Another interesting story but once again the Jury is still out.

http://www.upi.com/InternationalInte...3-104217-9679r

BUSH AT BAY

By MARTIN WALKER

UPI Editor

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

Hmmm. Wouldn't it be interesting if that snags Joseph Wilson.

Think about it:

Wilson wasn't supposed to bring this up before the Niger officials. In fact, at the time of his Niger trip, Wilson wasn't even supposed to know about the documents. The officials present at his 2/19/2002 meeting at the CIA said they didn't tell him. And yet.......he tells reporters later that he DID broach the subject of the documents to them. (Could it be wifey told him?) So.....what if his spilling the beans on that Classified piece of info is what triggered someone to decide to "fake" some documents so that they could discredit this intelligence? Wilson could have been in on it. After all, Valerie Plame told the Senate Committee staff that when she first asked her husband if he'd go to Niger she said, "[i]they've got this crazy report that says Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger/i]....." Sounds to me like she was looking for someone to go that she could be SURE would come back with the answer she sought.

It was 7 months after his trip that an Italian journalist walked into the Italian Embassy with the documents saying he'd paid someone 15,000 EUros for them. We STILL don't know where these forged documents originated from and who forged them and why.

It would definitely be worth an investigation and I'm surprised it hasn't already been done.

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"If the President simply adds a couple of Republican solutions to a trillion dollar health care package that the American people don't support, it isn't bi-partisan. It's political cover," Rep Eric Cantor (R-Va.)

JP please provides links to your fantasy notion that the forged documents emerged from Wilson’s trip to Niger. Your frivolous and irresponsible observations clearly should be in the Political Opinions and Beliefs category and this particular post should be excised from this thread.

The Winnigsnile said You are indeed wrong Winning, this post of hers should be over in Humor and Propaganda ...........

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"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. "- Thomas Paine

You are really just too funny. Isn't it funny how you get all indignent when you THINK someone is lying about Joseph Wilson......but you could care less about the LIES that Joseph Wilson told about the administration.....and which has been documented in the Bi-Partisan Senate Report.

Unlike Joseph Wilson who actually LIED about his trip to NIGER and who sent him.....I was simply "surmising" and wondering about where those forged docs came from. And I made that clear.

Joseph Wilson is a known LIAR. He made a fool of himself before the Senate.....being caught in one of those lies and trying to claim he must have "misspoke" to the reporter and maybe he just thought he'd actually seen the documents but had really only read about them. PITIFUL, PITIFUL, PITIFUL.

Even that excuse is a (*)(*)(*)(*) lie. He knew full-well what he was doing when he fed those reporters those LIES. He needs to be brought up on charges....and that may happen fairly soon.

And BTW, if you think my post should be excised from this thread.....then Joseph Wilson's LIES needed to be excised from the Newspapers to which he fed them to! What I said wasn't a lie.....what he said was.

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"If the President simply adds a couple of Republican solutions to a trillion dollar health care package that the American people don't support, it isn't bi-partisan. It's political cover," Rep Eric Cantor (R-Va.)

Isn’t it nice how we both make each other laugh. I wasn’t indigent about your lies. But I am tired of your fantasy notions:

“So.....what if his spilling the beans on that Classified piece of info is what triggered someone to decide to "fake" some documents so that they could discredit this intelligence? Wilson could have been in on it”

This statement is vicious speculative nonsense based on wishful thinking. It goes beyond lies. But before you make an outrageous comment of this magnitude, you should at least be able to back it up. So again I ask you for any evidence to support the notion that the forged documents were a result of Wilson’s trip to Niger. Your abrasive speculative nonsense does not qualify as a current events topic.

And why are you so obsessed about Joseph Wison when we have an administration that presented corrupt evidence about why we should go to war? Seems to me like your priorities are way off kilter.

If we’re going to do any excising we should excise the current administration from the White House.