www.csua.org/u/ik0 -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201777_pf.html
REAL ESTATE How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim By Peter Eisner Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 3, 2007; Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa? Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the US Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong. Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war. Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable. In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons. The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a US intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq. Burba, who had no special expertise in Africa or nuclear technology, was able to quickly unravel the fraud. Yet the claims clung to life within the Bush administration for months, eventually finding their way into the State of the Union address. As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it received in February 2002, former US ambassador Joseph C Wilson IV was called in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended with the criminal conviction of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. "You know I feel bad about it," Burba said later, discussing her frustrations about her role in giving the dossier to the Americans. "You know the fact is that my documents, with the documents I brought to them, they justified the war." The Tip In early October of 2002, a man mysteriously contacted Elisabetta Burba at her Milan office. the deep voice said, without identifying himself outright. It was Rocco Martino, an old source who had proved reliable in the past. Martino said he had some very interesting documents to show her, and asked whether she could fly down to Rome right away. One of the documents was purportedly sent by the president of Niger to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, confirming a deal to sell 500 tons of uranium to Iraq annually. This was the smoking gun in the package, claiming to show the formal approval of Niger's president to supply Iraq with a commodity that would in all likelihood only be used for a nuclear weapons program: Iraq had no nuclear power plants. Though the document was in French it would later come to be known as "The Italian Letter." It was written in all capital letters, in the form of an old telex, and bore the letterhead of the Republic of Niger. The letter was dated July 27, 2000, and included an odd shield on the top, a shining sun surrounded by a horned animal head, a star and a bird. The letter said that "500 tons of pure uranium per year will be delivered in two phases." A seal at the bottom of the page read "The Office of the President of the Republic of Niger." Superimposed over the seal was a barely legible signature bearing the name of the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja. Burba listened without saying much as she took a first look at the documents. She recognized right away that the material was hot, if authentic. But confirming the origin would be difficult, she recalled thinking at the time. she would take the documents, and if they checked out as authentic, then they could talk about money. He then suggested they simultaneously pursue another tack. "Let's go to the Americans," Rossella said, "because they are focused on looking for weapons of mass destruction more than anyone else. Rossella called the US Embassy in Rome and alerted officials to expect a visit from Burba. Burba came to a security gate and walked through a magnetometer, where an Italian employee of the embassy press department came down to meet her. After a few formalities, an Italian aide introduced her to Ian Kelly, the embassy press spokesman. Kelly and Burba walked across the embassy's walled grounds and sat down for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. Burba told Kelly that she had some documents about Iraq and uranium shipments and needed help in confirming their authenticity and accuracy. He made a phone call summoning someone else from his staff as well as a political officer. Burba recalled a third person being invited, possibly a US military attache. They walked past antiquities, a tranquil fountain, steps and pieces of marble, all set in a tree-lined patio garden. The Italian journalist's chat with Kelly and his colleagues was brief. But Kelly had not been briefed on what others in the embassy knew. CIA Role One person who refused to meet with Burba was the CIA chief of station. The station chief asked for more information and would later consider it far-fetched. The reports officer had limited its distribution because the intelligence was uncorroborated; she was aware of Sismi's questionable track record and did not believe the report merited wider dissemination. The Operations Directorate then passed the raw intelligence to the CIA's Intelligence Directorate and to sister agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. A more polished document, called a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, was written at Langley three days later in which the CIA mentioned the new intelligence but added important caveats. The classified document, whose distribution was limited to senior policymakers and the congressional intelligence committees, said there was no corroboration and noted that Iraq had "no known facilities for processing or enriching the material." Pushing the Africa Claim Almost four months later, on Feb. The CIA failed to recognize that it was riddled with errors, including misspellings and the wrong names for key officials. But it was a separate DIA report about the claims that would lead Cheney to demand further investigation. Martino's approach to Burba eight months later with the Italian letter coincided with accelerating US preparations for war. In a speech in Cincinnati, he declared that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a "grave threat" to US national security. "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. CIA Director George J Tenet had vetted the text of Bush's speech and was able to persuade the White House to drop one questionable claim: that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. The information was too fishy, Tenet explained to the National Security Council and Bush's speechwriters. Bush dropped the shopping-for-uranium claim, but ratcheted up the bomb threat. He said in Cincinnati that if Hussein obtained bomb-grade uranium the size of a softball, he would have a nuclear bomb within a year. This particular doomsday scenario had first been unveiled several weeks earlier, on Aug. In a speech in Nashville to the 103rd national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he declared with no equivocation that Hussein had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear...
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