify the invasion of Iraq, and secondarily to curry favor in Washington for Berlusconi.

 

JJA: No way. I spent a lot of time in Italy, and believe me if they had decided to forge documents, they'd have fooled most of the world. Instead, the people at the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency figured it out in a day. No, if the documents were forged badly, it's because whoever did it, wanted them to be seen to be forgeries.

 

ML: Huh? What sense does that make?

 

JJA: Think like a counterintelligence analyst for once. It's an old-fashioned sting operation. You're Jacques Chirac, okay? You want to embarrass the Americans and protect your buddy Saddam Hussein, right? The Americans are running around trying to find evidence of a covert Iraqi nuclear program. So, first you feed them some crappy information along those lines, hoping that they'll buy it, and then you arrange — through Rocco in Italy — to have these documents surface. The documents "confirm" the disinformation and of course also what the Americans want to believe anyway. The Americans launch their accusations, then it turns out that the documents are forgeries, and bad forgeries at that, and so the Americans look like idiots and the causus belli disappears. In one move, you've helped your friend Saddam and hurt the Americans. Terrific. Chapeau, and all that.

 

ML: But it didn't stop the war, did it?

 

JJA: No, and it wasn't originally designed to stop Bush. It was designed to stop Clinton.

 

ML: You're kidding, the documents surfaced in the fall of 2002, just a few months before Bush's State of the Union speech.

 

JJA: True, and I'll get to that in a second. But the documents were forged earlier, almost certainly by 2000.

 

ML: Why didn't they surface earlier?

 

JJA: Because they weren't needed. Clinton looked like he might have been on the verge of going to war, but he didn't, so the documents got filed away. They were used later, as part of an effort to deny Bush that U.N. vote.

 

ML: But you think the French were trying to convince us to bite on a Saddam-wanted-uranium-from-Niger scam?

 

JJA: Look at page 76 of the Silberman-Robb Report. CIA had received three reports from "a liaison intelligence service" in late '01 and early 2002. "One of these reports explained that...during meetings on July 5-6, 2000, Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement for the sale of 500 tons of uranium." And the "liaison service" provided a "verbatim text" of the agreement. Got that? Not the document, but a text. They were keeping the documents to themselves, and they wouldn't tell us the source, because, they said, they were afraid of leaks.

 

ML: Right, that text is supposed to be the text of one of the forged documents.

 

JJA: Silberman-Robb doesn't say that, actually, although that's probably true. Everyone has assumed that the "liaison service" was Italian, but since the Italians did not have those documents in early 2002-nobody except the French and Rocco, the French agent, had them at that time-it wasn't them.

 

ML: So they weren't the "liaison service." It was...the FRENCH???

 

JJA: Voila! Or should I say, Ecco!?

 

ML: In fact, the New York Times on Saturday quotes the head of the Italian service accusing the French of being behind Rocco and the documents.

 

JJA: Yeah, and what do the French say? They say the guy's remarks are "scandalous," but they don't deny it. Hah! God, I wish they let us have cigarettes here, I'd blow some smoke rings...

 

ML: Has Bloomberg taken over there too?

 

JJA: You can't imagine the prissiness of this place.

 

ML: I've got one more question, if you've got the time.

 

JJA: Haha. I've got eternity, what a ridiculous thing to say. What's the question?

 

ML: I never understood all the excitement over the forgeries. The president didn't refer to them in the State of the Union, after all. He talked about "British intelligence."

 

JJA: Bravo! The Brits issued a white paper in September, 2002-remember the documents arrive at the U.S. embassy in Rome a month later — talking about Saddam's quest for uranium in Africa. And they have said repeatedly that their information had nothing to do with the forgeries.

 

ML: Yes they do. And they also say — and the Butler Commission supports them, and Bush, on this — that the information was good, and the conclusion was, and is, "well founded."

 

JJA: So now you're going to ask why the whole world believes that we went to war at least in part because we fell for the phony documents.

 

ML: Precisely.

 

The damn ouija board was sparking and I was starting to get a lot of static.

 

JJA: It's because the big-time media keep saying it — it's a textbook case of The Big Lie. Say it often enough and eventually a lot of people will believe it — and the White House, amazingly, unaccountably, incredibly, confessed to something they had not done, namely accept the documents as legit, and base policy on them.

 

ML: But they hadn't.

 

JJA: No. In fact, the information the president cited — the British intelligence — was probably accurate. If I had to bet, I'd lay pretty decent odds that the story of Saddam trying to buy uranium in Africa was true. But Ari Fleisher and Steven Hadley confessed that they had swallowed the sting. Hadley even publicly humiliated himself, although if I remember it right, it was about a speech in Cincinnati that Bush had given, not the State of the Union.

