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Michael Ledeen takes a little swipe at me and others reporting on the Niger forgeries story here, after consulting with his Ouija board, even though he ought to know that I have gone out of my way to take care in reporting this story, including in knocking down one of the more outrageous allegations about him flying around that I had checked out and knew to be false (the Italian parliamentary report that wasn't being one). Anyhow, Ledeen's piece basically puts forward what's been the classic Italian government/Sismi pushback on the Niger forgeries story from the beginning: that the forgeries are all the fault of the French intelligence services, which were a client of Niger forgeries middleman Rocco Martino. And it's true that the French were Martino's main client at the time he peddled the forgeries, first to them, and later to the US embassy Rome (that walk-in attempt reportedly failed), the British, and an Italian reporter.
This line is so interesting for a variety of reasons. As I already mentioned, last summer when Martino was identified by reporters, it is the same theory put forward by Sismi and its friends, through a variety of means, all of them suggesting sheer panic in Rome and a desperate desire to keep this story under wraps. Secondly, it's really just a variation on the theory the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh put forward in his Niger forgeries piece a couple years back, that the forgeries themselves must have been the product of an operation by CIA officers who wanted to embarrass the Bush administration for being gullible enough to be taken in by them. I don't buy Hersh's theory, and I don't buy Ledeen's version a la Francaise. His version also leaves out as I have reported here ad nauseam the fact that a senior Sismi officer Antonio Nucera has himself confirmed on the record hooking Martino up with the Sismi asset at the Niger embassy in Rome. As I wrote here over the weekend, I don't think there's evidence Sismi as an institution at the very top concocted the forgeries scheme. But Sismi as an institution clearly was the first allied intelligence service to report to the US - and repeatedly - that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger, in other words, they promoted the claims (that turned out to be transcriptions of the forgeries themselves), that the British also reported to the US. Secondly, I don't see how it's possible for an intellectually honest person to deny that Sismi-affiliated people (Nucera, La Signora, Rocco himself) were involved in the forgeries caper, to varying degrees. None of the key players themselves are denying either their varying degrees of involvement in the plot, nor their affiliations, past and current, with Sismi. Are they saying Sismi ordered them to do the forgeries? No. But are they denying involvement with each other or the coming together that led to the forgeries being disseminated? No.
My question: when are the French going to speak up? Yes, Martino sold them information (as well as to others, I understand). They also warned the US off the information as I understand from a previous reading of the SSCI Phase I report. The Italians have been blaming them directly and indirectly for over a year for the Niger forgeries and as far as I have seen, the French haven't really spoken up to defend themselves very vigorously. I assumed that was because they were embarrassed that they are/were a client of Rocco Martino's. Time to speak up!
One other point. The very fact of the Italian government's panic and almost hysterical pushback since reporters identified Rocco Martino in the summer of 2004 - compared to the utter coolness and lack of defensiveness from the French -- does make one wonder, what does the Italian government have to hide? Why the panic? It's suspicious in its own right, especially since I don't really see the Italian government denying the facts of the case, that Nucera, Rocco and La Signora worked for Sismi at one time or the other, and were the gang that came together that resulted in the global dissemination of the forgeries. In its very excessiveness, Rome's panic at Martino and other Sismi-affiliated officials being identified in connection with the Niger forgeries resembles nothing so much as the White House panic at Joe Wilson's allegations about the dubiousness of the substance of the Niger yellowcake claims themselves.