Niger Uranium – Why the Forgeries
Posted By John Moore on July 13, 2003
During the lead-up to the Iraq war, documents surfaced which purported to show an attempt by Saddam to buy Niger uranium. These documents turned out to be forgeries.
Nobody is asking: Why were these forgeries made and who made them?
They certainly served a purpose: they cast serious doubt on any theory that Saddam actually was after the uranium. After all, how could one propose that theory when supporting documents were shown to be forgeries? What bureaucrat in the CIA would risk his career proposing further investigation of a theory supported by fraudulent documents?
Now, months later, many people are still confused by this ploy, believing that US assertions were based on those documents (they weren’t, they were based on British intelligence), and that the US (and George Bush) made those assertions based on documents they knew were forgeries.
Thus these forgeries have been damaging to Bush and no doubt to US credibility, even though the US immediately detected the forgery and never took them seriously!
Meanwhile, the British are claiming they have other evidence of the connection, and that they never even saw the forged documents before advising the US of the Niger connection. They are standing by their assertion that Saddam sought to purchase uranium from Niger.
Disinformation, which is what these documents were, is a standard technique of both warfare and intelligence.
US sources now suspect that at least one of the British sources was SDCE, the French intelligence service, who would not allow British MI6 to share the information with the US.
Were the French playing a clever disinformation game, forging the documents to deflect US probes? Certainly the French were hostile to US intentions towards Saddam, and had in the past sold Niger uranium to Iraq.
Or could it have been the Russians, also hostile, who are certainly masters in the game of disinformation?
How about a US intelligence agency seeking to provide a case for the Iraq war? This seems unlikely, since the forgeries were sure to be discovered, and furthermore this would have been only a tiny little item in a very large body of evidence against Iraq.
The investigative news organizations in the US who are so earnestly looking for culpability by Bush should use some of their vast resources to investigate who was behind these forgeries.
B”H – So why would Saddam buy Uranium as “yellow cake” from Niger, if he had deposits of it in Iraq? …unless of course he knew those areas were being watched, perhaps? Of course,…
link 1.
…he could just have been in a hurry, as they say in the above link, which also seems to very effectively support your thesis.
Now, where did that “no imminant threat” mantra come from, anyway? Since he wouldn’t be a “real” danger for a couple of years yet, we could have waited till he could have done some real damage to our troops.
Regards
p.s., further supporting material:
link 2.
(I hope you can get the url’s I sent to work.)
We now know that he was looking for Yellow Cake from Niger. Wilson, the man who got famous for investigating and saying otherwise, now says that Iraq was there trying to buy yellow cake.
I suspect the reason was speed and difficulty of detection.
It won’t make any difference to the left. They will continue to hang their whole case on the lack of finding of large stocks of ready to use WMD’s, even after two WMD weapons were used against us (sarin and mustard gas, both used incorrectly and hence not effectively), and the fact that Bush did’t say that the war was being fought because of any imminent threat, and the means to make both chem and bio weapons were found, the scientists are still afraid to talk and a number have been murdered post-war, and we havae found evidence of an active bioweapons research program, and facilities (including the Bacillus Thuringensis plant) that could rapidly produce sufficient amounts of bioweapons.
Nobody expected him to be able to quickly make a bomb, unless he bought appropriate material from out of the country (which, of course, we now know he could have – from A. Q. Kahn’s network).
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1
I think this a link you should look into–even though this subject is about 2 years old I think it’s worthy to ask questions of our government such as : Even if the “British told us first,” why was our govt relying on foreign intelligence without seeing the documents for ourselves? Why was this information (clearly unverified) used in President Bush’s State of the Union address and included in the President’s Daily Brief, a document that is highly classified? Why was this information used by Colin Powell in his address to the Senate shortly which shortly after mobilized the Democrats to join rank in the war cause?
Now that the Rove controversy has come to light, I think that these are all worthy questions and perhaps there is a “larger” body of evidence against Iraq (or was) but it seems that there are alot of dirty politics going on, and many were not going to let anyone get in their way of warring with Iraq.