It appears the initial steps in the timeline are:
1. Cheney task group decides to take over Iraq
2. 9/11
3. Bush asks if this can somehow get Iraq
4. First Ghorbanifar meeting in Rome (planning?)
5. Forgeries and so forth
The two steps that have not enough detail are 1 and 4. How can what was discussed in 1 and 4 be exposed?
The Repubblica article has a lot of good stuff. But the Bush side of the affair are all a black hole. So it can't really illuminate how active BushCo was in the forgeries, and when they got involved.
Posted by emptywheel at October 27, 2005 09:40 AMConcerning the excerpt on Hamilton McMillan: McMillan actually collaborated extensively with the SISMI in the 1980's and was privy to Italian 8th division intel at the time concerning Africa/ Mideast. The declaration is not on heresay.
Other than that, it will be hard to find independant confirmation other than M16. In a French dossier published in 2003, interviews with Niger authorities did mention small transactions with Iraq in the 1980's.
Posted by rom wyo at October 27, 2005 01:33 PMas the british memo said: "the facts were being fixed around the policy"
Posted by silly rabbit at October 27, 2005 01:49 PMVia DKos:
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
The guards at the gates are both wounded and distracted. They can no longer protect the seeping waters coming out. Now that they know Bush is wounded, his adversaries and enemies in the CIA, former State Dept., and elsewhere are comin' out full steam ahead. This is just the beginning.....
Posted by MisterOpus1 at October 27, 2005 03:09 PMstill trying to figure something essential out.
you've got yourself some kind of theoretically sophisticated intelligence agent, who knows just what buttons to push in order to help out a geopolitical ally in a massive push for war. you're a SISMI guy, you've been doing this kind of psyops for years, it's a piece of cake. generate a vaguely plausible story that buttresses your boss (Berlusconi)'s boss (Bush). tis not your to wonder why and all that, but still, job is clear.
so you do it. you make a fake document based on (as eriposte has so rigorously shown) a real world event, for authenticity sake.
but funny thing. you put in the wrong names of all the key players on your fake. names you remember (or found in a World Governance Guidebook?) from 13 years ago. you don't double check to see if these people are still in power. you don't use google. you don't make a phone call. ask an african specialist at your workplace. nothing.
you go to great lengths to push a document that is GREAT SIGNIFIGANCE and that you worked on VERY CAREFULLY, you sell it hard to anyone who will buy--and you don't check it at all.
it would not have been hard to make this forgery so good we would still not be sure today. it would have been easy for your paymasters to tell you to do so?
so the question--how did such an obviously shitty piece of work get done? who is the psyops fuckup? and how the hell, the moment any of this became apparent, that anyone anywhere thought this shit would cut it?
have i lost my mind on this?
Posted by robert green at October 27, 2005 03:12 PMFrom London.
Thanks for your painstaking detective work on our end of the Niger forgeries, which I think has been 11much neglected.
The Repubblica articles would surely seem to point up a puzzle which has been lurking for some time - how far Tony Blair was a guller and how far he was gulled. Was he told by the Joint Intelligence Committee that the intelligence definitely proved that, at the very least, Saddam had sought to secure uranium from Niger? Or was he involved from the outset in the kind of cherry-picking processes practised by the Office of Special Plans?
What makes the question more pressing is, first, that the Repubblica articles seem to suggest that enough information was contained in the dossier given to MI6 in late 2001 to enable them to do the kind of checks which would have established immediately a strong presumption of forgery. One is tempted to say that if MI6 is that incompetent, perhaps we should simply get rid of it and hire a couple of bright young men who, like those at the IAEA, know how to use Google -- pending the reconstruction of an intelligence service slightly less easy to dupe.
There is however a further point. A basic point of intelligence methodology is that information coming from secret sources should be checked with information from public sources. This notion of intelligence as a comprehensive research process is fundamental to the classic study by Sherman Kent, which was traduced in that incredibly silly article co-authored back in 1999 by Abram Shulsky, later director of the Office of Special Plans. (Anyone reading that article should have been aware that putting Shulsky in charge of any intelligence operation was a recipe for disaster.)
