somebody forged the now famours Niger document that allegedly showed that Saddam was trying to obtain yellow cake uranium from Africa ... the question is, who did and why did they do it ???
allegations about Saddam's trying to obtain these nuclear materials from Niger first surfaced in 1999 ... the charges were thoroughly investigated by a number of people and agencies and found NOT to be credible ... but the documents did not surface until 3 years later just before the vote on the IWR in October, 2002 ...
two possibilites seem to exist ... either the forger wanted to support the case for war or the forger wanted to weaken the case for war ... without going into all the details, it's also important to understand that a huge feud was going on between the CIA (which did not find the WMD allegations credible) and the Office of Special Plans (OSP) that was being run under the auspices of the White House ...
the documents about Niger uranium were awful forgeries ... it does not seem reasonable that anyone hoping to have them pass the necessary scrutiny would ever have believed they were authentic ... so ask yourself this: why would someone do such a horrible job forging these documents??? ... an article cited below by Seymour Hersh included the following:
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, "These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."well, you could conclude they were just simply inept ... but at this level, this degree of incompetence wouldn't be my first guess ... and because of that conclusion, i'm discounting the likelihood that the Niger memo was written by someone supporting the IWR and the invasion of Iraq ... if you want to build a case for war, you need to do a better job than planting incredibly bad forgeries ...
so now what? why would someone plant such a bad forgery? my conclusion is that the document was forged by and planted by someone in the CIA ... but their goal was NOT to support bush's case for war; their goal was to tempt the OSP into using obviously bogus data to support their case ... someone in the CIA saw their agency under attack by OSP ... OSP and the WH politicized everything and refused to accept the findings of the CIA that challenged the case about WMD in Iraq ...
the Niger memo virtually dared the WH to use such outrageous forgeries ... the WH was eagerly looking for supporting evidence to its aluminum tubes argument (i.e. that they could be used to produce enriched uranium) ... the WH was desperate to strengthen its case about "mushroom clouds over NY" by linking the centrifuges (i.e. aluminum tubes) to the purchase of yellow cake uranium ... they were so intent to "fix the facts around the policy", as stated in the Downing Street minutes, that they were "ripe to be suckered" into using the Niger document ... the CIA may have realized that the document could become the "trojan horse" that would ultimately destroy the credibility of the WH case to invade Iraq ... the WH would be so eager to accept this "gift" that they would not realize the damage it held within ...
two copies of the document were sent from Rome where it was "discovered" ... one went to the State Department and one to the CIA ... the CIA immediately proclaimed the document a forgery ... the State Department, however, included it in a list of supplemental evidence provided to the UN ... George Tenet called the State Department and later wrote to them stating he believed the document was a forgery ... but the WH now had their proof ... and the CIA would later have their "plausible deniability" (i.e. "we tried to tell them it was bogus but they just wouldn't listen!!") ... a few months later, in spite of additional confirmation that the documents were forged, bush pushed ahead with his "this proves it" evidence and included references to the Niger memo in his State of the Union address ...
the trap had been baited and the mouse had taken the bait ... the only problem was that the war went ahead anyway ... but now, as the Iraq and Plame investigation deepens, perhaps those who took the bait, used the bait, and knew the documents were obvious forgeries will be held to account ...
and perhaps it was true that buried somewhere deep inside the CIA, a plan was hatched to discredit the WH by handing them evidence they couldn't resist using even though it was so obviously false ...
Comments ??
btw, please read these outstanding articles related to this subject:
http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Niger_uraniumhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.htmlhttp://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1