 |
|
For weeks in the run-up to the Libby indictment last Friday, reports swirled in the blogosphere and some wires. They contended that CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had “widened his probe” to include investigating the origins of the Niger yellowcake forgeries themselves. They spoke of Fitzgerald getting ahold of a secret Italian parliamentary report that reportedly fingered a gang of American neoconservatives and aides to Ahmad Chalabi as being behind the Niger forgeries.
“NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government,” UPI’s Martin Walker reported in his column last week. “Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair.”
“Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end,” went a similar report at Antiwar.com. “A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report. Now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. ‘Bulldog’ Fitzgerald asked for and ‘has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document.’”
There’s just one problem: Not only has Fitzgerald not received such a report or even indicated he has any interest in one. There is no Italian parliamentary report, published or unpublished, on the Niger forgeries. In fact, until today, there has been no Italian parliamentary investigation of the Niger forgeries, or the claim promoted by the Italian military intelligence organization Sismi to the CIA and other western intelligence agencies that Iraq was seeking vast quantities of yellowcake uranium in Niger.
“There is no parliamentary report,” Michaela Panella, spokeswoman for Italian member of parliament Enzo Bianco, told this reporter on Monday, in a telephone interview from Rome. Sen. Bianco presides over the Italian parliamentary committee that oversees the Italian secret services, known as Copaco.
What about an unpublished report? “No, I really don’t know of anything.”
Panella does not just appear to be engaged in a cover up of a secret report. No one in Italy seriously investigating the Niger forgeries has heard of such a report.
A reporter with the Italian newspaper Repubblica, which published a blockbuster series on the origins of the Niger forgeries last week, said that he heard rumors of such a report while in Washington this past summer, and went back to Italy and checked them out with his sources. He was left scratching his head. Not only is there no such report, there is as yet no such Italian parliamentary investigation. Sismi’s director Nicolo Pollari was interviewed by the Italian parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence services on Thursday, in a closed-door session.
A former US official recently in Italy told this reporter that there is no Italian parliamentary report either. Italian sources indicated to him it was the echo of a rumor put out by people back in the States.
Former CIA officer, Vince Cannistraro, who at one time heard rumors of such a report from Italian sources, now says there doesn't appear to be a parliamentary report either. “There is no published report,” Cannistraro told me Monday. “If there is a report, we might expect it would have some analysis and conclusions. There is no report, at least not a published report. …I think this stuff is just getting circulated."
Why the Italian parliamentarians have to date avoided investigating the Niger yellowcake claims is not so hard to understand. They are eager to avoid implicating Italy in the scandal, especially in the run up to Italian elections early next year. As Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was cited by Italian daily Libero Thursday, if the Repubblica reports about Italy being behind the Niger yellowcake allegations were believed, "we would be considered the instigator" of the Iraq war, the AP reported.
Yet recent news reports both in Italy and the US have only added to previous understanding that the origins of the Niger yellowcake claims were in Italy. So too were the forgeries', it turns out.
The Italian military intelligence organization Sismi reported that Iraq had signed a contract to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to the CIA in October 2001 and February 2002. It also reported those claims to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the MI6, which reported them back to Washington. A motley crew including a senior Sismi officer, a former Sismi officer turned intelligence peddler (Rocco Martino), and a Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome were identified by Repubblica as having collaborated to assemble the Niger forgeries, after staging a robbery on New Year’s Day 2001 to get official Niger embassy letterhead and a diplomatic codebook. Martino reportedly sold the dossier of forgeries to the French, the British, attempted but failed to sell them to the American embassy in Rome, and to an Italian reporter working for a Berlusconi owned magazine.
It's understandable people spin conspiracy theories without real answers. And given credible reports of the role of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in putting forward other bogus Iraq intelligence claims and defectors with made-up legends to the western media and western governments, much of it stovepiped directly to receptive Pentagon hawks and the Office of the Vice President, suspicion remains high. Without a comprehensive investigation of policymakers’ use of Iraq intelligence, such as that promised but not delivered by the Senate Select Intelligence committee, and now demanded by Senate Democrats, these questions, rumors and conspiracy theories are certain to persist.