The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Sunday, October 30, 2005
The French were behind misleading Niger Documents
While we are on this Wilson/Plamegate business, JunkYardBlog has found evidence that the French may have been behind some of the misleading information on the yellowcake/Niger transaction. (Bold emphases mine):
Rocco Martino has admitted that the French paid him to make the fake Niger-Iraq uranium documents. If the Bush administration weren't in a fog largely of its own making, it would take this story and run with it. It locks in several important Iraq-related threads and thoughts as facts: The French are our enemies, the UN is corrupt, and Joseph Wilson isn't operating in good faith and never was.
The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
Let that sink in for a minute. The French paid a man to conjure up fake documents related to Saddam's WMD ambitions and floated those documents to the US and UK. Why would the French do this?
The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
It was a set-up to protect Saddam, who had been a close associate of French President Jacques Chirac since the 1970s. Oil-For-Food may have played a role as well; several officials close to Chirac have been caught out on that scheme.
Let's rewind back to summer 2003. These documents, which purported to show that a yellowcake transaction between Iraq and Niger had actually taken place, were the ones Joseph Wilson's Niger trip had helped debunk (the IAEA did the heavy lifting, Googling names on the documents that turned out to be wrong, proving the docs were fakes). In his anonymous whisper campaign to Nick Kristoff and in his own op-ed of July 2003, Wilson pulled a switcheroo between these documents and the infamous 16 words in the President's SOTU address of January 2003, claiming that his trip to Niger had debunked those 16 words. But the 16 words were not based on those documents, but rather on a British finding that they stand by to this day regarding Iraqi interest in purchasing yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Is it possible that Wilson pulled the switcheroo for the same reason that Martino created the documents in the first place--that he had paymasters who wanted him to? This next section is highly speculative, but intriguing. If the French could pay an Italian to make the documents to undermine the case for war before hostilities ensued, and we have the forger's confession that they did, why couldn't the French pay an American to use them to smear the Bush administration once hostilities had been underway for a few months? There has always been something puzzling about Wilson's obvious misstatements and obfuscations regarding these documents as they relate (or not, as it turns out) to the 16 words. After all these years, it can't just be an honest misunderstanding. Wilson knows what his trip did and did not do, yet has chosen to misrepresent its findings on the 16 words consistently for more than two years. French involvement at both ends of the document dupe would explain a lot. It looks like a coherent strategy to first protect Saddam from US-UK attack, then undermine the Coalition as it sought to fight off the insurgency and capture Saddam, who at the time of Wilson's smear campaign remained at large.
French authorship of the scheme would also help explain how the IAEA had been able to determine that the documents were forgeries so quickly--the French tipped them off. Recall that the IAEA Googled names on the documents to prove them false. Googling, while useful to bloggers, isn't yet a standard investigative technique for the UN's nuclear weapons proliferation watchdog agency. But if those who knew the docs were fakes tipped someone in the IAEA's offices off, well then Google works both to prove the forgery and to discredit the US and UK as being so incompetent as to go to war based on documents that a quick Google search would prove were fakes.
Even though we never went to war based on anything in those documents.
Let's hope Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation takes all of these new facts and leads into account.
(t2 Chris)
UPDATE: It turns out that Wilson's trip didn't even help debunk the documents at all. He lied about that to the Washington Post's Walter Pincus too. Which doesn't help Wilson's credibility, but does lend believability to the speculation that he was helping the French forgery have its intended impact.
The media should cover Wilson's credibility issues thoroughly as the Fitzgerald investigation winds toward whatever conclusion it reaches.
UPDATES: It may be asking too much of Fitzgerald to include anything relating to the origin of those fake Nigerian documents in his investigation--the story linked above is a little over a year old. Had you heard of it? Has the press made a big deal of it, and have the Democrats treated that story in anything resembling good faith?
But the French connection to those documents brings back to light one of the most curious lapses in journalism history, the widespread incuriosity about the role Oil-For-Food played in the run-up to the war. French fingerprints are all over that scandal:
Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.
"...a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council." How true. We have an Italian confessing to creating the Niger documents for French paymasters, we have Frenchmen and Russians--both permanent UNSC countries opposed the war, naturally--caught in various stages of Oil-For-Food undress, we have the UK's George Galloway up to his eyeballs in that same scandal. Is it even conceivable that no strategically-placed Americans got cut in on the action? Do I need to point out that the US is a permanent member of the UNSC? Do I need to point out how much undermining the case for war would have been in Saddam Hussein's interest?
