6-12-06, 9:03 am
Martino now believes he was set up in order to pass the documents along to various intelligence services in Europe and the US for the Italians without being officially connected to them. In his article titled, 'The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed,' Unger describes Martino as having a reputation as someone who sold secrets to the highest bidders, sometimes even double dealing. He was the perfect patsy, he told Unger.
Indeed, the crux of Unger’s article is that Italian spy agencies, in collusion with ex-US spies with ties to the most hawkish neo-cons in the Bush administration, may have orchestrated the distribution of the Niger documents for far more nefarious purposes than making a few bucks.
As it turns out, some of those documents had an enormous impact on the course of world events. They helped start Bush’s war in Iraq.
Unbeknownst to Martino, Unger reports, the aging ex-spy had passed on the infamous Niger forgeries that purported to show that Saddam Hussein’s government had made arrangements with the government of Niger to buy 500 tons of uranium 'yellow cake' ore.
Dossiers reporting the contents of the documents quickly made the rounds of the various intelligence branches. But, according to Unger’s investigation, between their surfacing in January 2001 and the fateful January 2003 State of the Union Address in which President Bush used specific information from the forgeries to make his case for war to the American people, the documents had been discredited on 14 separate occasions by CIA analysts, State Department WMD experts, foreign intelligence agencies, current and former US diplomats, and others.
Indeed, CIA analysts doubted the authenticity of the documents almost immediately. Why would Saddam buy uranium ore when he had no technology to transform it into anything useful, let alone nuclear weapons? Analysts also knew, Unger reports, that though the Niger government owned the uranium operation, it was a French-managed consortium that mined and shipped the material. If such a deal had gone down, the French would know about it, and an exchange of 500 tons would have been impossible to keep secret. In addition this, CIA analysts believed that because one of the documents indicated an arrangement for moving 500 tons of uranium in one shipment, an impossible task, the documents had to be faked.
But the CIA's description of the documents as 'ridiculous' wasn't enough to kill claims by Bush people that they were true.
A few months later, Unger’s sources say, when intelligence analysts were able to look at the actual documents in the summer of 2001, they definitively showed that the crucial one describing a deal between Iraq and Niger contained a number of errors that indicated it had been forged. The document contained an obviously forged signature of the Niger president, references to an outdated Niger Constitution, references to events that had taken place after the transaction was supposedly made, an incorrect postmark date, and the signature of a minister who was no longer in office at the time it was supposedly created.
In addition to being further debunked by the CIA with these findings, in November 2001 the US Embassy in Niger denied that the documents were genuine for many of the same reasons. A month later State Department WMD experts called the forgeries 'bogus.'
Still, this wasn't enough to stop White House efforts to use the documents as evidence that Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat.
About this time, a group in the Pentagon was formed, headed by Bush-appointee Douglas Feith, called the Office of Special Plans. The sole purpose of this group was to gather evidence about Iraq that could be used to make a case for war, and apparently to suppress information that cast that 'evidence' in doubt. Despite CIA dismissal of the Niger forgeries, Feith's group authored reports using the forgeries as evidence to make a case for war and delivered it to Vice President Cheney.
Soon after, Cheney asked the CIA to dig up more information on the Niger documents. According to Unger, it was at this point in February 2002, after the documents had been discredited at least half a dozen times, that CIA operative Valerie Plame told her bosses that her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a former diplomat who had served in both Baghdad and Africa, might be the guy for the job.
Wilson's trip was approved in late February 2002 and was viewed as being a response to Cheney’s request. Wilson went to Niger and within a few days sent a cable to the State Department calling the claims of the Niger documents 'unlikely.' Citing the fact that the French actually controlled the operations in Niger, Wilson also considered the notion that the Niger government would risk friendly relations with the US to make a deal with Saddam to be incredible. He also noted the impossibility of shipping 500 tons of uranium ore in a single shipment. At this point, most intelligence analysts without political axes to grind considered the Niger forgeries simply ridiculous, writes Unger.
But even Wilson’s reports weren’t enough to halt White House efforts to use the forgeries in the case for war.
By August 2002 Feith's group stepped up its circulation of reports and memos using the Niger forgeries to Cheney and other White House departments. Cheney and people connected to his office began using the forged information in their public statements. In September 2002, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice used her infamous 'mushroom cloud' comment to press for congressional authorization for war on Iraq. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld picked up on this phrase over the next few weeks to frighten the public and demand that Congress authorize a war.
In October 2002, Congress bowed to this pressure based on forged documents and authorized the use of force.
In the following months, additional sources rejected the Niger forgeries, including an Iranian defector, French intelligence (twice), and most CIA analysts. In October, Bush's speechwriters, on several occasions, tried to get the CIA to authorize the use of specific information from the Niger forgeries in public speeches, rather than just the vague claims about mushroom clouds and unsubstantiated hints at Iraq's attempts to build a nuclear program. Each time, reports Unger, CIA analysts refused to sign off on information from the Niger forgeries.
Finally, in early January 2003, CIA analysts tried emphatically to characterize the Niger forgeries as 'baseless,' hoping to kill it once and for all. Just a couple of weeks later, it appeared in Bush's State of the Union Address. Unger reports that some of his CIA sources believe George Tenet bowed to pressure from the White House and abdicated his duty to prevent the use of inaccurate intelligence.
Unger's sources also believe that the White House knowingly included the misleading information then pointed the finger back at the CIA claiming that it had given them faulty information. The White House then played innocent in international circles, but never returned to the American public to say, 'Hey, we were wrong about this. Let's take a step back and get this right.'
In the end, this misleading information was used to sledgehammer Congress and the public into supporting war. For this lie, close to 2,500 US soldiers have been killed and more than 18,200 have been wounded. Media reports of Iraqi deaths total as much as 42,000, while some scholarly sources estimate that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Iraq has become a magnet for international terrorism, by all accounts, and violence and destabilization seem to have no viable solution, other than US withdrawal as soon as possible.
So far, the details of this story have come from ex-CIA agents, former State Department staff, and former members of foreign intelligence agencies. The Republicans in Congress failed to create a venue in which the US public could scrutinize thoroughly the administration’s evidence for war. They rejected calls for not rushing to war. When the Republican-controlled Congress signed a blank check for war in October 2002, it abdicated its Constitutional duty to hold the executive branch of the government accountable for telling the truth about the reasons for war.
To date, Republican leaders have refused demands from the public and from members of Congress to investigate the abuse of intelligence in the lead-up to the war or to hold accountable those members of the administration who knowingly used false information, including the President, to make a case for war. In so doing, the Republicans are guilty of helping to damage irreparably US credibility, squandering whatever moral authority it may have had after 9/11, exposing the US to a greater danger of terrorist threats, holding some responsibility for thousands of deaths, and abusing the Constitution.
Republicans deserve neither our trust, nor leadership of our representative institutions.
--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at
