Outing Plame may not have been illegal. What is the prosecutor hunting? (the bigger picture!)

POST GAZETTE.COM ^ | JULY 17, 2005 | JACK KELLY

[marron]

Niger’s involvement in illicit uranium dealings is covered in this Financial Times article: ...

Yes it is...with the usual unsubstantiated claims

I'll have to do some more digging. Everything I find seems to be quoting that same FT article.

Its a key piece of information, in my mind. If Libya gets its uranium from Niger, that is the smoking gun.

But it will have to wait, I have to disappear for a while. Maybe you'll find something before I do. Someone, somewhere, out there must have another link confirming or refuting the FT story that Libya's uranium came, off the books, from Niger.

[CHARLITE]

[liberallarry]

This is the article I was searching for.

Here you have the bogus dossier on Saddam’s uranium

It turns out that I was right in my first post...and Hersh's article was misleading. Wilson was sent by the Veep's office to investigate the forgeries, which that office obtained 10 months before the CIA officially got them - probably from SISMI to MI6 to the CIA.

Why the Administration has gone to such pains to conceal this information is difficult for me to understand. My guess is that the Veep is too strongly connected by this to cooking the intelligence and, by extension, to exposing Plame.

Right now, it looks like Rove and Libby are going to be charged with perjury for trying to conceal their role in outing Plame. If that happens I think Rove will refuse to take the fall and will blame Cheney.

I know the last paragraph is wild supposition. But if it turns out to be true it will be very, very bad for our country.

[marron]

Thanks for the ping. Let me meditate on it for a couple of days.

I'm still curious about Libya's uranium. Surfing the net yields dozens and dozens of stories asserting that it came from Niger, but all of them are merely re-stating almost word for word the Mark Huband story in the Financial Times.

On the other hand, scanning the IAEA report, they avoid the issue, mentioning that this or that material or piece of equipment is of "foreign origin" but never mentioning from where, which to me sets off alarm bells. Since they missed the whole thing, they have no reason to make it obvious just how badly they missed it.

I am frankly suspicious of the IAEA's ability or commitment or interest in catching anyone doing anything.

I did see a couple of competing articles proposing that, maybe, Libya's uranium came from North Korea, but that seems far-fetched when there are several possible sources right there in Africa that would be easier. I saw another article which said that Libya was investing in Central African Republic's uranium mining industry, which the CAF government then duly denied. But mostly everyone seems to have accepted Huband's story.

Other than the odd blogger dismissing his report, I didn't see anyone refute him or even deny it. Obviously, "if" Libya got its uranium from Niger during the nineties (they admit to getting some in the seventies and eighties) then this changes the complexion of everything everyone has written about the subject. But while I intend to continue swearing its true, I frankly haven't found any other source that isn't based on Huband. Let me know if you do.

Thanks again for the ping. Someone else sent me a similar article concerning the forgeries, and between the two of them my head is spinning.

Cheers

[marron]

I mentioned you on another thread, and forgot to ping you...

"Niger Yellowcake and The Man Who Forged Too Much"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1448788/posts

[liberallarry]

This is a correction to my last post...but an important one.

I said Wilson was sent by the Veep's office to investigate the forgeries

That should have read Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate the forgeries in response to a request by the Veep's office for more info on them

[marron]

I read through the link, and it contains a lot of details I hadn't seen gathered well into one place.

It differs some, or perhaps merely shifts the focus a little, but there are a couple of common elements.

The docs came from the Niger embassy. They were created with some egregious errors that anyone could see, specifically, bearing a signature of an official who hadn't been in office for a decade.

Since a Nigerien diplomat would have access to up-to-date signatures, and would certainly know if someone was out of office for 10 years, I would say that the forgeries were designed to be discovered.

That much is clear.

[liberallarry]

I agree...and there's more. The forgeries were made in the last months of the year 2000 but were not put into circulation for almost a year. Why?

[marron]

The forgeries were made in the last months of the year 2000 but were not put into circulation for almost a year. Why?

I confess I can't quite get my mind around that one. I'll have to stew on it for a while.

I will say that if an embassy employee forged them, he would have no need of a break-in to get them out. He might need a break-in to explain how they reached the outside world, but that seems a little farfetched.

Maybe the break-in was an effort by outsiders to get the real docs, whether successful or not we don't know, and the forged ones were offered later to poison the well.

I don't pay much mind to the Kos story, which credits the docs to some kind of Mossad plot, because these docs were designed to fail, they were intended to debunk the story. I have faith that if Mossad had put these docs together to justify a war, we wouldn't be talking about them, they wouldn't have the wrong names on them.

[liberallarry]

Maybe the break-in was an effort by outsiders to get the real docs

What real docs?

[marron]

Maybe the break-in was an effort by outsiders to get the real docs What real docs?

"The" real docs.

I'm just trying to imagine what the need was for a break-in if the forged docs were produced by an embassy employee, or even if they were produced by someone else and merely channeled through an embassy employee per another version of the story.

It could be that "someone" broke in trying to get their hands on information related to a supposed uranium deal. Why such info would be at the Rome embassy is beyond me, unless the contact was between that embassy and Zahawie.

If the story was circulating, and there was fear that some genuine docs might have been pilfered during the break-in, the proper damage control might be to poison the well with the forged docs.

Thats just me trying to put together an explanation I can understand. I welcome alternative explanations. We could probably write a pretty good sceenplay from all this...