Louis Charbonneau
Attacking Iraq: Coalition faked it, says UN
Sat Oct 11 17:19:04 2003
64.140.158.154

Coalition faked it, says UN
By Louis Charbonneau VIENNA
http://www.metimes.com/2K3/issue2003-13/reg/coalition_faked_it.htm

A few hours and a simple internet search was all it took for UN inspectors to realize documents backing US and British claims that Iraq had revived its nuclear program were crude fakes, a UN official said.

Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, a senior official from the UN nuclear agency who saw the documents offered as evidence that Iraq tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger, described one as so badly forged his "jaw dropped".

"When [UN experts] started to look at them, after a few hours of going at it with a critical eye things started to pop out," the official said, adding a more thorough investigation used up "resources, time and energy we could have devoted elsewhere".

The US first made the allegation that Iraq had revived its nuclear program around September last year when the CIA warned that Baghdad "could make a nuclear weapon within a year" if it acquired uranium.

US President George W. Bush found the proof credible enough to add it to his State of the Union speech in January.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official said the charge that Iraq sought the uranium was to be the "stake in the heart" of Baghdad and "would have been as close to a smoking gun as you could get" because Iraq could only want it for weapons.

Once the IAEA got the documents – which took months - French nuclear scientist Jacques Bautes, head of the UN Iraq Nuclear Verification office, quickly saw they were fakes.

Two documents were particularly bad. The first was a letter from the president of Niger which referred to his authority under the 1965 constitution. That constitution has been defunct for nearly four years, the official said.

There were other problems with the letter, including an unsuccessful forgery of the president's signature.

"It doesn't even look close to the signature of the president. I'm not a [handwriting] expert but when I looked at it my jaw dropped," the official said.

Another letter about uranium dated October 2000 purportedly came from Niger's foreign minister and was signed by a Mr. Alle Elhadj Habibou, who has not been foreign minister since 1989.

To make matters worse, the letterhead was out of date and referred to Niger's "Supreme Military Council" from the pre-1999 era – which would be like calling Russia the Soviet Union.

After determining the documents were fakes, the IAEA had a group of international forensics experts – including people from the US and Britain - verify their findings. The panel unanimously agreed with the IAEA.

"We don't know who did it," the official said, adding that it would be easy to come up with a long list of groups and states which would like to malign the present Iraqi regime.

The IAEA asked the US and Britain if they had any other evidence backing the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium. The answer was no.

IAEA chief Muhammad Al Baradei informed the UN Security Council in early March that the Niger proof was fake and that three months with 218 inspections at 141 sites had produced "no evidence or plausible indication" Iraq had a nuclear program.

But last week US Vice President Dick Cheney repeated the US position and said that Al Baradei was wrong about Iraq.

"We know [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons," he said.

Reuters
==================================
Forging a Case for War
07/11/2003
http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6&page=6

Here's a fun game: Imagine the Chinese government announces itself threatened by a secret American plot, and declares it is preparing preemptive military action against us. Making Beijing's case before the UN, President Hu Jintao waves around a set of documents laying out a complicated conspiracy. One of the documents purports to be from "Prime Minister Richard Cheney of the Unionized States of America." Another, dated October 2000, is signed by "Secretary of State James Baker." The Chinese would look absolutely deranged, relying on such obvious forgeries; the world would recoil in confusion and fear. Yet this is what our President did in his State of the Union address, when he cited similarly ludicrous forgeries as evidence Saddam was uranium-shopping in Niger.

Earlier this week, the White House conceded the President overreached with this claim -- that it "should not have been" in his speech. Well, no kidding. And? By week's end, the only thing the President had to add was that he sure wasn't going to take responsibility for his own speech! So this is all we get: The President as Otter from "Animal House", throwing his arm around the nation's shoulder and telling us, "Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You &%$@ed up -- you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!"

Who created these forgeries? Why did they do so? How did they come into the hands of the U.S. government? How could they possibly have been relied upon when they got wrong the name of Niger's government, foreign minister and Constitution, and botched the President's signature? (Are we led by cynical liars -- or total incompetents?) That these basic questions go unanswered -- or even unaddressed -- is the best evidence yet that the White House was never interested in reality; only in war.

* * *

What has Army Times upset? They don't like the White House's griping and opposition to a proposal to double the $6,000 now paid to families of troops who die on active duty. (An additional $6,000 multiplied by 212 dead so far works out to $1.27 million -- or, for perspective, about 0.00032 percent of the nearly $4 billion per month the war is costing us.) They also want to cut monthly imminent-danger pay to $150 from $225, and cut the family-separation allowance down to $100 a month from $250. The anti-tax Administration is doing nothing for the military -- it won't even step up and ease residency rules to help frequent-traveling service members who sell a home qualify for capital-gains exemptions. The Administration plans to cut more than a billion dollars out of next year's budget for military housing. "The chintz even extends to basic pay," Army Times fumes, noting that Bush's proposed 2004 budget would cap raises for some ranks at 2 percent.

All this from an Administration that came to power declaring: "To all of our men and women in uniform, and to their parents and families: Help is on the way!"

***

It isn't honesty, and sure isn't contrition. But the White House has finally, grudgingly conceded it was wrong of the President to assert in his State of the Union address -- on the basis of a ludicrous, childlike forgery -- that Iraq had been attempting to acquire uranium from Niger for a nuclear bombs program. In a statement given to The Washington Post, the Administration says: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."

Skip over the "knowing all that we know now" -- that's some weaselly window-dressing, a throw-away phrase designed to suggest the Administration accidentally came to make this accusation. The reality -- according to the man Dick Cheney sent to get to the bottom of the Iraq-Niger-uranium fairy tale, career diplomat Joseph C. Wilson -- is that this was no accident. In an op-ed article in The New York Times, Wilson writes: "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Interestingly, Wilson also says he was asked to check out a memorandum making this accusation -- but was not given a copy of it. Perhaps that's because it was a transparent joke: According to Reuters, UN investigators found it a jaw-droppingly crude fake debunked by a "simple Internet search" -- which revealed this document got the name of the foreign minister and of the government itself entirely wrong. (Let's hope our savvy MBA President doesn't get one of those chain letters from the "chairman of Niger" offering to deposit $20 million in his bank account.)

As Congressman Henry Waxman has pointed out on his web page about the Niger forgery scandal, the White House answer is not really an answer. (An answer would get into how and why a joke-forgery came to be cited as justification for the eventual combat deaths of 200 American citizens.) And the Republicans in Congress are fighting mightily to stuff this "we lied about everything" genie back into the bottle.

But we're closing in on an answer. As diplomat Wilson writes: "The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

"The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."

MORE:
http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6&page=6

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This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale!
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