F.B.I. Is Still Seeking Source of Forged Uranium Reports

[tocqueville]

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 28, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - A two-year inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and intelligence officials say.

A counterespionage official said Wednesday that the inquiry into the documents, which were intended to show that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program, had yielded some intriguing but unproved theories. One is the possibility that associates of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who was a leading champion of the American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the forgery. A second hypothesis, described by some officials as more likely, is that the documents were forged at Niger's embassy in Rome, in a moneymaking scheme. The official said the matter was being investigated as a counterintelligence case, not a criminal one.

The United States government did not receive the papers until October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003 that the papers were forgeries.

But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency in the months before Mr. Wilson's trip also contained information that was "based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/politics/28niger.html

[DemonFighterLives]

1. Yesterday on Big Eddy or Al Frankin, I can't remember which

They were saying that the letterhead papers were stolen in a break in. Also mysterious is that the forged documents were hand carried to the US and did not use normal channels. I don't know where Ledeen stands in this or cheney, but it is obvious that it is some sort of Neocon Dirty Trick. The deeper story here is that GFY cheney or rummy had to cover their tracks of their illegal arms deals that Valerie and Brewster Jenning were getting close to.
Just speculating, but I'm hoping that more is uncovered.
:freak:

[leveymg]

2. An effort to delink the Plame case from the OSP-AIPAC spy case

Can you see the same news management style at work in this article as in Judy Miller's WMD reporting? Are the same editors now at work trying to cover-up the role of Michael Ledeen, Manoucher Ghorbanifar and the OSP cabal in the Niger forgeries?

This is yet another scandal in the making for the NYT, which I no longer trust as a primary source. The Times is now little more than Debka-Lite.

[DemonFighterLives]

3. Kick

:kick:
Let's not lose sight of the importance of this.
:dem: