UPI: Fitz looking at Italy Niger Docs Report; Berlusconi has his own Judy

[leveymg]

This is very interesting. It ties one of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi's newspapers in with the plot to stovepipe the Niger Yellow Cake Forgeries to the White House. It also confirms that Fitz has been looking at the Italian Parliamentary investigation of the origins of the notorious Niger Yellow Cake Forgeries.

This would link the Plame case together with the Larry Franklin OSP-AIPAC spy case. Stephen Hadley and Michael Ledeen arranged a December 2001 meeting in Rome between OSP officers Franklin and Harold Rhode with Manoucher Ghorbanifar. Shortly thereafter, the Rome Embassy of Niger was burglarized, and seals showed up on the fake documents that purported to show that Iraq had attempted to buy tons of uranium from that African country. Franklin is also the key defendant in the ongoing prosecution of an espionage operation -- run out of the Israeli Embassy -- involving the exchange of classified documents about alleged Iran and Iraq WMD programs.

Martin Walker's UPI column, below, states that whoever authored the forgeries (other sources say Mike Ledeen and his ex-CIA henchmen,Dewey Clarridge and Alan Wolf) funnelled them through an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, who writes for one of the newspapers owned by Berlesconi - shades of Judy Miller and the NYT.

No wonder Berlusconi was so eager to commit Italian troops to the occupation of Iraq -- and access to the oil riches that everyone imagined that would bring -- his newspaper and intelligence service may have helped pave the way for the invasion.

The column is worth reading in its entirety.

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051023-104217-9679r
Walker's World: Bush at bay
By MARTIN WALKER
UPI Editor

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

SNIP

. . . NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium.

SNIP

In July 2003, (Jos. Wilson) wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public. But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington . . .

SNIP

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war. And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

SNIP

[salvorhardin]

1. UPI and the Washington Times are owned and ran by the Moonies

Neither is a credible source. Just because they're saying stuff that you want to hear, don't forget the source.

[leveymg]

2. I respectfully disagree.

Martin Walker has been a reliable investigative reporter with The Guardian (UK) for decades. See, his bio from The Globalist below:

http://www.theglobalist.com/AuthorBiography.aspx?AuthorId=3

Martin Walker is Editor-in-Chief of United Press International. Previously, in his 25 years as a journalist with The Guardian newspaper, he served as bureau chief in Moscow and the United States, as well as European editor and assistant editor.

A regular broadcaster on the BBC, National Public Radio and CNN, and panelist on Inside Washington and Capitol Gang Sunday, he is also a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times's Opinion section and of Europe magazine.


His books include "Waking Giant: Gorbachev and Perestroika," "The Cold War: A History," "Clinton: The President They Deserve" and "America Reborn," published in May 2000 by Knopf.

Don't shoot the message and messager because you don't like the owner of the newspaper.

[salvorhardin]

3. Bullshit

Anything the Moonies do is suspect. I know full well who Martin Walker is and what his credentials are, but as long as he works for the Moonies then anything he says is instantly discredited.

However, take or leave it as you please. My main point in all this is, "know your sources."

[leveymg]

5. Don't try to flame this thread into getting pulled by the mod.

I'm not going to play games with you.

[salvorhardin]

6. What games?

As I've said twice already, know your sources. Then decide. That I find anything remotely connected to the Moonies to be a big steaming pile is beside the point.

On edit: I would make the same arguments for anything coming out of the LaRouchies too.

[Brotherjohn]

8. A number of journalists/blogs have been writing about this for some time.

Google "Niger embassy Ledeen" for starters.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Niger+embassy+Ledeen

Josh Marshall, Daily Kos, most recently James Moore (author of "Bush's Brain"), who tries to tie the embassy break-in/forgeries to the Bush White House (bringing it neatly to one-step-removed, if you ask me).

Although some of their information may be coming from the same sources, I don't think all of these independent, respected journalists are all playing Judy Miller with the same bogus information.

