Niger uranium forgeries

The Yellowcake forgery refers to a set of falsified documents which claimed that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to justify the impending 2003 invasion of Iraq. The IAEA had ruled the documents a forgery, and former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson had criticised the George W. Bush administration as seeking to craft evidence to support a decision to invade Iraq, rather than to accept his judgement that the link was false.

There is some controversy regarding whether or not these documents formed the basis of a 2003 pre-Iraq War statement made by President Bush, which asserted a connection between Saddam Hussein and Africa. However, the Downing Street memo, and other reports by former officials Karen Kwiatkowski, Richard A Clarke, and others, implicates the Bush administration and UK, Tony Blair government, to having conspired to fabricate materials to support an earlier decision to invade Iraq.

An FBI investigation into the authorship of these documents is ongoing, though critics charge that the CIA was directed to produce the documents.

Background

In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush stated, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell did not mention Niger or yellowcake in his speech to the UN in February, 2003. The British Government claimed that they had not seen the particular documents at that point, and that their "conclusions" in support of Bush's statement were based on "separate evidence." The release of the Downing Street Memo in 2005 however, showed that the UK conspired with the U.S. to support the Iraq War as early as mid 2002, despite claims of debate and consideration.

The documents had long been suspected as fakes by United States intelligence, and had been investigated and discounted well before these 2003 presentations. Barbro Owen-Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to Niger, had investigated and "debunked" claims of yellowcake sales to Iraq.[1] In early 2002, Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been dispatched to Niger to investigate the claim of yellowcake sales, prompted by an intelligence report, based on the forgeries, which had been circulated from Vice President Dick Cheney's office. On February 22, 2002 Wilson reported to the CIA and the State Department that the information was "unequivocally wrong."

On March 7, 2003, only days before the invasion, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Niger officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic."

Fallout

Soon thereafter, the documents became generally accepted by the press as falsified. In July 2003, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan stated, "[T]he truth now, we know, is that a forgery was put together to get this country into a war with Iraq, that forgery found its way into our intelligence agencies, it found its way into the State of the Union, and the president of the United States should show more indignation and outrage that this was done." Buchanan added, "Somebody in our own government knew very well that was a forgery, and they advanced it on up the line." [2]

By late 2003, the trail of the documents had been partially uncovered. They were obtained by a "security consultant" (and former agent of the precursor agency to SISMI, the SID), Rocco Martino, from Italian military intelligence (SISMI). An article in The Times (London) quoted Martino as having received the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy, after a meeting was arranged by a serving SISMI agent. ("Tracked down," by Nicholas Rufford and Nick Fielding, Sunday Times (London), Aug. 1, 2004.) Martino later recanted and said he had been misquoted, and that SISMI had not facilitated the meeting where he obtained the documents.

Martino, in turn, offered them to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba. On instructions from her editor at Panorama, Burba offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October, 2002. [3]

It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistaro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians:

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein . . . . [4]

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistaro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." [5]

In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a Congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation. As of September 2004, the FBI had not yet interviewed Martino, claiming they were awaiting permission from the Italian government to do so. [6] However, Martino is known to have been in New York in August 2004. [7]

On July 14, 2004 the British Government released a report called "A Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction" commonly referred to as the Butler Report. The report calls President Bush's statement regarding Niger "well founded." The Butler Review made the following conclusions on page 139:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in
1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different
sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring
uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of
Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as
opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government
did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British
Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact
of the forgery does not undermine it.

In September 2004, the CBS News program 60 Minutes decided to delay a major story on the forgeries because such a broadcast might influence the 2004 U.S. presidential election. A CBS spokesman stated, "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election." [8]

See also

• Downing Street memo

External links and references

• "Bush's "16 Words" on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn't Lying" - Fact Check
• "Senate Report on PreWar Intelligence on Iraq" - US Senate Select Committe on Intelligence
• "Report on Intelligence of Weapons of Mass Destruction" - Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Butler
• "Transcript of UN speech by Colin Powell" - CNN, February 6, 2003
• Detailed timeline of Africa-uranium allegation - Center for Cooperative Research
• "Who Lied to Whom?" by Seymore M. Hersch, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.
• "Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S." CNN, March 14, 2003.
• "Who Forged the Niger Documents?" interview of Vincent Cannistraro by Ian Masters, Alternet, April 7, 2005.
• "Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France" by Bruce Johnston, News.Telegraph, September 19, 2004