Tracking Back the Fraud

While lefty bloggers around the nation are expectantly waiting for "Fitzmas" (the delivery of indictments from the Fitzgerald grand jury) and pundits are debating the significance of NY Times revelation that Cheney told Libby about Wilson's wife, there have been some developments at the other end of the case, the backstory.

Before there was a campaign against Wilson, before there was a Wilson mission to Niger, there were documents claiming to prove that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger. These documents were forgeries, and apparently fairly clumsy ones. The CIA and the State Dept. doubted them, particularly after Wilson went and confirmed that there had been no such attempt.

This has left unanswered the questions of "where did these forgeries come from?" and "how, when our intelligence services knew it was false, did the claim about uranium make it into the State of the Union speech?" that Bush gave in the run-up to war.

Laura Rozen, who has been following this story for a long time, has previously reported that the forgeries were likely the product of the Italian intelligence agency SIMSI. Now, writing in The American Prospect, she brings us news of some revealing articles in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that may be answers.

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Rozen's article, which tracks the path of the players and the documents, reads like a film noir script. But it makes a strong case that the White House essentially did an end-around, ignoring the analysts at the CIA to gather information that would bolster its case for war. They were given fraudulent information created by an allied intelligence operation that was trying to curry favor by giving the Bush White House what they thought it wanted.

That's the problem with making decisions based on your gut, ignoring expertise and experience, and only listening to what your inner circle is telling you. When it becomes obvious what you want to hear, that is what you will hear, and you will act on it, and then, sooner or later, reality intrudes with disastrous consequences.

Today, those consequences include 2,000 American soldiers dead.