 

ML: Why didn't they just tell the truth?

 

JJA: I think they thought they were protecting CIA in some weird way. Who knows? Ask them, why don't you?

 

I could barely make it out, and the smell of burning insulation was really bad. And I was only getting Angletonian fragments.

 

JJA: ...Idiots...should have fired Tenet on September 12th...damned French...

 

And that was it. That's just the way his mind works. Remember that he really hated the French, ever since he caught them breaking into some offices in Washington. Or was it they who caught him breaking into their offices? I can never remember.

[Guest Freetospeak]

James Angleton was sent to be educated at Malvern College, a public school in Worcestershire. In 1937 Angleton enrolled at Yale University.

 

During the Second World War Angleton served with the Office of Strategic Services and in March 1943 was sent to London to be trained by MI5 officers such as Dick White and Kim Philby. He later served as a counter-intelligence agent in Italy.

 

After the war Angleton worked for the War Department's Strategic Services Unit. He became the chief counter-intelligence officer for Italy but in 1947 he returned home to join the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1951 he was sent to Israel where he helped establish Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

 

Some researchers have claimed that Angleton was involved in covering up CIA's involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, claimed in his book, The Ends of Power.

 

Angleton became convinced that the CIA had been penetrated by a "mole" working for the KGB. He ordered his assistant, Clare Edward Petty, of the ultra-secret Special Investigation Group (SIG), to carry out a study into the possibility that a Soviet spy existed in the higher levels of the CIA. Angleton suggested that David Murphy, a former chief of the Soviet Division, was a spy. Petty eventually produced a 25 page report on Murphy that concluded that he was "probably innocent". Angleton disagreed and insisted he was a spy.

[Guest Guest]

James Jesus Angleton was in no sense "right," "correct" or ever vindicated.

 

His paranoid and counter productive decimation of US intelligence is well documented. The failure of Angleton to ever find any high level SOviet moles in US intelligence is a well worn fact in US diplomatic history.

 

Angleton's hysterical witch hunts reeked of McCarthyism and the worst kind of Cold War character assassination.

 

To be very clear, James Jesus Angleton was himself responsible for the grave defects in US intelligence morale during his reign as Counter Intelligence Chief at the Central Intelligence Agency. The witchhunt ruined many carrers, while shrowded in secrecy, and his victims were unable to pursue legal recourse to regain their tarnished reputations and ruined careers.

 

AJ Weberman's opinions on this matter of no real interest, as this is the YIPPIE most famous for digging through Bob Dylan's garbage, and his opinion about ALdrich Ames and Angleton bears no weight in serious discussions of Angleton's malfeasance and hysterical, reckless behaviour.

 

No Mr. Angleton was not right, and his decimation of the agency was a travesty of justice unparalleled in US diplomatic history....

[Guest LAW]

Cmon let's stay on track here. This is not JFK assassination debate.

[Luke_Wilbur]

James Jesus Angleton died on May 12, 1987. The posts looks like a fictional conversation between Michael Ladeen and James Angleton. That is why you need to put sources of where you are getting this information.

 

U Figure it out,

Where did you get this? This piece of fiction has some truth to it.

 

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica has published an exposé alleging that the nation’s military intelligence agency SISMI provided bogus intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war with the knowledge of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The charge follows a parliamentary report released in July concerning the forged Niger uranium documents at the heart of the CIA leak case. The documents, which purported to show a deal between Baghdad and Niger, may have been produced in the Italian capital, the newspaper claims.

 

The July report named four men as the likely masterminds — Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi, and Francis Brookes — and suggests that the plan was conceived at December 2001 meeting in Rome involving Ledeen and SISMI chief Nicolò Pollari.

 

Find More Information at:

 

http://www.vermontguardian.com/dailies/112...2005/1111.shtml

[Guest Sardinia]

American Enterprise Institute (Aie) Michael Ledeen, sponsored from the minister of the Defense Antonio Martino, disembarks to Rome with men of the Pentagon in order to meet a fist of "outlaws Iranians". The encounter is organized from the Sismi. In "a covered" apartment of the service near Public square of Spain (second other sources, in one classified room of the hotel Park of the Principles).

 

Around to a great table, covered from maps of the Iraq, the Iran and Syria there are more or less venticinque men. Those that they count indeed are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans of the Pentagon, Michael Ledeen (Aie), capocentro of the Sismi accompanied from its an assistant ("a man stempiato between the 46 and 48 years; other young one, on the 38, with an apparatus to the teeth"), mysterious Iranians.

