The Italian Letter

This theory is similar to the one outlined in on our Smoking_Gun Intro page, but it's story appears to start a year too late.

It confirms the idea that the forged documents about Saddam Hussein trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger were created by SISMI, the Italian intel,intelligence Agency. but may be talking about a 're-issue,' a second dissemination of this information, in October 2002, this time by a 'rogue agent' employed by SISMI,

But, as the authors know, the CIA got this info from SISMI a year earlier. Perhaps this second dissemination also went to the British? Leading to them making the same false claims in September 2002?

Questions about the theory in "The Italian Letter,"

1. Why would the Italians want the USA to start a major war in Iraq?
2. Is the Italian intel,intelligence Agency so good that they could so easily fool the CIA with crude forged documents?
3. Why didn't Bush, in his infamous 16-words in the State of the Union, January 2003, make reference to these claims about Saddam Hussein trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger as coming from the Italian intel,intelligence Agency rather that saying the information came from the British intel,intelligence Agency?

A.C.T.,'s current theory remains that the forged documents were created by the USA/CIA in D.C., and then given to the Italian intel,intelligence Agency for the expressed purpose of having them then send them back to the CIA, in October 2001

(See Timeline to track when this info first appeared & spread)

The Way of the World

Claims White House knew Iraq had no WMD.

Says Bush ordered forgery linking Saddam, al-Qaeda 9/11 plot leader, Mohammed Atta.

Says CIA made the forged memo that showed up in Iraq in the ninth month of the war, a memo attempting to confirm the initial False intel Iraq, the 16_word claim in the State of the Union made by Bush before the war began.

Suskind also quotes Alan Foley, head of WMD analysis for the CIA, as saying, “It is, in my opinion, true that the administration, for whatever reason, was determined to have a showdown with Iraq that predated this whole WMD stuff.”

In support of that theory, Foley says that Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, passed along information that Iraq had no WMD to a Lebanese journalist who served as an intermediary on behalf of the CIA in 2002.

That intel,intelligence, Suskind writes, was dismissed as “disinformation.”

Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intel,intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intel,intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” More info

Hubris

On page 230 of Hubris: "In an earlier interview with a Vanity Fair writer on May 10, Wolfowitz said, ‘For reasons that have a lot to do with US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue (to justify the war) that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason…."

Isikoff and Corn tell about Cheney’s frequent visits to the CIA headquarters. He would "park himself in Director George Tenet’s seventh-floor conference room. Then officers and analysts would be summoned" to brief him. (page 3) Cheney and Libby were focused on two issues in particular: Iraqi WMD programs, and ties to al Qaeda. They "were never satisfied and continually asked for more. ‘It was like they were hoping we’d find something buried in the files or come back with some different answer,’ Michael Sulick, deputy chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, later said." (pages 4-5)

In November 2001, just months after September 11, Woodward reports, Bush pulled aside defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and asked him to secretly begin updating war plans for Iraq.

Sixteen months later, in March 2003, after an intense war-planning effort, a tense political fight at home and a carefully crafted 'if-you-don't-we-will' diplomatic strategy with the U.N., the American invasion began

The most stunning aspect of the story, however, is the glaring intel,intelligence failure of George Tenet's CIA, from bad WMD information to what Woodward reports as the outright manipulation of questionable intel,intelligence to make the case for war

A Pretext for War

Says the accusation of Iraq having near-nuclear capabilities, the ties of Saddam and Al-Qaeda were all based on bogus, or very weak intel,intelligence reports, and exaggeration, false intel created at the criticized Pentagon group OSP.

“First OSP [Office of Special Plans] supplies false or exaggerated intel,intelligence; then members of the WHIG - [White House Iraq Group, the task force set up in the White House to sell the war] leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.” [BAMFORD, 2004, PP. 325]

"The images and storyline are simple and visceral: imminent biological or chemical attack, threats of nuclear holocaust, Saddam Hussein as a psychopathic dictator who can only be stopped by American military force. A key element of the narrative is forged documents “proving” Iraq sought uranium from Niger ."

Independent Diplomat

ex-British diplomat, Ross, who specialized in WMD’s said: “It's pretty clear the Bush and the Blair governments took a decision to go to war, and then tried to use the weapons inspection route and the claims of Iraqi WMD as a justification after the fact, when, in fact, the intel,intelligence and the facts of WMD did not justify that course. That was not the real reason they went to war."

Ross testified during the Butler Review, which investigated intel,intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He testified that at no time during his work on Iraq (1998-2002) did the UK or US assess that Iraq's WMD posed a threat.

A dry read but as one of the diplomats inside the UN at the time of launching the Iraq War he makes the point that the decision to go to war was made and then justifications and facts for this decision were made up.

Ross was in charge of the Iraq dossier in Britain's UN delegation in the run-up to the Iraq war. It was his job to prepare the evidence on 'weapons of mass destruction ' and to negotiate resolutions on sanctions. But the more he worked on the issue the more he realized that Washington and London were engaged in a "gross exaggeration of what we knew" and that "Britain's behavior in the Security Council was at best manipulative and at worst dishonest."

WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implication

107-page scholarly report, by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, available as a free PDF download. May have helped move along the investigations by the Senate intel,intelligence Committee.

Charges that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush "systematically misrepresented" the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The biological weapons had all been destroyed after the first Gulf War (a

There were no links to al-Qaeda and White House claims that Saddam would give nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda were the most irresponsible.

Collusion

Bonini and D'Avanzo are the Woodward and Bernstein of Italian journalism. They, more than any other reporters, penetrated the Iraqi uranium fraud-one of the great, and most consequential, scams of our time

Disarmament Diplomacy

One of the first to point out how the declassified October 2002 National intel,intelligence Estimate on Iraq reveals a dramatic shift between intel,intelligence assessments prior to 2002 and the intel,intelligence views as they were presented in the NIE. This shift appears to have occurred without additional evidence after inspectors departed in 1998.

Also has report on how the 2007 NIE indicates Iran has stepped back from nuclear weapons plans.

Neither recommended nor not-recommended. Appears to be scholarily source of articles and information about nuclear WMD, thus a good perspective on what are the issues, what people are saying about the issues and what type of info we can discover in polcies and intel,intelligence reports.

The Acronym Institute works with policy makers and non-governmental organisations to promote non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament by disseminating information and maximising negotiating opportunities in all available fora. When arms control measures become blocked, as at present on treaty ratification and the proposed ban on the production of fissile materials, the Acronym Institute will work to promote constructive dialogue and alternative approaches.

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