[salvorhardin]

10. I didn't say the author of the piece was playing Judy Miller

I just said that UPI and the Washington Times are not credible sources of information. There's a reason Helen Thomas resigned, and that's because she didn't want everything she did to be colored by the fact that she worked (at the time) for the Moonies.

[burythehatchet]

15. what would I do without your guidance uncle Sal n/t

[seemslikeadream]

20. Watch those sources burythehatchet

pots some times call kettles black

[eridani]

16. La Repubblica investigation confirms this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1877629

[Peachhead22]

4. The Niger embassy in Italy was burglarized!?

To get the seals used on the forgeries?! Whoa Nelly! That ain't no garden variety burglary and no money grubbing forgers. Embassy security, even for third-world country's embassies must be top-notch. That to me is strong evidence it was state sponsored.

[rateyes]

7. Yeah, what if Fitz found out who forged the documents....

and it was DIA? Talk about this administration coming crashing down!! Forging documents to use in your speech as a justification for war. Damn. That would be something.

[Epiphany4z]

9. The Niger embassy in Italy was Burlarized

and letter head was taken...hmmm gee didn't Rove some trick with stolen letter head in the past?

[seemslikeadream]

18. Yea January 2001!

[Uncle Roy]

11. This is wonderful news!

My biggest worry all along had been that Fitz would focus too narrowly on the (to me) relatively uninteresting question of who outed Plame. Instead, fortunately for us all, it looks like he's following that dangling thread off into the main fabric of the conspiracy.

Let the unravelling begin!

[rodeodance]

12. I have read elsewhere of the Franklin=Plame link. Yes good news and

hope something big comes from it.

[rodeodance]

13. recommended

[rodeodance]

14. Kick

[seemslikeadream]

17. Translation of part 1 and 2 of La Repubblica

http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/10/berlusconi-behind-fake-yellowcake.html

Double-Dealers and Dilettantes--the Men Behind Nigergate Were All Italians.

The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war.

They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for the New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.

The "war dance" which followed Judith Miller’s scoop seemed like "carefully-prepared theater” to an attentive media-watcher, Roberto Reale of Ultime Notizie (The Latest News).

Condoleezza Rice, who was then White House Security Advisor, said on CNN: We don’t want the smoking gun to look like a mushroom cloud. A menacing Dick Cheney told Meet the Press that We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his technical and commercial capacities to acquire the material necessary to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon. This was the beginning of an escalation of fear.

26 September 2002: Colin Powell warns the Senate: The Iraqi attempt to acquire uranium is proof of its nuclear ambitions.

19 December 2002: The information on Niger and the uranium is included in the three-page President’s Daily Briefing prepared each day by the CIA and the Department of State for George W. Bush. The ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, added his stamp of approval: Why is Iraq dissimulating its purchase of Niger uranium?

more


http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/25/la-repubblica-scoop/

....

It’s a fact that on the eve of the Iraq war, and under the supervision of the diplomatic advisor to the Foreign Ministry, Gianni Castellaneta (today ambassador to the USA), the director of SISMI organized his agenda in Washington with the staff of Condoleeza Rice, who was National Security Adviser to the White House at that time. La Repubblica is able to document this two track process between the government and Italian intelligence. At least one of these ‘barely official’ meetings of Pollari’s was, according to secret service agents, the ‘creation of a system’ that would bring together government, intelligence and public affairs .

