The AP is reporting that Sismi chief Nicolo Pollari has asked to be questioned by an Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the Italian intelligence services, concerning recent news reports that Sismi was behind the Niger yellowcake claims:

...Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman.

She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.

The documents detailed a purported Iraqi deal to buy 500 tons of uranium yellowcake from Niger, a claim the United States and Britain used to try to prove Saddam Hussein was seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction and justify the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Italian government - a staunch U.S. ally - repeatedly has denied reports that SISMI passed on documents about the Niger affair. ...

One of the things that comes through strongly in the Repubblica series this week on the Italian role in promoting or not denying key bits of evidence the Bush administration was using to make its flawed case for war in Iraq is how patterns that emerged in Washington, including unconventional intelligence channels that bypassed the CIA, were mirrored across the Atlantic.

When I was in Italy last year reporting on this story, I met with one of the two co-chairs of this Italian parliamentary committee (the Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the "services" has co-chairs from the left and right, Enzo Bianco on the right, Massimo Brutti on the left).

What's so striking to me having investigated this story both in Washington and in Italy is that -- just like our own Senate Intel committee, the Italian parliamentarians haven't exactly been very aggressive in getting to the bottom of this story that has been under their noses for over a year. On the contrary. They've known the gist of much of this for a while now, but have been very, strikingly, notably passive. (Part III of Repubblica's series out today, which I've just read a translation of, is bound to give them heartburn as well.)

Will Pollari be the fall guy in all this? Perhaps. But as in our own government, there's plenty of blame to go around.

I will have more on this later today.

Update: Chigi Palace reacts.

Posted by Laura at October 26, 2005 08:33 AM