Nigergate updates and links

Kevin Drum over at Washington Monthly has some more Nigergate news printed in LA REPUBBLICA ( Italian langauge only ) via Nur al-Cubicle. Nigergate fanatics seeking news that may not be reported in the US press may want to add Nur al-Cubicle to their bookmarks. Anyway from LA REPUBBLICA :

The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins [in late 2001] when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martin, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of "Iranian exiles." The meeting is organized by SISMI in an agency "safe house" near Piazza di Spagna (however other sources told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).
Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI station chief accompanied by his assistant (the first is a balding man between 46 and 48 years of age; the second is younger, around 38, with braces on his teeth), and some mysterious Iranians.

Pollari confirms the meeting to La Repubblica: "When [Antonio Martin] asked me to organize the meeting, I became curious. But it was my job and I wasn't born yesterday. It's true -- my men were also present at the meeting. I wanted to know what was boiling in the pot. It's also true that there were maps of Iraq and Iran on the table. I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly 'exiles'. The went and came from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the Pasdaran [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard]."

....The bogus Italian dossier on the Niger uranium turns up [at the meeting] also -- and we don't know exactly why -- because Chalabi is in possession of it."