France was not only behind the infamous "16 words", they also tricked Tenet into stamping out a flaming bag of poop on his front porch and are currently attacking Florida.
I wouldn't normally link to a Murdoch Black paper, but this one looks like an interesting piece for comic relief.
Italian diplomats say that France was behind forged documents which at first appeared to prove that Iraq was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium in Niger - evidence used by Britain and America to promote the case for last year's Gulf war.
They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims.
They have passed to The Sunday Telegraph a photograph which they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels. "The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said.
"Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war."
According to an account given to The Sunday Telegraph, France was driven by "a cold desire to protect their privileged, dominant trading relationship with Saddam, which in the case of war would have been at risk".
The allegation, which has infuriated French officials, follows reports last month that "Giacomo" claimed to have been unwittingly used by Sismi, Italy's foreign intelligence service, to circulate the false documents.
This might be disinformation to divert our attention from the Office of Special Plans and their possible role in the matter. Josh Marshall claims to have been investigating these matters for some time and will hopefully get the story past the publisher before too long. Nothing yet on the Telegraph article from Marshall or Rozen.