Rocco Martino has admitted that the French paid him to make the fake Niger-Iraq uranium documents. If the Bush administration weren't in a fog largely of its own making, it would take this story and run with it. It locks in several important Iraq-related threads and thoughts as facts: The French are our enemies, the UN is corrupt, and Joseph Wilson isn't operating in good faith and never was.
The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
Let that sink in for a minute. The French paid a man to conjure up fake documents related to Saddam's WMD ambitions and floated those documents to the US and UK. Why would the French do this?
The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
It was a set-up to protect Saddam, who had been a close associate of French President Jacques Chirac since the 1970s. Oil-For-Food may have played a role as well; several officials close to Chirac have been caught out on that scheme.
Let's rewind back to summer 2003. These documents, which purported to show that a yellowcake transaction between Iraq and Niger had actually taken place, were the ones Joseph Wilson's Niger trip had helped debunk (the IAEA did the heavy lifting, Googling names on the documents that turned out to be wrong, proving the docs were fakes). In his anonymous whisper campaign to Nick Kristoff and in his own op-ed of July 2003, Wilson pulled a switcheroo between these documents and the infamous 16 words in the President's SOTU address of January 2003, claiming that his trip to Niger had debunked those 16 words. But the 16 words were not based on those documents, but rather on a British finding that they stand by to this day regarding Iraqi interest in purchasing yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Is it possible that Wilson pulled the switcheroo for the same reason that Martino created the documents in the first place--that he had paymasters who wanted him to? This next section is highly speculative, but intriguing. If the French could pay an Italian to make the documents to undermine the case for war before hostilities ensued, and we have the forger's confession that they did, why couldn't the French pay an American to use them to smear the Bush administration once hostilities had been underway for a few months? There has always been something puzzling about Wilson's obvious misstatements and obfuscations regarding these documents as they relate (or not, as it turns out) to the 16 words. After all these years, it can't just be an honest misunderstanding. Wilson knows what his trip did and did not do, yet has chosen to misrepresent its findings on the 16 words consistently for more than two years. French involvement at both ends of the document dupe would explain a lot. It looks like a coherent strategy to first protect Saddam from US-UK attack, then undermine the Coalition as it sought to fight off the insurgency and capture Saddam, who at the time of Wilson's smear campaign remained at large.
French authorship of the scheme would also help explain how the IAEA had been able to determine that the documents were forgeries so quickly--the French tipped them off. Recall that the IAEA Googled names on the documents to prove them false. Googling, while useful to bloggers, isn't yet a standard investigative technique for the UN's nuclear weapons proliferation watchdog agency. But if those who knew the docs were fakes tipped someone in the IAEA's offices off, well then Google works both to prove the forgery and to discredit the US and UK as being so incompetent as to go to war based on documents that a quick Google search would prove were fakes.
Even though we never went to war based on anything in those documents.
Let's hope Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation takes all of these new facts and leads into account.
(t2 Chris)
UPDATE: It turns out that Wilson's trip didn't even help debunk the documents at all. He lied about that to the Washington Post's Walter Pincus too. Which doesn't help Wilson's credibility, but does lend believability to the speculation that he was helping the French forgery have its intended impact.
The media should cover Wilson's credibility issues thoroughly as the Fitzgerald investigation winds toward whatever conclusion it reaches.
UPDATES: It may be asking too much of Fitzgerald to include anything relating to the origin of those fake Nigerian documents in his investigation--the story linked above is a little over a year old. Had you heard of it? Has the press made a big deal of it, and have the Democrats treated that story in anything resembling good faith?
But the French connection to those documents brings back to light one of the most curious lapses in journalism history, the widespread incuriosity about the role Oil-For-Food played in the run-up to the war. French fingerprints are all over that scandal:
Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.
"...a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council." How true. We have an Italian confessing to creating the Niger documents for French paymasters, we have Frenchmen and Russians--both permanent UNSC countries opposed the war, naturally--caught in various stages of Oil-For-Food undress, we have the UK's George Galloway up to his eyeballs in that same scandal. Is it even conceivable that no strategically-placed Americans got cut in on the action? Do I need to point out that the US is a permanent member of the UNSC? Do I need to point out how much undermining the case for war would have been in Saddam Hussein's interest?