To summarize: Nicolo Pollari’s SISMI wanted to substantiate the the Iraqi acquisition of raw uranium to build a nuclear bomb. The game-plan was rather transparent. ‘Authentic’ documents relating to an attempted acquisition in Niger (old Italian intelligence from the 1980’s) were the dowry of the second-in-command of CISMI’s Roman headquarters (Antonio Nucera). They were bundled together with another fabricated document … through a simulated burglary on the Nigerien embassy (from which they had gotten headed notepaper and seals). The documents were shown by Pollari’s men to CIA station agents, and at the same time, a SISMI ‘postman’ by the name of Rocco Martino was sent to Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6 in London.

turning to the second chapter of the Great Swindle, organized in Italy, to build the case that military intervention in Iraq was necessary. … the Italian report on uranium …

… The CIA analysts thought the first report ‘very limited’ and ‘without the necessary details.’ INR analysts in the Department of State assessed the information as ‘highly suspect.’ … The immediate impact on the American Intelligence community wasn’t very gratifying for Pollari … Gianni Castellaneta advised him to look in ‘other directions’ too, while the minister of Defence, Antonio Martino invited him to meet ‘an old friend of Italy’s.’ The American friend was Michael Ledeen, an old fox in the ‘parallel’ intelligence community in the US, who had been declared an undesirable person in our country in the 1980’s . Ledeen was at Rome on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, created at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowiz to gather intelligence that would support military intervention in Iraq. A source at Forte Braschi told La Repubblica : “Pollari got a frosty reception from the CIA’s station head in Rome, Jeff Castelli, for this information on uranium. Castelli apparently let the matter drop . Pollari got the hint and talked about it with Michael Ledeen.’ We don’t know what Michael Ledeen did in Washington. But at the beginning of 2002, Paul Wolfowitz convinced Dick Cheney that the uranium trail intercepted by the Italians had to be explored top to bottom. The vice-president, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tells it, once again asked the CIA ‘very decisively’ to find out more about the ‘possible acquisition of Nigerien uranium.’ In this meeting, Dick Cheney explicitly said that this piece of intelligence was at the disposition of a “foreign service.”

… Forte Braschi says that “Pollari was incredibly cunning – he knew that it wasn’t enough to rely on the CIA to push the uranium story. It was necessary to work, as Palazzo Chigi and the Department of Defence had indicated, with the Pentagon and with the National Security Adviser, Rice. … An administration official has told La Repubblica “I can confirm that on September 9 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley, the deputy to the National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice.”… SISMI’s ‘postman,’ Rocco Martino contacted a journalist for a weekly newspaper – edited by Carlo Rossella – to sell her the documents at issue. … Panorama had a worldwide scoop. Title “The War? It’s already begun,’ it spoke of ‘half a ton of uranium.’ … The government asked. The intelligence service gave. The media spread it. The government confirmed it. It was an old disinformation technique from the Cold War. Exaggerate the danger of the threat. Terrify and convince public opinion of it.

[seemslikeadream]

19. LEDEEN

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7681

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."

A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" scandal by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimed advocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle. Just as the Roman senator Cato the Elder finished his perorations with the command "Carthage must be destroyed," so Michael "Creative Destruction" Ledeen closes his hopped-up warmongering essays with "Faster, please!," an exhortation presumably addressed to his confreres in the Bush administration.

Ledeen has kept the neocon faith – and the same friends – for all these years. He's still buddies with Ghorbanifar. In December 2001, he had a meeting in Rome with Ghorbanifar in the company of the Pentagon's top Iran specialist, Larry Franklin, and Harold Rhode, assigned to the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon think tank. Also at the Rome conclave: a number of Ghorbanifar's Iranian friends, including a former senior official of the Revolutionary Guard. Rounding out the distinguished guest list, we have the Italian delegation, consisting of SISMI head honcho Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, a neocon favorite. Once again, Ledeen plays the middleman – but what kind of a deal was he trying to negotiate?

more


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10571.htm

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.


http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=2426_0_1_0_C


First of all, I am not a leftist. Secondly, the sources for the quotes of former CIA and DIA agent Philip Giraldi were my interviews of him, as indicated in the correctly transcribed entry on the Wikipedia page, and which I provided the mp3 link for. Fourth, I am happy that the US is no longer part of the British Empire.

