Interesting News

Out of my favorite European country Italy, comes some interesting news about a forgery that took place around four years ago. The story of a forged document that contained information of an Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium from Niger is making it's way into newspapers in Italy, and prompting an inquiry of the director of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI."

ROME (AP) - The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday.

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."

As the investigation is wound up tomorrow, (or maybe not if NYT is to be believed) another investigation on another continent is beginning that may give us some real answers to the real crime, not the petty outing of an American patriot working on dangerous weapons proliferation issues, but a crime of knowingly relying on false information to bring about an illegal war. As the story goes, the documents were passed to an Italian journalist who gave them to her editor, who then insisted that the documents be turned over to Italian intelligence. The director of the Italian agency, Nicolo Pollari, sent them to the CIA, and the CIA dismissed them as bogus.

Talking Points Memo has the most comprehensive information about the Italian connection.

"Nicolo Pollari is the head of Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The Repubblica article claims that over the course of 2002 Pollari -- knowing the documents were fakes -- made repeated attempts to get them into the DC information stream by going around the CIA, which discounted them as fakes. This was to satisfy the expressed needs of Bush administration officials who were searching for some information to validate their claims about an Iraqi nuclear program.

Remember, too, that Pollari attended the secret Rome meetings in late 2001 arranged by Michael Ledeen and attended by Manucher Ghorbanifar, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode.

Pollari's efforts were apparently in concert with the man who is now the Italian ambassador to the United States. And, perhaps most explosively, Pollari apparently arranged a secret meeting with Stephen Hadley -- then deputy National Security Advisor, and now National Security Advisor -- to discuss the documents.The alleged date was September 9th, 2002."

There were apparently, meetings between the head of SISMI, and the White House to bypass the normal chains of intelligence, and get the documents directly to Cheney and Libby. If you notice the players involved in the meetings with Italian intelligence, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, the guys busted for passing classified information to AIPAC, and Micheal Leeden, formerly of Iran Contra, you might get the idea that something stinks, and it's not the gorgonzola that they had for lunch.

So who knows, we might get the whole story some day, it seems to be coming out in bits and pieces, but I sure wish that someday we'll know the truth, and preferably in English, since all the Italian words I know are related to food, and not espionage. To me, yellow cake sounds like a good thing, and in Italian, it sounds positively divine.

Wait and see.

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