 

Pollari confirmation to Republic the meeting. "When the minister me churches to supply to that encounter, me incuriosii. In bottom, it is my trade and I am not been born yesterday. It is true, were also my men to the reunion. I wanted to know that what bubbled in pot... Is true, were papers of the Iraq and of the Iran on the table and those lì many outlaws Iranians did not have to be. They went and they came from Tehran with their passport and without some difficulty I lack were transparent to the eyes of the pasdaran... ".

 

Therefore, the Iranians are not outlaws. They are not oppositori of the regimen of the Ayatollahs. They are men of the regimen, sendes you of Tehran. If it is asked Washington that devil they make us, to the eve of the war, the Iranians to Rome, elbow to elbow with people of the Pentagon, can be collected some good information. In order to pull some thread of the garbuglio, it must listen to a source of the intelligence American who asks to remain anonymous. It says: "In Italy you have always underrated the job of poisoning of Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (Inc). You have the tendency to omit this understood it of your history because thoughts that Ahmed has been only transaction ours. It is not therefore: it has been also transaction yours, more than how much you have up to now imagined or known ".

 

It must say who is Ahmed Chalabi. Favourite of neo-with, Chalabi is person in charge from the "hawks" of the Pentagon of veicolare to the European intelligences news on the proliferation of the crews of obtained destruction of mass from presumed scientists that the regimen has disertato. To being person in charge of the news collection and the construction of the "legends", she is the responsible of the intelligence of Chalabi, Aras Habib Karim.

 

Aras is a key man. It coordinates the Intelligence Collection Programme. It manages and it manifactures the "production" of the dissidents. It is a curdo sciita, than cinquantenne, most clever, little less bad, a wizard of the doppiogioco and the counterfeiting of documents. With one particularitity: from always the Cia an agent considers it "Iranian". According to key man he is an American, Francis Brooke.

 

False dossier the Italian one on the uranio nigerino arrives also, is not known indeed because, in its hands. Brooke holds the connections with Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz and between Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress. It is ascoltatissimo, also more than Chalabi, to Tehran.

 

It continues the Source of the USA intelligence: "Ahmed Chalabi and its better men - Karim, Brooke - move in square with send you of the Pentagon and the American Enterprise Institute. An example in order to understand better. The three men who, in 2004, alternate themselves to Bagdad to the flank of Chalabi as "official of connection" with the Pentagon they are Michael Rubin, president of the American Enterprise Institute; Harold Rhode, assistant to the Office of Special Plans di Douglas Feith and councilman "for the transactions Muslims" of Paul Wolfowitz. It happens therefore also in Italy to the eve of the war.

 

The reunions, than are convened to Rome, collect the representatives of all the square: Michael To Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute; Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans; the colonels of the Iraqi National Congress; in more the iracheni sciiti of the Supreme Council for the revolution Muslim in Iraq (Sciri) and naturally the "guardiani of the revolution". It is this the parterre of Rome. Interesting, not ". Interesting.

[Guest Freetospeak]

Francis Brooke worked in the mid-1990s on the Rendon Group's anti-Iraq campaign in London at a salary of $19,000 a month. He subsequently became the chief assistant in Washington to Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. Brooke also was principal founder and director of the Iraq Liberation Action Committee, which favored Hussein's ouster.

 

The Rendon Group is a secretive public relations firm that has assisted a number of U.S. military interventions in nations including Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Panama and Zimbabwe. Rendon's activities include organizing the Iraqi National Congress, a PR front group designed to foment the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

[Guest LAW]

Some of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) intelligence on Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed ties to militant Islamic groups are reportedly funneled directly to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney by Francis Brooke, the DC lobbyist for the group. [Newsweek, 12/15/03 Sources: Francis Brooke, Memo] Brooke will later acknowedge that the information provided by the INC was driven by an agenda. “I told them [the INC], as their campaign manager, ‘Go get me a terrorist and some WMD, because that's what the Bush administration is interested in.’ ” [Vanity Fair, 5/2004, pg 230] Brooke had previously worked for the Rendon Group, “a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm.”

[Guest TrueBrit]

I do not know if we went to war based on lie. But, I do think Americans and British were reckless in authorizing it. The difficult part is soldiers are now wondering who the enemy really is.

 

I think the simple solution is President Bush needs to open up the the Intelligence records to the public.

[Guest LAW]

Does anyone know more about the FBI's decision to reopen the investigation reversing their conclusion that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme and not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy.

 

"This is such a high-profile issue for a lot of reasons, and we think it's important to make sure there aren't lingering questions," said an aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "There's always a chance that you do a little more investigating and you uncover something you hadn't seen before or you hadn't realized."