Iraqgate- Former US-Ambassador warned of Niger-Iraq Bogus

posted by ewing2001 on Monday July 21, @03:21PM

Related story: Docus leaked to Italian Berlusconi Reporter because of her relation to killed Humanitarian in Afghanistan?

White House striking back?

By Andrea Mitchell -NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON, July 21 — They were just 16 words in the State of the Union address — words that we now know were misleading. And this man, retired career diplomat Joe Wilson tried to warn the administration of just that nearly a year before the speech.

Advertisement

NOW IN AN NBC News exclusive, Wilson says his family is the subject of a smear campaign. Wilson tells NBC News the White House deliberately leaked his wife’s identity as a covert CIA operative, damaging her future career and compromising past missions after he criticized the administration on “Meet the Press” and in the New York Times.

He told me, “It’s a shot across the bow to those who might step forward, those unnamed analysts who said they were pressured by the White House for example would think twice about having their own families names being dragged through this particular mud.”

The White House strongly denies the charge. In fact, Wilson was only one of three experts who warned the administration a year before the State of the Union that the Niger information didn’t check out.

As previously reported on NBC News, then-Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Fitzpatrick reported it was false in February 2002. So did four-star Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford two months later. So the warnings came to the White House more than a year before the State of the Union.

Probing the documents

July 21 — There are new questions about how forged documents could have been in the hands of U.S. officials four months before the State of the Union address without anyone’s figuring out they were bogus. NBC’s Lisa Myers reports.

Wilson reached his judgment without ever seeing the forged documents that led to the charge. We showed him the documents for the first time Monday: I asked, “This is the first you are seeing the documents?” Wilson answered, “Yes. This was never a legitimate piece of information.”

ITALIAN CONNECTION

And in their first TV interview Monday, the Italian journalists who first gave the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome tell NBC News the documents didn’t even pass an amateur’s test. “The smell of these documents, since the beginning, I was not convinced,” says Carlo Rosell. So, the Italian magazine never printed the Niger story.

But the CIA wasn’t as careful. NBC News has learned that it sent at least two secret memos to the White House only days before the State of the Union recycling the Niger charge — even though the agency knew it was false.

NBC News has learned one memo said “fragmentary reporting” on the Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Africa is “another sign of reconstitution of a nuclear program.”

In August 2001, war photographer Elisabetta Burba (Somalia, Sarajevo) learned from the death of her friend, Maria Cutuli Grace, who was killed in Afghanistan:

(edited from web-translation) "...Maria Grace, instead, was killed. Killed from an armed command. Perhaps of taliban, perhaps not. Maria Grace made the editor ordinary, to the "(Corriere della Sera)", than but she had sent it in Pakistan, on its demand, as she had insistito, a year makes, in order to go in Palestine and Israel (its "promised earth"), in Africa, Asia....

Maria Grace has been remembered thursday slid from its friends, its friends and father Albanian Giulio, the comboniano missionary friend of Elisabetta Burba, today sended of "Panorama", yesterday similar of writing desk of the Cutuli "to Age". They had known together, don Giulio, the founder of Misma agency. Then both had followed the course of peacekeeping of the Sant' Anna of Pisa, "the smaller sister of the Normal school", say Elisabetta today..."

"...Now the White House and 10 Downing Street appear to be on the offensive, striking back at those who dared speak the truth. The Nation’s David Corn reports that in a recent column about former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, the man who went public about his trip to Africa on behalf of the Vice President to investigate allegations that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger, conservative commentator Robert Novak passed on a strange charge from unnamed White House sources. They claimed that Wilson’s wife was behind his involvement in the investigation:

"Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation, Novak wrote.

According to Corn, Novak’s allegation that Wilson's wife prompted the trip was not only false, but it resulted in her being “outed” as an operative. Apparently, she had been working undercover for the CIA at a private energy company. Corn writes that exposing a CIA operative is illegal and that the incident illustrates just how far the administration is willing to go to intimidate those who speak out..."

<  Was the Removal of Bustani (OPCW) part of the Iraq Coup? | IraqGate: White House-Novak-Wilson Crisis increased  >