Crossposted on:
http://www.isittreason.com
A Theory: Is It a Conspiracy?
Let us assume this for a moment: that the forged documents were created by Vice-President Dick Cheney and several elite members of the U.S. intelligence community. What we know for sure is that these documents contained a fake letter about the purchase of 500 tons of uranium ore from Iraq, with a fake signature by the President of Niger, Mamadou Tandja[1]. These documents were found by the Italian intelligence service called Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza, or commonly known as SISMI. Rocco Martino, a SISMI official, gave them to an Italian reporter named Elisabetta Burba, who eventually handed them to the U.S. embassy in Rome.
Assuming that these documents were created by Vice-President Cheney, how could the United States government plant them in Italy? Who could help them do this? How did the forged documents find their way back to the United States?
Check out More After the Flip:
Those who pushed hardest for war against Iraq were neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, including Paul Wolfowitz, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense. Serving under Wolfowitz was Douglas Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Feith was a protege of Richard Perle, who is the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory committee to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, these men advised that the President to go to remove Saddam Hussein. As we know from Bob Woodward and Paul O'Neil, the neocons were getting ready to attack Iraq even before 9/11.
Working for Douglas Feith was a man by the name of Larry Franklin. Franklin, an analyst on Iranian affairs, is a former Pentagon analyst who is currently being prosecuted for giving classified information, a presidential directive on U.S. policy towards Iran, to an Israeli government official and members of AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying organization.[2] This occurred when Franklin worked in a Pentagon office headed by Douglas Feith[3]. On December 9, 2001, Franklin attended a meeting in Rome organized by a man named Michael Ledeen. In the mid-1980's when Ledeen was serving as a consultant to the National Security Council, he introduced Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer, to Oliver North, then an NSC aide[4]. At the time of this meeting in 2001, Ledeen was working as Karl Rove's personal foreign policy advisor. Other key players who were present at this meeting in Italy were Nicolo Polari, the head of SISMI, Antonio Martino, Italy's defense minister and Harold Rhode, who is a protege of Ledeen and worked for the Office of Special Plans[5], whose purposes were to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al-Qaida. No such ties have been found yet. OSP was created by Donald Rumsfeld and administered by Douglas Feith[6].
No one knows for sure what exactly came out of this meeting in Rome. According to several news sources, they focused on Iran and the ability of the United States to affect regime change[7]. An important person who was not present at the meeting was an Italian named Francesco Pazienza, a former SISMI official. He and Ledeen went way back when they stirred the Billygate Affair into controversy. This was when, in 1980, Ledeen accused President Carter's brother, Billy, of having met with Yasser Arafat in Libya in 1978. It is now known that Ledeen collaborated with Pazienza to drum up this false story. Pazienza was then indicted in an Italian court (with Ledeen as an unindicted co-conspirator) for luring President Carter's brother Billy into a compromising relationship with Qaddafi during the 1980 presidential campaign. During the trial, Pazienza revealed that Ledeen performed work for SISME and had dealings with Pazienza outside of the Billygate Affair[8].
To review, false documents created by Cheney could have been delivered down the chain from Douglas Feith to Larry Franklin, who was working for Feith. Franklin could have easily taken it with him to Rome and dropped it off with Michael Ledeen, who once worked for the Italian intelligence services, SISMI . He was literally on their payroll. Ledeen still has substantial ties to the Italian intelligence community, speaks fluent Italian and continues to write on Italian politics. On April 3, 2005, CIA operative Vincent Cannistraro actually implied that Ledeen was at least partially behind the creation of the forged documents[9]. Then on July 26, 2005, "Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the American Conservative magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by 'a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy.' When Horton guessed whether that was Ledeen, Giraldi chuckled and replied 'you'd be very close.' Giraldi added that the ex-CIA officers, 'also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing.'" [10]
Pazienza's possible involvement doesn't just stem from his relationship with Michael Ledeen. After being removed from SISMI after his conviction, a secret Italian intelligence agency picked him up. This group is called Propaganda Due, or P-2. Originally an Italian Masonic Lodge established in 1877, it grew in the 1960's to become an organization whose membership included ItalyâTMs most rich and powerful. In March of 1981, the head of the organization had his house raided and the Italian police found a complete roster of P-2 in his home. One of the names on that roster was Silvio Berlusconi, who would become the Italian Prime Minister that supported the Bush Administration in its drive for war in Iraq[11]. This is well documented in a Wall Street Journal article dating back to August 7th and 8th of 1985. Another prominent member of P-2 is Rocco Martino, who was recruited out of SISMI. In 2000, Martino contacted, "a SISMI source, a 'lady' who worked at the Niger Embassy in Rome, could provide Martino with information in exchange for which Martino pays the Nigerian 'lady' 500 euros/month."[12] It isn't entirely clear if Martino was working for SISMI, P-2, both or on his own. On January 2nd, 2001, the Nigerian embassy was broken into. All that was taken was some letterhead and seals.[13] By late 2001 (around the time of the secret Rome meeting), Martino has the fully forged documents from the Nigerian lady, then hands them over to an Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba. She worked for the magazine Panorama, which just happens to be owned by Silvio Berlusconi. According to a post on Daily Kos, "Burba shows the documents to her boss and requests to arrange a visit to Niger. Her boss, editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella, who is known to have ties with the Berlusconi government, insists that she first turn copies over to the U.S. Embassy, which she did on October 9th. Burba's trip to Niger proved that the documents were fake and even that the companies allegedly involved were too small to make a transaction of that size. Something the French would have known had they been behind the forgeries."[14]
Seymour Hersh published an account in The New Yorker of what apparently happened next. He wrote,
Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. "The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming," the first former official told me, "and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy." Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. "Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false - until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed."[15]
This account would make sense if one were to believe that the forged documents came from Vice-President Cheney. The neoconservatives were housed in the Pentagon and, as we now know, they used everything they could to justify war. The C.I.A. was skeptical the entire time. When former CIA director George Tenet took responsibility for allowing those sixteen words to be included in Bush's State of the Union, in fact he was taking the fall for something he doubted in the first place.
Cheney could have very easily created the documents with the help of his "cabal"[16], given them to Michael Ledeen so that he could give them to the clandestine group of Rocco Martino, Francisco Pazienza and Antonio Martino (no relation to Rocco). We know that it was Rocco Martino who gave the documents to the Italian reporter, who then gave them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Our embassy then forwarded them to the CIA, the and the CIA put the documents back on the desk of Vice-President, Dick Cheney. Finally, in today's La Republicca, an Italian newspaper, Martino is quoted as saying, "It's true - it's my hand in the dissemination of those documents (on the Niger uranium), but I have been tricked. Behind this story there are Americans and Italians together. It was a case of a disinformation operation".[17]
[1] http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030719-120154-5384r.htm
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/27/eveningnews/main639143.shtml
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/27/national/main639143.shtml
[4] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/08/1060145871467.html
[5] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq_6
70
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
[7] http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3706341&p1=0
[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Ledeen
[9] http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21704/
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due
[12] http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/22/7563/12283
[13] http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7256
[14] http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/22/7563/12283
[15] http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact
[16] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9757220
[17] http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/25/24855/347
Original post can be found here:
http://www.isittreason.com