As far as Ledeen and the Niger uranium forgeries, Giraldi explained in the interviews that the "couple of CIA agents" were paid in foreign accounts and that Fitzgerald had "already found the money trail." Ledeen's connections to the Office of Special Plans and Sismi are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy with Harold Rhode, who "practically lived out of (Iranian spy) Ahmad Chalabi's office," Manucher Ghorbanifar and guilty Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill:

"he intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later...

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence...

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named."

But where did they originate? Giraldi's partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, "You'd be very close," in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.

Combined with what Giraldi had to say, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?


http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7256

July Friday 29th 2005 (05h28) :
KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS
13 comment(s).

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO

Karl Rove’s only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen, a rabid anti-Arab, pro-Israel activist. The FBI is investigating Ledeen for procuring forged documents (shown here) on nonexistent WMD, which George Bush used to justify his war on Iraq. When Joseph Wilson exposed the farce, Rove helped "out" Wilson’s CIA wife. Did Ledeen procure the documents for Rove, and how might he have done that? The story includes multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino, Italian spy Francesco Pazienza, wanted CIA spy Robert Seldon Lady, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who’s under charges of giving US secrets to Israel.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Karl Rove’s foreign-policy advisor, Michael Ledeen, proclaimed "the rightness of the fascist cause" in 1972. In 1984 he got George Bush Sr to appoint Iranian arms merchant and Iranian/Israeli double-agent Manucher Ghorbanifar as a middleman in the scandalous Iran-Contra affair. Ledeen has been a fixture in Washington and Israel ever since, advocating a modern version of the Crusades against Islamic nations. Based on what he has said and written, I believe Ledeen is insane.
Michael Ledeen, Rove’s "brain," is one of the leading advocates for a US attack on Iran. The Washington Post quoted Ledeen as saying that Rove told him, "Anytime you have a good idea, tell me." I guess that means we can look forward to the Bush team drumming up a war with Iran.

George Bush Jr., when he assumed the presidency in 2000, already knew that he was going to settle the family score with Saddam Hussein. His "brain," Rove, quickly enlisted Ledeen to trump up a causus belli.

EARLY 2000: ROCCO MARTINO AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION

...


The war is not just about oil, Israel’s fears/ambitions, or US hegemony. There are contracts and contractors in Iraq. Modern-day carpetbaggers with briefcases descended like a plague of scorpions on the poor, bloodied, bombed-out, grieving people of Iraq. They included the daughter of the war’s chief banshee -- Simone Ledeen, Michael’s young daughter -- shown in the photo, greeting with an impish smile another occupier at the Baghdad airport -- getting ready to lord it over the Iraqis as she tries out her new MBA in working for the CPA. Caption: "The creatures step out of the tripods." Maybe it’ll help to pay off those student loans -- huh, Michael?

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/19/145557/54

Keyser Soze aka Michael Ledeen.

Michael Ledeen was one of the founders of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank for AIPAC. He is co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. As far back as 1980, the CIA allegedly listed Ledeen as an agent of influence of Israel. Ledeen is the main foreign policy advisor to Karl Rove. Ledeens main obsession seems to be to overthrow Iran.

In 1972 he published the book Universal Fascism, in which he expounds upon "the rightness of the fascist cause." In Universal Fascism, Ledeen first builds his case that fascism was the "20th Century Revolution" and that "people yearn for the real thing - revolution". It's the blueprint for a fascist revolution.

In 1980 he collaborated with Francesco Pazienza of SISMI and P-2 in the "BillyGate" affair. This is the same Pazienze who was recently found out to belong to the parallel intelligence agency in Italy. In 1985 Pazienza was found guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of terrorists. Ledeen is identified in court documents as an agent of SISMI.

The Pentagon downgraded Ledeen's security clearances from Top Secret-SCI to Secret in the mid-1980s, after the FBI began a probe of Ledeen for passing classified materials to a foreign
country, believed to be Israel.