eRiposte
What do you make of JMM's claims that what CIA got was a full transcription of these forgeries?
Btw, I'll need your expert review of my "Joe Wilson's CIA report," which I should have up in an hour or so.
Posted by emptywheel at November 1, 2005 09:23 AMThe CIA admitted that they got "verbatim text" of the *accord* (detailing the alleged uranium sale). That is clear in the SSCI report. Nowhere in the Senate Report does it say that they got verbatim text of *ALL* the forgeries. (Actually, the "verbatim text" of the "accord" has not surfaced publicly yet!)
Unless I see some new evidence, I am inclined to conclude, based on the existing evidence that the CIA did get *partial*, but not complete, transcriptions of the forgeries - initially. INR was trying to find every bit of evidence they could to kill the uranium claim - and I find it implausible that they wouldn't have used the false stuff in the forgeries (more to come on this later this week) to highlight that the claims were bogus.
Posted by eriposte at November 1, 2005 10:59 AMIt seems to me quite obvious that the Niger forgery with "I APPROVE IN ALL AND EACH OF ITS INVOLVED PARTIES IN REGARD TO THE POWERS INVESTED IN ME BY THE CONSTITUTION OF THE 12TH OF MAY 1966" in it could have been done by copying an existing document and forging PARTS of it by deleting it and pasting in new text. In other words,it could be just a doctored up copy, IMHO.
Anyone who does a "save as" on a document, to their hard drive, and uses the copy as a template for a new one knows what I am talking about. And sometimes, some of the old text stays in by accident, because we weren't thorough enough and careful enough. When this happens, one of the most common things that gets left in is dates in the text.
Could this be done without being detected? I am sure that there are people and organizations out there that CAN do it far better than we can do on our image editors.
A forensic test on the document, would certainly be an interesting exercise.
If it is a doctored up copy, the new text may be just date changes. Has anyone looked to see if Iraq ever bought uranium from Niger BEFORE the Nigerien Constitution was amended the first time? For this document, the date is the LEAST amount to change - but a necessary one.
If not date changes, the body of the text only needs to be changed in a very few places on such a document. It is possible that the only changes besides the date was the insertion of the word "Uranium" in place of whatever the agreement was about in the original.
I believe that the seal was also poorly done. I have seen a .pdf file of the document, and the seal DOES look amateurish. But has anyone looked to see what the official documents looked like early in Niger's history as an independent country? They may have had temporary letterheads done. THE ORIGINAL pre-copy document may date back to the 1960s or 1970s.
Posted by SteveGinIL at November 1, 2005 11:27 PMSteveGinIL,
Yes, it is known that Iraq had an interest in uranium in the 1980s (pre Gulf War I) and it is almost certain that many of these forged documents were created by doctoring originals from that era.
Posted by eriposte at November 2, 2005 05:54 AM