A.E.I. Owe You
We've had closure on the Rather Memo and the Shaivo Memo, but we have yet to get closure on who forged the Niger Uranium Documents. While it seems that figuring out who was responsible for this forgery that helped lead us into war might be a useful pursuit, there has been very little interest in figuring out this puzzle in either the media or the Bush administration.
But for those who still care, a small tidbit of information appeared in a radio interview of former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro by L.A. radio host Ian Masters.
Money quote:
In the course of this interview, Cannistraro makes the powerful charge that the famous forged Niger documents, cited by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003, as proof of Saddam's nuclear intentions, and used in part as justification for the subsequent invasion of Iraq, were not forged in Italy as had been previously suspected, but were fabricated in the United States. When asked by Ian Masters if he would state the person or persons who actually perpetrated the forgery, Cannistraro declined. Masters presses, proffering "If I were to say the name 'Michael Ledeen' to you, what would you say?" Canistraro responds with "you're very close."
If you're not familiar with Michael Ledeen, you should be. He's an American Enterprise Institute Freedom Scholar and a war-monger beyond compare. He believes in the creative destruction of the Middle East and has a background of various illegal activities ranging from his Iran-Contra involvement to dealings with mysterious arms brokers.
Is there something about the connections that the folks at AEI have to the oil industry and/or the military industrial complex that would give them motive to forge those documents?