[Peace-discuss] Connections

[C. G. Estabrook]

[An interesting account of how several of this week's stories
may be connected.  --CGE]

   Tell us who fabricated the Iraq evidence 
   By Norman Dombey

10/09/05 "The Independent/UK" -- -- President Bush's principal
adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper
naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the
American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the
Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry
Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to
Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread
linking these events and it is Iraq. 

Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to
war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question:
who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent
threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he
was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop
nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security
Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It
was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead
public opinion and help start a war.

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took
office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome.
Strangely, nothing of value was taken. Months later came 9/11
and a month after that, as George Bush wondered how to get
back at the terrorists, a report from the Italian security
service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium.

Disappointingly for the neocons, the CIA sent Ambassador
Joseph Wilson to Niger to check the story: he reported that it
was nonsense. When the story was repeated by Bush, Wilson went
public. His wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, was then outed by
the White House. Hence Rove's predicament.

An organisation called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was
set up in the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, a former consultant
to Israel's Likud party, to prepare for the war. In the words
of Robert Baer, a distinguished former CIA man, it was a
"competing intelligence shop at the Pentagon ... if you didn't
like the answer you're getting from the CIA". In short, bogus
stories would get a second chance at the OSP.

A clue to the ancestry of these black arts can be found in
1980, when right-wing Republicans wanted Ronald Reagan
elected. They publicised a story that Billy Carter, the then
President Jimmy Carter's colourful brother, had received
$50,000 (£28,000) from the Libyan government.

The story was always denied by the President and no evidence
of the payment was found, but the story helped to elect
Reagan. Its source? Sismi, and an associate of a man called
Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier
parts of US foreign policy. He is an American specialist on
Italy with a long-standing commitment to Israel. According to
The New York Times, in December 2001, a few months after the
CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with
Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two
officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In Rome
they met the head of Sismi.

Some months later, the documents were published, having been
sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to
Sismi.So far, so circumstantial. One man who might well know
the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head
of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that
the documents were produced in the US but "funnelled through
the Italians". When an interviewer asked Cannistraro "if I
said Michael Ledeen", he reportedly replied "I don't think
it's a proven case ...You'd be very close"

Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: "I
have absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have
never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled
them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever
wrote or said anything about the subject."

It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was
it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a
fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?

Norman Dombey is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at
the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear
capability 

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.