Interesting collection of articles, Shermy. Thanks for collecting and posting them.
From the Kristof article (my emphasis in boldface):
As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously....
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.
I know this is how it's been reported, and maybe it really was an amateurish job. But would somebody who would go to the trouble of creating the forgery really be so amateurish? Maybe it was done on purpose that way, and was intended to be discovered?
MARCH 7, 2003 : (UN : IAEA SAYS LETTERS APPEARED TO BE FABRICATED) A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions. .....
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. "We fell for it," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.
A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents "were shared with us in good faith," he said.
- "Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake: U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases Were Forged," By Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, March 8, 2003; Page A01
Question : has anyone published the 'forged' letters? I mena, if they are just forgeries, what harm would there be in simply publishing them?
I know this is how it's been reported, and maybe it really was an amateurish job. But would somebody who would go to the trouble of creating the forgery really be so amateurish? Maybe it was done on purpose that way, and was intended to be discovered? It's an amazing story. But even better is how the bogus documents have been used to frame Blair and Bush as lying about Iraqi uranium quests.
Did they lie? Did they mean Niger? Or South Africa?
Does Joe Wilson still claim Bush meant Niger in the State of the Union speech? Did he really ever make such a claim?
Does he still?