The forgery -- a fraud that found its way into the president’s State
of the Union message -- is being quietly investigated by the FBI at
the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Robb-Silberman Commission, which investigated what went wrong with
American intelligence in the run-up to the invasion, said it was
unclear who forged the documents and why.
It turned over classified "factual findings concerning the potential
source of the forgeries" to the FBI.
What has happened to these findings is a Washington mystery.
The commission, which was highly critical of the intelligence
community, was generally open with its criticism, but it kept the
forgery details confidential.
It was no doubt reluctant to compromise sources and methods of the
CIA.
From the inception of the yellow-cake controversy, there have been
reports that foreign intelligence sources were involved.
Most attention has been focused on Italy’s intelligence service.
Yet, why Italy would have wanted to plant such a forged document has
never been explained.
Suspicions that the Italians might have done so on request have
flourished.
It was the International Atomic Energy Agency that eventually found
that the yellow-cake documents were forgeries.
Both the British government and the United States were said to have
been duped.
Although the contract and other papers in which the Iraqis appeared to
be purchasing yellow-cake from Niger were fakes, they had passed
muster from the nation’s multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus.
It was the IAEA, an agency that is regularly maligned as inept by this
country’s national-security establishment, which quickly found that
the documents were riddled with flaws in the letterhead, forged
signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and
government entities and -- in one case -- a date for a meeting that
said Wednesday, July 7, 2000. July 7, 2000, was a Friday.
Those who have seen these papers rule out the possibility that they
could have been produced in the United States or Britain and slipped
to the Italians.
A first-rate Western intelligence service could never have produced
such poor quality fakes.
But a first-rate Western intelligence service could never have fallen
for such amateurish forgeries, either.
Forgery is a crime, but what about failing to notice it when it leaps
out at you like a snake?
It took the U.S. intelligence community six months to evaluate the
authenticity of the yellow-cake documents -- time for a major failure
of the intelligence system.
As for the forgeries, the Robb-Silberman Commission apparently has a
well-founded suspicion whodunit.
From The Nashua Telegraph, 7/31/05:
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/OPINION04/107310062/-1/OPINION02
Forged ‘yellow-cake’ papers real spy ‘crime’
By John Hall
The outing of a CIA officer isn’t the only potential crime that
occurred in the long, tortuous attempt to prove that Saddam Hussein
was buying uranium from Africa.
There also is the little matter of forgery.
Someone planted fake documents that helped both President Bush and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair reinforce their case that Saddam was
actively seeking the raw material for an atomic bomb.
It was at the heart of the rationale for invading and disarming Iraq
-- that Baghdad was reconstituting its outlawed nuclear program.
The question now is whether the Justice Department’s special
prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, will be allowed to get to the bottom
of this crime.
He has a reputation for looking under every stone.
And the so-called "yellow-cake forgery" is directly related to the
intramural scandal he is now uncovering, except that it involves
substance, not personalities.
At the request of the CIA, a federal grand jury is supposed to be
looking into whether the White House may have leaked the name of a
covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to get back at her husband,
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for blowing the whistle on the yellow-cake
fraud.
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Don't hear much about the forgery, do ya. I wonder why?
Harry
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