This is certainly interesting. Link Italian lawmaker: U.S. told of WMD forgeries Senator says Bush administration was warned Iraq documents were fake The Associated Press Updated: 1:46 p.m. ET Nov. 3, 2005 ROME - Italian secret services warned the United States months before it invaded Iraq that a dossier about a purported Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium in Africa was fake, a lawmaker said Thursday after a briefing by the nation's intelligence chief. "At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they (Italy's SISMI secret services) said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Sen. Massimo Brutti told journalists after the parliamentary commission was briefed. Brutti said the warning was given in January 2003, but he did not know whether it was made before or after President Bush's speech. The United States and Britain used the claim that Saddam was seeking to buy uranium in Niger to bolster their case for the war. The intelligence supporting the claim later was deemed unreliable. Italian lawmakers questioned Premier Silvio Berlusconi's top aide and an intelligence chief Thursday about allegations that Italy knowingly gave the United States and Britain forged documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa. Berlusconi, in an interview with the conservative daily newspaper Libero published Thursday, said Italy had not passed any documents on the Niger affair to the United States. He added that La Repubblica's allegations were dangerous for Italy because "if they were believed, we would be considered the instigator" of the Iraq war. The Niger claim also is at the center of a CIA leak scandal that has shaken the Bush administration, leading to last week's indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. Libby was charged with lying to investigators about leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Wilson accused the administration of covering up his inquiry into whether Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger after he found the claim had no substance. © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. © 2005 MSNBC.com
The Associated Press? That ultra-left wing rhetoric spouting news service? They're all a bunch of commies......
Ok who's telling the truth What if Wilson's story is the truth. How will the American people know .The Dem closed the door The Repubs didn't seem to want it closed but were saying nothing .I want the Dam truth cause somebody is lying to the people and we are do some correct info on this issue .If the Bush administration has lied or Wilson and all the other people that claim Iraq was not in the process of buying or making any WMD's. some heads should roll behind this because ther have been many lives lost for no reason.
Roxfan if you're really interested in the Niger story, Josh Marshall has been writing about it for over a year now. It's been very interesting and a lot of stuff is just coming out. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ So without further ado, another mc josh post. --------------- Curiouser and curiouser and curiouser and ... Remember how the Italian government said that in January 2003 they'd warned the US that the Niger docs were forgeries. Well, just out from AP ... Commission member Sen. Massimo Brutti told reporters after the closed-door session that that the commission was told that the Italian secret services warned the United States in January 2003 that the dossier was fake. But later, the senator called The Associated Press to retract that statement. He said that the commission was not told that the Italians had warned the Americans. Brutti said he was confused by the barrage of reporters' questions when the lawmakers emerged from the briefing. He said when he had the opportunity later to check his briefing notes, he realized he had misspoke. Brutti said what he meant to say was that the commission was told that a SISMI official, contacted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, about the dossier, told the U.N. agency that "those documents didn't come from Sismi, they weren't produced nor supplied by Sismi." "Our (intelligence services) were not involved," Brutti said the briefing was told. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted Brutti as saying that the commission was told that the U.N. agency queried Sismi about the dossier in January 2003. And from Reuters ... Sen. Massimo Brutti initially told reporters that Sismi had warned the United States about the bogus documents around the same time as U.S. President George W. Bush gave his 2003 State of the Union address, making the case for war. "At around that time, they (Sismi) said that the dossier did not correspond to the truth," Brutti said. He later backtracked, telling Reuters that since Sismi never had the documents, it could not comment on their merit. Your guess is as good as mine. -- Josh Marshall ----------------- and another... Let me suggest a few other questions to be posed in response to the new story the Italian government rolled out today to explain their involvement with the Niger uranium hoax. The current story, detailed in this updated report from the Associated Press is that Rocco Martino forged the documents, that no one at SISMI (Italian military intelligence) was involved in any way and that at some point in January 2003, the Italians warned the United States that the documents were forged. For the sake of discussion, let's stipulate to those facts. So these questions. 1. If Martino forged the documents with no involvement by SISMI personnel, how did SISMI end up distributing transcriptions of the forgeries to the United States and other countries? 2. The Italian government now says they warned the Americans that the documents were forgeries in January 2003. But what exactly did they warn them about? According to the current story, the documents that the Americans had went from Martino to Elisabetta Burba to the US Embassy in Rome to the State Department. When exactly did the Italian government come into the picture in that chain of custody and how did they know we had the documents? What Italian intelligence had done is give us reports in 2001 and early 2002 that were summaries and transcriptions of the documents. Was it their own earlier reports that they told us were based on forgeries? And if so, when did they learn that the information they gave us was based on forgeries? 3. If it is certain that Martino is the forger, and that he was acting on his own account, why has no action ever been taken against him? -- Josh Marshall
Thanks for the link mc. After reading that blog, it's looking like there's a lot more layers to this onion.
