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Libbygate: Now to the Real Story

By Dave Lindorff
Created Mar 7 2007 - 9:14am

So Scooter Libby has taken the fall.

Three and a half years and a long bloody war after he and a gang of
war-mongers in the White House and Blair House, including President Bush and
Vice President Cheney, set out to undermine and trash the reputation of an
Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Libby has been found
guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a
Washington jury.

Now maybe special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and what passes for journalists
in the mainstream media can get down to the real business of finding out
just why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed upon a minor
state department official and why they went so far as to violate federal law
and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, in the process destroying
her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons
in the Middle East.

Because that's what this whole Libby story is really about.

The whole focus of the media in this case has been on the narrow,
inside-the-Beltway question of who leaked information about Plame to the
media.

Entirely forgotten or ignored has been what this leak was all about to begin
with.

For that, you have to go back and look at what Wilson did in the first place
that so enraged or frightened the Vice President and the President.

And that was to go to Niger, one of the poorest nations in Africa, to prove
conclusively that there was no truth to a set of forged notes on the
letterhead of the Niger embassy in Rome, purporting to be receipts for 400
tons of Niger uranium ore allegedly being sought by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Wilson knew those documents were cheap forgeries--the name of the mines
official on the papers was someone who hadn't been in office for years--but
he went to Niger anyhow, just to make doubly certain that no such purchase
attempt had been made.

None had.

So the real question then is, who is behind those forged documents?

There is an interesting story here--and an important mystery to be solved.

As it happens, way back in early 2001 there was a pair of burglaries at the
Niger Embassy in Rome and at the home of the Niger ambassador. Police
investigating the crimes found that the only things stolen were official
stationary and some official stamps, used to make documents official. A
cleaning lady and a former member of Italy's intelligence service were
arrested for the crimes. They were odd burglaries to be sure, since there is
precious little one could use, or sell, such documents for, given the
country involved. I mean, it might make sense to steal official stationary
from the French Embassy in Rome, which a thief might use to finagle a pass
to the Cannes Festival. But Niger?

Jump to October 2001. A few weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by his ministers of defense and
intelligence, made a visit to the White House. There he reportedly handed
over the forged Niger documents (they were on Niger government stationary,
and had Niger government stamps!), which appeared to be receipts for uranium
ore, made out to Saddam Hussein. Now forget the matter of why either Hussein
or Niger's government would want paper receipts for such an illegal
transaction, and forget the matter of how Hussein would have transported 400
tons of yellow dust across the Sahara to his country without somebody
noticing. The simple fact is that Bush's own intelligence experts at the CIA
and State Department promptly spotted the forgeries, and they were dumped.

We know this because we know, from the likes of onetime National Security
Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill, that Bush was pushing for war with Iran almost as soon as he
finished reading My Pet Goat following the attack on the Twin Towers. Surely
if the White House had even thought those Niger documents might be legit,
they would have leaked or broadcast them all over creation.

They didn't. The documents were deep-sixed, and mentioned to no one.

But according to some dedicated investigative reporters at the respected
Italian newspaper La Repubblica, they resurfaced before long at a very
suspicious meeting. This meeting occurred in December 2001 in Rome, and
included Michael Ledeen, an associate of Defense Department Undersecretary
for Policy Douglas Feith and a key figure in the White House's
war-propaganda program, Larry Franklin, a top Defense Intelligence Agency
Middle East analyst who later pleaded guilty to passing classified
information to two employees of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), convicted Iraqi bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi, then head of the
CIA-created Iraqi National Congress, and Harold Rhode of the sinister
Defense Department Office of Special Plans, that office set up by the White
House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under Feith's direction to
manufacture "evidence" to justify a war on Iraq. Also at this peculiar
meeting were the heads of the Italian Defense Department and of SISMI, the
Italian intelligence agency.

According to La Repubblica, it was at that meeting that a plan was hatched
to resurrect the forged Niger documents, and to give them credibility by
recycling them through British intelligence.

And that is what Bush was referring to when, in his 2003 State of the Union
address, he famously frightened a nation by declaring, "The British
government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa."

Bush lyingly implied that this was new information, when in fact he
knew--had to know--that the "evidence" in British hands was the same set of
documents he had been offered by Berlusconi almost a year and a half
earlier, which had been declared to be bogus.

No mainstream American media organization has pursued this story, or even
published the details as reported in Italy. Most Americans, consequently,
don't even know what a grand lie Bush and the White House perpetrated upon
them and the Congress in order to win approval for an attack on Iraq.

Perhaps now that Libby has gone down for his part in this grotesque crime,
some editor will ask the obvious question: Why did the White House and the
Office of Vice President go to such extraordinary lengths to attack Wilson
and his wife? And more importantly, who was behind those Niger embassy
burglaries and the forged uranium ore sale documents? And what was OSP doing
meeting in Rome in December 2001 with the head of Italian intelligence?

Make no mistake: this whole story has the odor of a "black op" designed to
target the American people.

If so it was an act of high treason.

It is not just Libby who should go to jail for this crime. It is the
president and vice president.

At this point, whether or not the mainstream media decide to do their job,
one has to hope that Fitzgerald, with Libby in the bag, will take the next
step and hold the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence recommendation over
the convict's head in order to try and win from him a promise of cooperation
with the prosecution.

Because Libby knows who was behind all of this.

And that's the real story that needs to be told.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson