It seems like anyone these days with a few bucks and a website can start a veterans for this or veterans for that organization. So with that in mind I'm putting myself forward as the executive director of Concerned Vietnam Combat Veterans Whose Service Records Have Been Attacked by Friends of President Bush Even Though President Bush Has Nothing To Do With It and Did His Best to Stop it But Failed.
Now, I'll admit that the acronym we're working with at the moment -- CVCVWSRHBABFOPBET PBHNTDWIADHBTSIBF -- is less than euphonious. But I'm figuring that the importance of our mission will make up for that shortcoming.
You'll remember that friends of the president pulled this stuff with John McCain back in South Carolina in 2000. And McCain just told the AP that this swift boat nonsense about Kerry was "dishonest and dishonorable" and called on the president to disavow it -- something his spokesman, Scott McClellan has now declined to do. So I figure I can get him and Kerry to sign up without much problem.
Now, perhaps to your surprise, I take a somewhat sympathetic view of the president on this question. I see it as one more in a long line of unlucky breaks he's had to endure. Years ago, remember, he tried to go to Vietnam, but couldn't manage to get there because the program he asked someone about got shut down a week before he asked about it. Then the CIA bamboozles him about the WMD business. More recently, records were lost which might have discredited charges that he'd been off carousing when he was supposed to be protecting the Gulf of Mexico from the Viet Cong. And now these so-called friends of his are butting their way into his reelection campaign and attacking his opponent's combat record.
All of this tells me that as long as I'm going to have to get a lawyer to help me set up CVCVWSRHBABFOPBETPBHNTDWIADHBTSIBF that I might as well have him help me set up another political outfit, Rich Kids Who Can't Catch a Break (RKWCCAB). I can think of at least one member.
--Josh Marshall
God bless those Illinois Republicans.
I couldn't believe my good fortune when I came home last night after a long evening to see that the Illinois GOP had chosen Alan Keyes for its senate standard bearer against Barack Obama.
In an era of political drama often tilting toward tragedy, comedy isn't always an easy thing to summon from the news. But I'm confident that Keyes will be helping to rectify that problem.
When the state GOP popped the question, Keyes reflected on the magnitude of the decision he faced and told the press conference that he needed a few times to mull his options because "if I do step forward to accept this challenge, I will be laying it all on the line."
Now, this is classic Keyes as the master of grandiloquent nonsense. Hearing that he will lay all it on the line this time makes you wonder what he possibly could have left off the line when he ran for office in 1988 (Senate), 1992 (Senate), 1996 (president) and 2000 (president).
As you can see, Keyes appears to suffer from an affliction which presents as its primary symptom the inability to go more than four years without entering a campaign in which he will get trounced beyond all reckoning but will nevertheless get a chance to show up at a few debates and work himself into a lather.
Now, one slightly more serious point about the Keyes candidacy ...
I've had a number of people -- both Republicans and Democrats -- write in today and suggest that the real reason for running Keyes is not to win the race (which I think goes without saying) but to rough up Obama and break his political stride with an eye toward his apparently limitless political future.
What'll make this possible, the argument goes, is submitting Obama to Keyes' rhetorical firepower and word wizardry at the debates that will surely happen between now and November.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the 'wingers who seem to have taken over the Illinois GOP think this is going to happen. But this is the really the stupidest idea in the world.
Keyes is something else to watch on the hustings or in a debate. But calling him a master debater is rather like saying Dolly Parton has a dynamite bod or Lou Ferrigno is toned -- or, perhaps mostly aptly, that the Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons is quick on his feet. In other words, impressive in his own way, but also a bit cartoonish and rather less than subtle.
If and when these two guys debate what we're going to hear are rants from Keyes -- both spellbinding and inane -- about how tort reform is necessary to bring America back into compliance with natural law, how drug reimportation is incompatible with the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and how gun control has been outlawed by God.
I don't see how any of that is going to set Obama back much.
--Josh Marshall
With such strong qualifications for office, who would have <$NoAd$> imagined such a thing could happen?
Officials in Indiana and Washington said they were dumbfounded by a statement U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, of Sarasota, made about a terrorist plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana.
During a speech to 600 people Monday in Venice, Harris either shared a closely held secret or passed along secondhand information as fact.A staff member of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation's intelligence operations, said he had heard of no such plot, and Indiana officials in the county where the power grid is located were at a loss to explain where the information originated.
In an interview Tuesday, Harris would not reveal the name of the mayor who told her about the threat or provide further details.
She said in the speech that a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested in the plot and that explosives were found in his home in Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis.
Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
This piece in the local paper has more on her shenanigans.
--Josh Marshall
Today the Times reports that the the SEC has fined Halliburton $7.5 million for, in effect, defrauding its shareholders.
The charges stem from a change in accounting methods Halliburton made in 1998. The SEC found that the old and the new accounting methods were both permissible under accepted practices. The key, however, is that Halliburton did not inform investors of the change. That allowed Halliburton to "report annual earnings in 1998 that were 46 percent higher than they would have been had the change not been made ... [and] a substantially higher profit in 1999."
This change came just as Halliburton was struggling with falling share prices that threatened to sink its proposed merger with Dresser Industries.
Again from the Times ...
It reported a 34 percent gain in profit for the quarter, far better than other oil services companies were reporting, and Mr. Cheney said then that "Halliburton continues to make good financial progress despite uncertainties over future oil demand."The commission said yesterday that the gain would have been just 6.7 percent without the undisclosed change in accounting policies.
This is sorta like, "Hey, we just changed the temperature reading in our refrigeration trucks from Fahrenheit to Celsius without telling you. So what's the problem?"
The SEC and the even the Times goes to some length to avoid the colloquial term for this sort of behavior: i.e., fraud. The SEC did levy the fine. And it did point the finger of blame at two lower levels Halliburton officials. Yet the SEC, in the words of the Times, "did not detail the extent to which [Cheney] was aware of the change or of the requirement to disclose it to investors." And not surprisingly, in the article, Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell is trumpeting the results of the investigation as a clean bill of health for Cheney.
Now, with a whitewash, you might at least expect that Cheney would be denying knowledge that this took place, as implausible as it might sound. But he won't. After taking down O'Donnell's crowing about the results of the investigation, the Times asked whether Cheney "had been aware of the effect of the accounting change on the company's profits." But O'Donnell wouldn't answer.
So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.
Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?
--Josh Marshall
Double-decker preemption? This from Gen. Tommy Franks this morning on CNN ...
With respect to WMD, ... I've had a couple reporters ask me the same question, 'Do you think that since we didn't find this WMD, do you think it's a mistake?' And I look and hopefully give a wry smile and say "Do you think it would be better to have left this regime to build it?" I think we are far better served that the regime of Saddam Hussein no longer stands in Iraq.
Very wry.
--Josh Marshall
Alan's moment draws near!
According to Reuters, Illinois Republicans have narrowed their choice of senate candidates to oppose Barack Obama to two. And one of those two is Alan Keyes. The other is a former deputy drug czar for demand reduction named Andrea Barthwell, who resigned early last month to consider a senate run.
Like Keyes', Barthwell's possible nomination would seem to indicate that the Illinois GOP is encountering some difficulty finding first-tier candidates to oppose Mr. Obama. During her brief stint at the drug czar's office one of her most noteworthy accomplishments seems to have been getting written up in a "hostile workplace memorandum" for "lewd and abusive behavior."
In the words of the Associated Press, "In front of her staff, Andrea Grubb Barthwell made repeated comments about the sexual orientation of a staff member and used a kaleidoscope to make sexually offensive gestures ..."
The staffer in question later told the investigator that he found her comments "lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality."
A kaleidoscope, you ask?
Thus the AP ...
The lewd and abusive behavior finding stemmed from a Dec. 19, 2002, staff gathering. Barthwell made comments about a staff member's sexual orientation after the staff member misspoke in an earlier conversation, the memorandum said."Dr. Barthwell made reference to this staff member sitting on men's laps. A kaleidoscope pointed upward was placed on a chair by Dr. Barthwell as the staff member was about to sit down," it said.
"Dr. Barthwell suggested that the staff member would want to cut the cake available for the gathering because the knife was 'long and hard' and he might 'enjoy handling it.' When the cake was cut, Dr. Barthwell referred to the pieces as 'most' or 'beefy' and she said to the staff member, 'I know you like it big and meaty.'"
Notwithstanding the strong social skills one might infer from that anecdote, the report also said that Barthwell's staff "almost uniformly stated their fear and discomfort with what they consider to be unusual behavior patterns and displays of temper."
In a short interview, Barthwell told the AP that the incident shouldn't be a factor in her candidacy. "I think it's something that was in the past, something we dealt with and it was resolved to everyone's satisfaction," she said.
So that's Barthwell.
Say what you will about Alan Keyes, I think we can be confident that when he starts saying unfortunate things about homosexuality he'll drive home his point with Aristotle and 'natural law' rather than kaleidoscopes.
Given all this, besides the fact that he's completely crazy, I think Keyes might likely be a less embarrassing figure to have in the senate than Barthwell. The man is not without his engaging qualities, after all, as one quickly realized reading Michael Lewis' masterful coverage of the 1996 presidential primary campaign in The New Republic.
You also didn't need to see Keyes diving into a portable mosh pit (set up by an as-yet-pre-iconic Michael Moore after a Republican presidential debate in 2000) and crowd surfing to the sounds of Rage Against the Machine to know that Keyes would probably be quite a guy to party with so long as the festivities were conducted in accordance with the laws of nature and nature's god.
In a classic Keyes' comment, both inane and inspired, he later defended the mosh pit episode, in the face of Gary Bauer's criticisms at the 2000 New Hampshire debate, as an ... well, it really deserves to be quoted in full ...
Admittedly, I was willing to fall into the mosh pit. But I'll tell you something. Do you know why I did that? Because I think that exemplifies the kind of trust in people that is the heart and soul of the Keyes campaign. It's about time we got back to the understanding that we trust the people of this country to do what is decent. And when you trust them, they will in fact hold you up - whether it is in terms of giving help to you when you are falling down, or caring for their own children.So I thought that as an emblem of that trust, it was the right thing to do. And anyway, my daughter thought it was a good idea.
How can you not love the guy a little after reading that? Whackjob or not ...
In any case, with such politically viable options to choose from, you might think the Illinois Republican bosses would pick someone without so much baggage, like Jack Ryan, for instance. But according to Reuters, they'll crown either Keyes or Barthwell during their conclave tomorrow.
--Josh Marshall
Do not miss this very important article that not only covers the exceptionally good reportage of Knight-Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay on the WMD claims, but also the costs of aggressively bucking the administration line.
--Josh Marshall
'Non-factual statements' my vice president told me ...
You'll notice that today in Hot Springs, Arkansas Vice President Dick Cheney blamed Democrats -- particularly John Kerry and John Edwards -- for high gasoline prices. The reason being that they opposed the administration energy bill.
"The only thing I can think of to do [to lower prices]," said Cheney in response to a question about gas prices, "is to keep pushing hard to enact a comprehensive energy plan on a national basis." But Kerry and Edwards, who voted against the administration's energy bill, "weren't with us in trying to come up with a national energy policy."
Yet, the Energy Department's own study of the bill -- a study requested by Senator John Sununu (R-NH) -- said its effect on prices, even years into the future, would be "negligible".
--Josh Marshall
My friend Steve Clemons has been threatening for some time to start a blog of his own. And now he finally has with his new site, The Washington Note. His first post is about former CIA Director and Ahmed Chalabi advocate Jim Woolsey.
I'll be returning to this site again and again, as Steve is one of the most connected guys in DC and knows the inside line on just about everything.
I just hope he updates the site often enough.
--Josh Marshall
Serendipity is part of the magic of the newspaper. Not the newspaper as a concept, or simply the work of hundreds of news professionals at the big dailies, but the physical artifact itself: the bundle of paper with numerous articles on various topics scrunched up together in the columns of a broadsheet.
The key being that even if you're focused on articles on topics A & B, you're bound to have your attention focused on articles on topics C & D, articles that actually turn out to interest you a great deal but which you wouldn't have thought to look for on your own.
The web has made that factor of serendipity all the more apparent to me because I've seen how focused -- and thus, in key respects I think, impoverished -- the web has allowed my newspaper reading to become. (Of course, the web has also allowed us all to have instant access to newspapers around the world -- something once possible only for heads of state and CEOs, if even for them).
As you no doubt know if you read this site on a regular basis, there are a host of topics that interest me a great deal -- basically, national politics, intelligence, foreign policy and military affairs. The web allows me to focus in on those topics. And I've found over time that I end up never seeing a lot of stuff I would have seen if I were still reading the paper paper.
In any case, largely for this reason I've started experimenting with getting the 'electronic' editions of the Times and the Post -- something which is now available for many papers, but not all.
Basically what you get is an exact copy of the physical newspaper on your computer, the same layout, the color, the ads, everything. The Times and the Post both use proprietary services, each of which I'd call 'okay' in terms of ease of use and navigation, though the Times set up seems marginally better. (I'm still getting the feel for them -- so that's a tentative judgment.)
One thing that strikes me about these services is that the papers don't seem at all serious about marketing them. First of all, they get almost no play on the sites themselves. And, more telling, they are outrageously expensive, as compared to the actual physical paper itself. I can't imagine I'll keep subscribing to the electronic edition of the Times, for instance, because it seems to cost as much to subscribe to as the paper paper itself.
Price aside, that almost seems galling on first principles.
In any case, here's an article today in the Times that I don't think I would have seen otherwise.
The article describes a new Spanish government proposal to finance all major religions in Spain. Spain already subsidizes the Catholic Church to the tune of $170 million a year -- no small sum in a country with a population of 40 million. Technically, the subsidy is temporary -- under an agreement brokered after the end of the Franco regime. But in practice it's permanent.
The new proposal is nominally couched in terms of equality and equity. But the Ministry of Justice and counterterrorism officials who are pushing the idea are quite open with the fact that the real aim is to wean Islamic organizations and mosques from funding from militant groups abroad.
--Josh Marshall
George W. Bush, August 2nd 2004: “Let me talk about the intelligence in Iraq. First of all, we all thought we’d find stockpiles of weapons. We may still find weapons. We haven’t found them yet. Every person standing up here would say, 'Gosh, we thought it was going to be different.; As did congress, by the way. Member of both parties. And the United Nations. But what we do know is that Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons. And ... umm … but let me just say this to you. Knowing what I know today, we still would have gone on into Iraq. We still would have gone to make our country more secure. He had the capability of making weapons. He had terrorist ties. The decision I made was the right decision. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.”
--Josh Marshall
It certainly doesn't seem like there's much time to make a drama out of the Illinois senate race. But comedy, it seems, is still a possibility.
The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that the Illinois GOP is now trying to draft Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama for the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Peter Fitzgerald.
According to a member of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee, Keyes, a Maryland resident, "said that he was open to the idea. And he felt that Obama didn't really represent the views of the people of Illinois."
For more on Keyes, the self-proclaimed 'Quintessential American', see this page on his website.
--Josh Marshall
"White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details [of White House counterterrorism proposals] matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry," writes Elizabeth Bumiller in the Times today.
Ain't it the truth!
But wouldn't it be nice if we had a press which would make some effort to point out instances where the 'details' utterly belie what the president says he's doing?
The issue here is the president's supposed embrace of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, particularly on the creation of a new National Intelligence Director under whom the heads of the various intelligence agencies would operate.
I was working on another project pretty much constantly through most of the day and heard discussion of this on the cable networks, particularly CNN. What I heard there was that the president had embraced the commission's recommendation on this point while only disagreeing on whether this new head of national intelligence would be housed within the White House or have cabinet rank status outside the White House structure.
Yet it turns out that this is but one, and not at all the most significant way in which the policy the president has embraced differs from that of the commission. In fact, when you look closely at it, it's nothing like what the commission recommended at all. The president went out into the Rose Garden, said he was adopting the commission's proposals. But in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn't be done.
The key point made by the commission, you'll remember, is that the new NDI would have to have budgetary authority across the various intelligence agencies and the ability to hire and fire senior managers. As the Times makes clear, the president's proposal does none of those. Indeed, the dailies do a pretty good job making this clear. The Post says that ...
Bush's statement embraced the two most significant of the 37 recommendations by the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but with significant limitations. Under his plan, the new intelligence chief would lack the authority over budgets, hiring and firing that the commission had envisioned.
If anything, though, even that doesn't quite do it justice.
You'll remember that we already have a national director of intelligence, someone in charge of overseeing the work of all the various American intelligence agencies. That person is the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence.
The only problem is that for a variety of reasons, some intentional, some historical and some incidental, the DCI does not really serve that function. In fact, the current set-up can reasonably be viewed as a worst of both worlds scenario since the DCI doesn't have this broad supervisory function and yet -- as we saw in the Iraq WMD debate -- the DCI can improperly tilt joint national intelligence findings in favor of his agency, the CIA.
Now, if you go back and read the actual 9/11 Report you'll see that the commissioners description of the organizational shortcomings of the DCI post reads more or less exactly like the description of the new post the president outlined today.
I quote from page 410 ...
The current DCI is responsible for community performance but lacks the three authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel.
And it gets better.
The Times article notes that the president said that while the new NID wouldn't have full control of the purse strings, he or she would have a 'coordinating' role in budgeting.
Yet, in the very next paragraph of the report, the commissioners note how this doesn't cut it.
Again on page 410 (emphasis added) ...
The only budget power of the DCI over agencies other than the CIA lies in coordinating the budget requests of the various intelligence agencies into a single program for submission to Congress.The overall funding request of the 15 intelligence entities in this program is then presented to the president and Congress in 15 separate volumes.
Now, for what it's worth, I'm not at all happy with the way that the dynamics of the election year are rushing the process of adopting this list of recommendations which, at the end of the day, is still the product of a small group of people, done with relatively little open debate. But there's still the issue of truth in advertising and whether the press -- and particularly the electronic press -- only pays attention to the "pictures and sounds" rather than the details of what the White House is actually doing.
The Post's Tuesday editorial notes this ... well, how shall we say it ... lack of candor, but still refers to it in bland terms.
Saith the Post: "Mr. Bush cast the plan he unveiled yesterday, to create a director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center, as embracing the commission's recommendations. In fact the administration's proposals differ in critical respects."
What's more, this is such a pattern for this White House that you'd think the Kerry campaign, and the Dems on the Hill, would get hold of this as a pretty manageable critique of this administration: That is, you just can't trust them.
What this White House says it's doing and what it's actually doing seldom turn out to be the same thing.
--Josh Marshall
America Coming Together has a mock George W. Bush commercial featuring the still-living but yet already immortal Will Ferrell, and it's hilarious.
I'm not sure what I think of their 'Stop the Fraud' petition seemingly aimed at getting the FCC to crack down on "misleading, deceptive and fraudulent advertising." Actually, I think I know what I think of it -- I don't like it. But the faux-commercial is funny. And ACT's get-out-the-vote work for this November is extremely important.
--Josh Marshall
Now the Bush-Cheney political campaign is telling all who will listen that they will spend the next month running a massive ad campaign (with a price tag of $30 million and no doubt supplemented by on-message talking points sent out to the all the foot soldiers) aimed at mocking John Kerry as a undistinguished and risible figure. According to the Times, this will culminate at the GOP convention where Kerry will be portrayed as "an object of humor and calculated derision."
(As a side note, this telegraphing of a looming attack is classic Rove -- a topic we'll return to.)
This makes sense on a number of levels.
First, the Kerry campaign now faces about four weeks of serious strategic vulnerability. They're now under the post-convention public financing caps, while the Bush campaign is not. That means that they're going to be hard pressed to match that spending dollar for dollar since they've now got a static budget that has to last them through the end of the election.
Hopefully for them the Democratic party and other independent Dem-oriented groups, while not allowed to formally coordinate on such things, will have Kerry's back on this during this period.
The more discussion-worthy point, however, is the use of humor as a political weapon -- mockery, derision, diminishment.
Republicans are very good at this. And it can be a tool that is deceptively difficult to respond to or combat. Effective mockery is 'sticky', hard to shake off, hard to parry. And it appeals to people's appetite for fun and humor.
Indeed, it's not just contemporary Republicans who have a knack for this. There seems to be something intrinsic to the reactionary or right-leaning mentality that gravitates toward this method of political combat. Think of the Tory pamphleteers and essayists of the 18th century in Great Britain or others of a more recent vintage in the US.
This is potent stuff. And Democrats would do well not only to be on their guard but consider applying this approach to the current president, who is more than a bit ripe for such treatment.
--Josh Marshall
Today, the Sunday Times of London reports that the Italian middle-man who provided the notorious Niger uranium documents to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba (she later brought them to the US Embassy in Rome, you’ll remember) was himself given the documents by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI.
I can vouch for the accuracy of this account since I have been working on this story for six months. In fact, I interviewed the Italian middle-man in question two months ago at a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan -- the details of that interview I describe below.
This all requires a bit of explanation. So here goes …
Back on June 17th, I wrote that I and several colleagues were working on a story that might cause quite a stir in Washington when it was published. That story was (and is) about the origins of the forged Niger uranium documents. Since January my colleague Laura Rozen and I have been reporting on this story for an article that will appear in The Washington Monthly. We’ve also been working in collaboration on this story with an American TV network.
At the time I wrote that post, I thought the story was going to appear in late June, thus my oblique mention of it on the site. It’s now slated to appear later this month.
The reasons for the delay in publication are difficult to describe before the piece runs. But, as you can see, we’ve now been scooped on one part of the story – to my transcendent mortification. So let me share with you some details of what we’re working on and expand on what the Times has reported.
What’s long been known about the Niger documents is that an Italian ‘security consultant’ tried to sell them to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba. Burba’s editor at Panorama, in turn, instructed her to take them to the US Embassy in Rome. That is how they came into the hands of the American government.
The question has always been, who’s the ‘security consultant’? Did he forge the documents? And, if not, where did he get them?
You’ll remember that in late June there was a piece in the Financial Times which alleged various evidence for the proposition that Iraq had in fact sought to purchase uranium from Niger. The story also suggested that the 'security consultant' was himself the likely forger of the documents and that this 'scam' had only served to obscure the real evidence of the sale of uranium to Iraq.
This is untrue on several counts. The 'security consultant' wasn't the forger -- a fact well-known by the FT's Italian government sources. And we have little doubt that the information about him contained in the FT article was provided by Italian intelligence sources to get out ahead of the information they knew the 'security consultant' and others had already provided to us -- specifically, their own complicity in the dissemination of the documents.
So who's the 'security consultant'?
The ‘security consultant’ is a small-time information peddler who buys and sells information in the netherworld of diplomatic, intelligence and media circles in Rome. His clients include foreign intelligence services and also the Italian media. He is himself a former member of SISMI.
He received the forged documents from a current SISMI officer who works in the division specializing in weapons proliferation.
We know the identity of both men. Both are in their early 60s. The identity of the ‘security consultant’ we’ve agreed not to disclose. We will publish the identity of the SISMI officer in the upcoming article.
Here are the basic outlines of what happened.
In early 2000, the ‘security consultant’ was approached by a former colleague from SISMI whom he'd known for some twenty five years. This current SISMI officer told him that he had a source in the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, that they (i.e. SISMI) had no more use for her, but that she could be a source of valuable information for him if he put her on a monthly retainer. They were washing their hands of her, he said. But she could be of use to him.
The ‘security consultant’ met with the woman in question and agreed to pay her 500 euros a month for various documents and materials which came into her hands in the course of her work for the Embassy. Most of the material in question had nothing to do with Iraq or WMD. It dealt primarily with immigration into Italy and Islamist activities in North and Central Africa --- topics of concern to at least one of the 'security consultant's' longstanding clients.
What wasn’t clear at the time, however, was that SISMI hadn’t washed their hands of this Niger Embassy employee at all. She remained a SISMI asset. In fact, the relationship which the SISMI officer had set up was intended to serve as a conduit through which SISMI could conceal its role in the dissemination of what proved to be disinformation.
This was how the forged documents came into the security consultant’s hands.
You’ll remember that most of the papers in the bundle of Niger-uranium documents that arrived at the US Embassy in Rome were actually authentic. It was only a subset of the documents --- those specifically related to the alleged Niger-Iraq transactions and a couple others --- that were bogus.
In late 2001, the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents --- those later identified as forgeries --- and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the ‘security consultant’ on an on-going basis.
She mixed those documents in with authentic documents which she had access to in the course of her work at the embassy. She then passed those documents --- again, a mix of authentic and forged ones --- to the ‘security consultant’.
The Financial Times article led to a surge of articles and commentary suggesting that the forged documents were only a minor part of the case for the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. But, as we've noted earlier, that's a willfully misleading account, one which both the Butler Report and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report helped to further.
Contrary to arguments that there was lots of independent evidence of uranium sales between Iraq and Niger, US government sources have told us that almost all of the important evidence derived from the phony documents. Specifically, it came from summaries of the documents Italian intelligence was distributing to other western intelligence agencies -- including those of the US, Britain and France -- in late 2001 and 2002.
The US has long known that the Italians had the forged documents in their possession at least as early as the beginning of 2002. And what we've uncovered is that at the same time Italian intelligence operatives were surreptitiously funnelling copies of the documents to this document peddler with the knowledge that he would sell them to other intelligence services and likely to members of the Italian press.
Now, a few more notes on the ‘security consultant’. The Financial Times story said that he “had a record of extortion and deception and had been convicted by a Rome court in 1985 and later arrested at least twice.” Several of the particulars here are incorrect. But he does have a criminal record. And I’m told by a very reliable source that he is now trying to sell his the detailed version of his story to members of the British press for 30,000 euros. Whether he's successful in doing so we'll probably find out in the next few days.
We already have his account. And needless to say, we didn’t pay him. But it’s reasonable to ask how trustworthy his account is since he seems to be someone of rather less than spotless integrity. The answer is that we’ve confirmed the key details of the story I outlined above independently.
More to follow ...
--Josh Marshall
