Amid all the debate over the indictments and now the Supreme Court nominee, let’s not forget the Italian forgeries. I was just watching the Countdown, and a writer forThe American Conservative, Phillip Giraldi, was on promoting his new piece in the upcoming issue. It should be noted that it was written before the indictments were handed down on Friday. The article is very important for two reasons, one shows that some conservatives still care about governmental accountability, and two the writer is a former CIA officer. The article is very meticulous and walks us through the events surrounding the forged Niger documents day by day.
In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.
These three paragraphs are perhaps the most important because they paint the picture that is often unreported. Most importantly it discusses the White House Iraq Group, a group that took over the intelligence gathering process for the White House in the march to war, and disagreed often with CIA estimates. Not only that but it further implicates Judith Miller as one of the reporters that was used to slip the false information into the papers and the public.
Prior to presenting these forgeries the new Italian Prime Minister brought with him, in his visit to America after 9/11, intelligence his country had gathered. It suggested for the first time the link between Niger and Iraq, but people in our government new better.
But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it was lacking in detail and very limited in scope.
Why is that so important? We are often quick to criticize the CIA and our intelligence after 9/11 and while there were problems, they remain largely on point, they were able to see right through this sham. Then why did it end up in the State of the Union? Is it, as we were told the fault of the CIA, the fault of George Tenent? No, it most certainly was not:
On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.
Again, our CIA did the job, then why did Tenent take the blame? We can’t be sure, but we do know this for whatever reason George drank W’s kool-aid, and as a result the American people came to further distrust the CIA and place more trust in the White House, and when we think about it that’s what this whole leak, this whole case, it’s what everything is about.
Why else would the White House take the time and energy to discredit a critic of the Administration, they went after no one in the way they attacked Joe Wilson. Wilson was attacked, his wife’s name was leaked, because he posed a threat to the plans of the White House Iraq Group, he was able to begin poking holes into why we were in war in the first place, and now despite the CIA once taking the blame, the truth begins to come out. Yes the case is about what Libby did before the Grand Jury, but on the periphery and as a result of this case the truth in why we are in Iraq is coming out.
In short this White House has done the unthinkable, not only did they bring us to war under false pretenses, they used forged documents, they took over the job of intelligence gathering from the CIA, they caused the American people to lose faith in the CIA, and blamed all of the problems on George Tenent. And now their House of Cards is coming down.