Spy's lie - people die : Melbourne Indymedia

Rocco Martino: 'I am the Source of the False Niger/Iraq Uranium Story'

The Sunday Times on Sunday and the Financial Times on Monday report that an Italian businessman and fraudster named Rocco Martino has said that he was the source of the false stories and documents related to Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger. He explained that in 1999, French intelligence sought information about business dealings in Niger. He has met with French intelligence officials in Brussels ever since 1999 on a regular basis and knew about the situation in Niamey.

Highly placed European officials admit that Martino provided the French with documents showing that Iraq may have been planning to expand trade with Niger. In fact, the documents did not refer to uranium, and the trade plans were probably the typical sort of relationship Arab oil states had with a whole range of third world countries.

Martino was surprised when he saw that the French immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought that the documents indicated an Iraqi interest in uranium. (We now know that Iraq had no nuclear program and so it is hard to see what it would have done with the uranium, anyway). The FT continues:

It was then that Mr Martino first became aware of the value of documents relating to Niger's uranium exports. He was then asked by French officials to provide more information, which led to a flourishing "market" in documents. He subsequently provided France with more documents, which turned out to have been forged when they were handed to the International Atomic Energy Agency by US diplomats.

Martino may well be the "independent" source that British intelligence maintains it had, apart from the forged documents, for the story of Iraq attempts to purchase Niger uranium. If so, it turns out that his "reports" are no more genuine than his documents. Martino alleged that the forgeries were produced by Italian intelligence, SISMI, and were given to their agent in the Niger embassy in Rome to be passed on to Martino from there. They knew Martino, who had once worked for SISMI, would immediately sell the documents to Western intelligence agencies. The question of why SISMI would produce such bad forgeries, which were falsified within a day of their receipt by the IAEA in early March of 2003, remains a mystery unresolved in Martino's account.

The Financial Times concludes:

One western intelligence official said: "This issue shows how vulnerable intelligence services and the media are to tricksters like Martino. He responded to a legitimate . . . demand from the French, who needed the information on Niger. And now he is responding to a new demand in the market, which is being dictated by the political importance this issue has in the US. He is shaping his story to that demand."

Martino's confession bolsters the case made by Josh Marshall in The Hill recently that conservative attacks on the credibility of Ambassador Joseph Wilson have been misplaced. Marshall has been following the Niger story closely for over a year.

Actually, whether Iraq made inquiries into Niger uranium is irrelevant to the current investigation of the Bush White House over the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the press. Plame is Wilson's wife and the leak was done in revenge on him for going public with the news that he had investigated and falsified the Niger story for the CIA in spring of 2002. It is illegal for a government official to blow the cover of a CIA operative.

Plame's specialty? Fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Her close contacts and friends in the 3rd world for the last 20 years? Likely mostly dead, now, thanks to some politico in the Bush White House.

posted by Juan @ 8/2/2004 06:01:30 AM

http://www.juancole.com/

Probably politically dead?... If there's any justice and maybe even Bush, himself will have an appointment in Samarra soon, real soon.

There is a distant mirror to this that involves Italy, spook led disinformation and a vast " giant Wurlitzer' of right wing echo chambers acting in concert to sway policy. Such disinfo seems to find fertile ground in a conspiracist mindset.

From...

The CIA's DI Disgrace
Consortium News - 13 Jul 2004
... Conservative author Claire Sterling was making this case in her book, The Terror Network – and the foreign policy principals of the Reagan-Bush ...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/071304.html

"...It had become an article of faith among the Reagan-Bush newcomers that Moscow was supporting international terror groups as a way to destabilize the West in general and the United States in particular. Conservative author Claire Sterling was making this case in her book, The Terror Network , and the foreign policy principals of the Reagan-Bush administration were fans of Sterling’s hypothesis.

The day after Reagan's inauguration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, believing that Moscow had tried to assassinate him in Europe where he served as Supreme Allied Commander, linked the Soviet Union to all acts of international terrorism, wrote Melvin Goodman, then-chief of the CIA’s office for Soviet analysis. There was no evidence to support such a charge but Casey had read , Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and, like Haig, was convinced that a Soviet conspiracy was behind global terrorism. [Foreign Policy, Summer 1997]

CIA analysts had a secret reason for doubting Sterling’s theories, however. Specialists at CIA dismissed the book, knowing that much of it was based on CIA ‘black propaganda,’ anticommunist allegations planted in the European press,..."

FROM... Robert Parry’s upcoming book, Secrets and Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty. As a correspondent for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra scandal

And this is either sourced from or confirmed by Bob Woodward...

"...It turned out that a small part of Claire Sterlings information had come from an Italian press story on the Red Brigade. The story was part of an old, small scale CIA covert propaganda operation. Sterling apparantly had picked up some of it in her research. Domestic fallout or replay of information in the US called " blowback" is one of the nightmares for both the CIA and journalists, particularly when it receives wide attention or is disputed.
He [Gordon, investigating ] found the sequence particularly telling: from CIA propaganda to Sterlings book galleys, to Haig's reading of the galley's, to Haig's press conference, then Haig's comments picked up in the New York Times article by Sterling, then finally in Sterling's book..."

Page 129, ' Veil, the secret wars of the CIA 1981-1987' Bob Woodward.

AprilCommentary Magazine - Veil, by Bob Woodward.htm

" The record was never corrected..." Then... but we have the Internet now... never again...NEVER AGAIN!

WONT GET FOOLED AGAIN!