The principle is fundamental to the indictment of the wartime and immediately post-war MI6 in the account of the Philby affair given by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who like Kent had a been a highly successful wartime intelligence officer. It is also set out in a textbook by the British intelligence veteran Michael Herman, formerly secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the organization supposed to be responsible for this kind of coordination. So we thought the lessons had been learned from past disasters.
It was precisely this basic point of good methodology which was followed by the CIA when they sent Joseph Wilson to Niger. So far at least, we seem to have seen no evidence whatsoever that the British JIC attempted any parallel investigation themselves, or indeed tried to consult with the CIA about what information that organisation had acquired or was seeking.
It would seem that there are two obvious possible explanations. One is that MI6 has reverted to being the kind of organization lambasted by Trevor-Roper -- a collection agency for tittle tattle, like the Office of Special Plans. The other is that Dearlove and others were aware that the information was dodgy, and failed to conduct proper investigations because they knew that so doing would expose it as false.
Another basic point of good intelligence methodology is that one should consider, within reason, all possible hypotheses. So I am agnostic as to how far the British end of this story has to do with monumental incompetence and how far with corruption. However, the assumption that MI6 was aware that the information was dodgy necessarily raises the question of whether this awareness was communicated to others -- including of course Blair.
If in fact he believed in good faith that the Niger claims were well founded, then Blair’s subsequent actions become, if not excusable, at least somewhat less appalling, and certainly much more intelligible. He could easily then have believed both that the potential threat was so great that the ends justified the means when it came to overdramatising intelligence, and also that the overdramatising would seem venial once the horrible truth was exposed. Because of course if the claims had been true, they would have provided strong prima facie evidence that Saddam had an active nuke programme.
And of course, people are committed by their errors. Once having embraced the Niger claims, it would have been political suicide for Blair to admit they had no substance. Precisely because of this, the fact that Taylor and Butler have continued to accept MI6 apologetics is in itself unsurprising. Ironically, Blair is protected by the extremity of his errors. Any objective account would have destroyed his political position, and also called into question the supposed 'special relationship'. For someone like Lord Butler, the notion that civil servants do not publicly intervene in politics is fundamental; so too is the ‘special relationship’. So he was bound to obfuscate. It is however also very possible that he did not have the wit to grasp quite how catastrophic the implications of this intelligence blunder were going to be.
Of course, if there was deception and Blair was not in the loop, a question arises as to who else was - which raises the issue of whether there were links between British, Italians, and Americans parallel to those between Americans and Italians.
Posted by david habakkuk at October 28, 2005 01:52 AMRobert Green -
That's a really good question. My theory about the documents' obvious mistakes is that they were forged after 9/11 as quickly as possible to establish a case against Saddam. I think Docs 3, 4 and 5 were prepared so hastily that the forgers had to rely on Niger documents from 1989 for information. It's not until Doc 2 that we see the forgers (who I like to call 'the Cabal') using more up-to-date info, i.e. the name of the foreign minister, seals, letterheads, etc.
Posted by Pat at October 28, 2005 03:28 AMRobert,
So far, it appears that the forgeries were done by people out to make a fast buck - not seasoned professionals who wanted to get the forgeries right. As more evidence emerges, we'll see if that story continues to pan out.
Posted by eriposte at October 28, 2005 07:10 AMEriposte,
Don't cha think it's kinda strange to have Berlusconi comin' to town for a little lunch on the 31st?:
Sorry, but I don't believe in mere coincidences like these. Josh Marshall's been on top of this one again, thank God. For a while there I thought these forgeries discussion was gonna get buried for good. I'm still a bit pessimistic about it, but it's nothing but good news to hear of Fitzgerald looking East towards Italy. I do hope this pans out.
It's just too fishy.