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Niger uranium, again. On the face of it, it's absurd. That the French who opposed the Iraq war were the ones who pushed the bogus Niger yellowcake information on the US, Italy and Britain, which supported the war. It's so absurd, and so unsupported by any evidence, that few in the States have really paid much attention to the theory. But it's the subject of fierce dispute in Italy, where the Berlusconi government has been looking for someone else to blame for the Niger yellowcake forgeries caper ever since reporters identified forgeries middleman Rocco Martino last summer, and learned of his and the yellowcake gang's Sismi pedigree.
The LA Times digs further into the French angle of Nigergate, and establishes that: the French investigated but never believed the information in the Niger forgeries and warned the US off of it. And the French were in a position to know, controlling Niger's uranium mines.
So now we have more proof about why the CIA never believed the Niger yellowcake information it had gotten from Sismi, and why it told the White House to keep it out of White House speeches and evidence for war. Unfortunately, the White House used it anyhow.
La Repubblica has previously reported on the French angle to Nigergate, and that the ex deputy chief of the French counterintelligence service, the DGSE, Alain Chouet, is due to testify to the Roman prosecutor Franco Ionta in a reopened investigation into the Niger forgeries caper. More from France's Le Point.