Niger Uranium Fraud soon to be exposed in detail

[fastpat]

Yes, the change of governments in Italy, a key player in the fraud, may make this whole outrageos episode see the light of day after all.

Closing In on the
Niger Uranium Hoax
Who lied us into war? The answer may be forthcoming…
by Justin Raimondo

On January 28, 2003, George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address, wherein he uttered 16 fateful words: "The British government," he averred, "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Fateful, because this assertion turned out to have been based not on mistaken intelligence, or wrongly interpreted data, but on an outright fabrication: the now-infamous Niger uranium forgeries. The British dodge, as Josh Marshall has pointed out, leads us in circles, and was only added later, to answer objections from the CIA.

On March 7, the International Atomic Energy Agency, having asked for the evidence supposedly supporting Bush's statement, declared that the documents provided to them – including correspondence between officials of the African nation of Niger and Saddam's minions – were bogus, badly done forgeries that required only a few hours of Googling to expose as fakes. Yet, somehow they had been incorporated into the U.S. intelligence stream and piped, it seems, directly to the White House.

Someone had double-crossed the president in a spectacular act of betrayal that surely provoked some resentment in the White House. But who were the betrayers? And how, given all the alleged safeguards, did they manage to get this half-baked hodgepodge past the gatekeepers and make the president look like an idiot?

There are many, and not just Democrats, who would claim that the president accomplishes this all by himself on a daily basis – but that, logically, would constitute an even greater provocation, and invite immediate and ruthless retaliation. This came, I believe, on Dec. 30, 2003, when Patrick J. Fitzgerald was appointed [.pdf] to investigate the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald's target: a cabal of administration insiders, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, who was later indicted. The Article