Craig Langston wrote :
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S M I wrote :
Huge chemical weapons factory just found in Iraq.
Comone all you damn lefties, rear your ugly
heads.
Unconstitutional war my ass.
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umm. No weapons found
you might want to read this
washingtonpost.com
FBI Probes Fake Evidence of Iraqi Nuclear
Plans
By Dana Priest and Susan
Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13,
2003; Page A17
The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of
evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including
the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception
campaign to foster support for military action against
Iraq.
"It's something we're just beginning to look at," a senior
law enforcement official said yesterday. Officials are trying
to determine whether the documents were forged to try to
influence U.S. policy, or whether they may have been created
as part of a disinformation campaign directed by a foreign
intelligence service.
"We're looking at it from a preliminary stage as to what
it's all about," he said.
The FBI has not yet opened a formal investigation because
it is unclear whether the bureau has jurisdiction over the
matter.
The phony documents -- a series of letters between Iraqi
and Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in equipment that
could be used to make nuclear weapons -- came to British and
U.S. intelligence officials from a third country. The identity
of the third country could not be learned yesterday.
The forgery came to light last week during a highly
publicized and contentious United Nations meeting. Mohamed
ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), told the Security Council on March 7 that U.N.
and independent experts had decided that the documents were
"not authentic."
ElBaradei's disclosure, and his rejection of three other
key claims that U.S. intelligence officials have cited to
support allegations about Iraq's nuclear ambitions, struck a
powerful blow to the Bush administration's argument on the
matter.
To the contrary, ElBaradei told the council, "we have to
date found no evidence or plausible indications of the revival
of a nuclear program in Iraq."
The CIA, which had also obtained the documents, had
questions about "whether they were accurate," said one
intelligence official, and it decided not to include them in
its file on Iraq's program to procure weapons of mass
destruction.
The FBI has jurisdiction over counterintelligence
operations by foreign governments against the United States.
Because the documents were delivered to the United States, the
bureau would most likely try to determine whether the foreign
government knew the documents were forged or whether it, too,
was deceived.
Iraq pursued an aggressive nuclear weapons program during
the 1970s and 1980s. It launched a crash program to build a
nuclear bomb in 1990 after it invaded Kuwait. Allied bombing
during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 damaged Iraq's nuclear
infrastructure. The country's known stocks of nuclear fuel and
equipment were removed or destroyed during the U.N.
inspections after the war.
But Iraq never surrendered the blueprints for its nuclear
program, and it kept teams of scientists employed after U.N.
inspectors were forced to leave in 1998
The Post story, written by Dana Priest and Karen
DeYoung, continues:
Two weeks after the Sept. 24 British publication, the
Niger story appeared in a classified version of the National
Intelligence Estimate, a summary of U.S. intelligence
agencies' conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, although the report noted that the
information had not been verified and the CIA had not
confirmed that the uranium sale had gone through.
[Emphasis added.]
The Times
doesn't have anywhere near the goods the Post has,
but packs its column inches with plenty of complaints from CIA
analysts about administration meddling. The
Times' James Risen isn't any more successful
than the Post at getting anybody from the CIA on the
record. He writes:
Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to
make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush
administration policies.
For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately
expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials
that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence
reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's
government and Al Qaeda.
"A lot of analysts have been upset about the way the
Iraq-Al Qaeda case has been handled," said one intelligence
official familiar with the debate. …
"Several people have told me how distraught they have
been about what has been going on," said one government
official who said he had talked with several C.I.A.
analysts. None of the analysts are willing to talk directly
to news organizations, the official said.
Disputation over the forged documents isn't to end here, of
course. With CIA analysts accusing the Bush administration of
coercing them, the administration is likely to volley back in
this internecine war fought on the battlefields of the
nation's dailies. A glimmer of that coming clash appears in
the last paragraph of the Post story, where a State
Department spokesman flings the dead cat back over Foggy
Bottom's fence toward Langley. The Post reports:
The State Department's December fact sheet, issued to
point out glaring omissions in a declaration Iraq said
accounted for all of its prohibited weapons, said the
declaration "ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger."
Asked this week to comment on the fact sheet, a CIA
spokesman referred questions on the matter to the State
Department, where a spokesman said "everything we wrote in
the fact sheet was cleared with the agency."
Still unanswered are these urgent questions: Who forged the
documents? Given the documents' transparent inauthenticity,
why were they given such credence? Who in the administration
pushed the CIA to validate them (if it did)? Why didn't the
CIA push back?