HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Apr. 30, 2005 By September of 2002, Britain's intelligence report--the infamous "dodgy dossier"--was made public. This was the dossier alleging that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Africa, and that Iraq could get WMD airborne on 45-minute notice. These claims figured into the hysteria of George W. Bush's address on the State of the Union of January, 2003. The sole basis for the first claim appears to have been forged documents detailing an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. True, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said there was other evidence as well, but to this day he hasn't disclosed what it was or where he got it. His credibility is virtually nil in any case, and therefore in some circles he´s known as Phoney Tony. In February of 2003, the US handed the documents over to the International Atomic Energy Authority, headed by Mohammed el-Baradei, an Egyptian weapons authority. On March 7, 2003, el-Baradei denounced the documents as forgeries. Apparently, CNN published the news on March 14, 2003, before the invasion of Iraq. I personally didn't find out about the forgeries till March 30. I was shocked that, since the main justification for war had been falsified, Bush and the cabal that does his thinking for him just ordered US forces to plow ahead with their tanks and machine guns, without even pausing to question whether they had the least reason to continue. This must have been extremely gratifying to Israel. Later it surfaced that the CIA had received the forgeries from Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a magazine owned by Italian President Silvio Berlusconi. Burba had gone to Niger to check the documents, and not convinced they were genuine, she gave them to the CIA. No one seemed to care where Burba got them, and the matter lay dormant for about a year. It turned out last year that Burba had got them from the Niger embassy In Rome, where they had been planted by one Rocco Martino, a private intelligence broker operating in Rome. Originally, apparently Martino claimed that he had been working for SISMI, Italian intelligence, but the latest, according to Martino, whose credibility is on a par with that of Blair or Bush, is that he was working for France. The story runs something like this. Early on, in 1999, Martino, on the French payroll, provided documents not related to uranium to French intelligence. The French, misunderstanding, thought that the documents were indeed about uranium. This gave Martino the idea to concoct false documents or get them from SISMI, providing the French with what they wanted. Perceiving that the documents were forgeries, the French circulated them anyway, in order to set the US and Britain up, in a stratagem rather like the Rather set-up, so that subsequently, by debunking the documents, they could undermine the case for war. This would suggest that France and el-Baradei were collaborating. According to some observers, very misguided ones in my opinion, this was a French anti-American, pro-Arab trick, played with intent to sabotage America's very laudable "war on terror". France would float the forgeries, America would fall for them and declare war, France would make fools of America's leaders, and the war run-up would come to nought, with the Franco-Arab conspirators rejoicing over the success of their ruse. The only problem with this view is that it means that France took it for granted that American intelligence would be entirely deceived. As it turns out, there was indeed no murmur from the US or Britain about the forgeries until the time of el-Baradei's denunciation. Can it be possible that Elisabetta Burba and Mohammed el-Baradei could figure out that the Niger documents were forgeries, but the CIA could not? Impossible, the CIA did know, and George Tenet later admitted as much, saying that he had warned the White House in advance, apologizing, in a political auto-da-fé, for not making George W. Bush personally aware. Bush never seems to be aware of anything. France could not possibly have anticipated that the dénouement would unfold as it did. So pinning the blame on France, as if France, in seeking to quench the war, actually stoked it, doesn't really hold water. It looks to me as if Rocco figures that the lesser of two evils is to say he was working for France instead of Italy. After all, he's in Italy, where France can't punish him. France may have been against the war, as they had every justification to be, but I'm skeptical of this story. I think everyone is looking in the wrong direction entirely. If anyone wants to see who was really behind the war, he or she should check the dual citizenship of Douglas Feith, head of the now-defunct Office of Special Plans that created so much in the way of bogus justifications for the invasion. He's a citizen of both the US and Israel, but his US citizenship may be just a door-opener. Who gained from the war? It cost the US 1600 lives and $200,000,000,000, all for nothing. It cost Israel no lives and no money, and, now free of a rival, they are probably getting ready to extend Zion to the Euphrates. When you see the Israeli flag flying over Iraq, in year 2020 or so, don't say that Thomas Keyes didn't tell you. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
