by chiggerbit » Wed Oct 12, 2005 3:11 pm
Hope this hasn't been posted before. It starts to make sense. Wow, if Fitzy dug deep enough, this could possibly go all the way back to Iran/Contra. How about October Surprise? I must not have been paying enough attention. Is Franklin connected to PlameGate? If Manucher Ghorbanifar is involved in this, then CS's theory is beginning to look credible.<br><br>If that Niger letterhead later used for the fraudulent document was stolen even before Bush took office, then the Niger uranium story began before 9/11. Incredible.<br><br>Too bad there isn't more proof, that it relies so much on conjecture. Still doesn't answer my question about whether Cheney really requested that the document be investigated. IF he did, it was the biggest mistake of his life. <br><br> <br>See link for entire article. Emphasis is mine.<br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article318195.ece">comment.independent.co.uk...318195.ece</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>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.<br><br>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.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>Ledeen is an intriguing and enduring presence in the murkier parts of US foreign policy. He is an American <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>specialist on Italy</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> with a long-standing commitment to Israel. According to The New York Times, in December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Manucher Ghorbanifar</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Larry Franklin</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. In Rome they met the head of Sismi.<br><br>Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.So far, so circumstantial. One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but "funnelled through the Italians". When an interviewer asked Cannistraro "if I said Michael Ledeen", he reportedly replied "I don't think it's a proven case ...You'd be very close"<br><br>Ledeen, on hearing this, issued the following statement: "I have absolutely no connection to the Niger documents, have never even seen them. I did not work on them, never handled them, know virtually nothing about them, don't think I ever wrote or said anything about the subject."<br><br>It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?<br><br>Norman Dombey is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear capability<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
