Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence

Published on Sunday, October 9, 2005 by The Independent
Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence
by Norman Dombey
http://www.independent.co.uk/

President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned
again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei,
accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive,
wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin
pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a
normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events
and it is Iraq.

Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and
maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen
to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged
documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of
uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was
revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an
intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention
intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war.

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took
office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome.
Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11 and a
month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get back at the
terrorists, a report from the Italian security service (Sismi)
reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph
Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it was
nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went public.
His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by the White
House. Hence Rove's predicament.

An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up
in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant to Israel's
Likud party, to prepare for the war. In the words of Robert Baer, a
distinguished former CIA man, it was a "competing intelligence shop
at the Pentagon"..."if you didn't like the answer you're getting
from the CIA". In short, bogus stories would get a second chance at
the OSP.

A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in 1980,
when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan elected. They
publicised a story that Billy Carter, the then President Jimmy
Carter's colourful brother, had received $50,000 (£28,000) from the
Libyan government.

The story was always denied by the President and no evidence of the
payment was found, but the story helped to elect Reagan. Its source?
Sismi, and an associate of a man called Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier parts
of US foreign policy. He is an American specialist on Italy with a
long-standing commitment to Israel. According to The New York Times,
in December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger
claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former
Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was
Larry Franklin. In Rome they met the head of Sismi.

Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to
an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.So far,
so circumstantial. One man who might well know the answer to all
this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism
operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were
produced in the US but "funnelled through the Italians". When an
interviewer asked Cannistraro "if I said Michael Ledeen", he
reportedly replied "I don't think it's a proven case ...You'd be
very close"

Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: "I have
absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even
seen them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know
virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said
anything about the subject."

It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it
who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus
belli against Saddam?

Norman Dombey is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the
University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear capability.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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