Lurking in the neighborhood of this case, however, is something I would genuinely like to know. Joseph Wilson went to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had made significant progress toward acquiring uranium yellowcake there -- reports grounded in a memo indicating that such a deal had gone down several years previously. This memo was a forgery.
The GOP and its hack reporter friends have attempted to obscure this reality by citing the report undertaken by Lord Butler at Tony Blair's request, which found that British assertions of Iraqi efforts to acquire Nigerian uranium were well-founded. This theory ignores several inconvenient facts. First and foremost, it's now clear that whatever Iraq may or may not have tried to do in 1999, it didn't actually get anywhere near building a nuclear bomb. Second, given the actual state of Iraq's nuclear program at the time, there's no reason to think uranium yellowcake would have been useful for doing anything, as Iraq had no capacity to transform it into a usable weapon. Third, the Iraq Survey Group, appointed by the president to review Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs stated last year that it had "not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material." Fourth, the International Atomic Energy Agency responded to the Butler report by asking the British government to provide it with the non-forgery-based evidence for the story, which the Brits have failed to do. Indeed, it seems that the only British sources were the forgery, and reports from other intelligence services that were, in turn, based on the same forgery.
All that aside, no officials anywhere, including the authors of the Butler report, deny the basic point that the Niger uranium memo was forged. What's more, the forgery was not especially hard to detect because there was not one forgery but two, the second of which was especially crude. As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) report concluded:
The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document -- a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium -- mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as being "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst though that all of the documents were likely suspect.Upon further examination, those suspicions proved well-founded. The uranium document was not properly formatted as a Nigerian government document, and there were inconsistencies regarding names and dates. It's worth underscoring, moreover, exactly how absurd this second document was. It reads, in part:
Le groupement dirigé par les Ambassadeur de Niger, Soudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libye, Iran ont décidé que le "Global Support" qui est composé de spécialistes provenant de différents corps militaires des pays alliés sera actif dans l'immédiat. Nous sommes convençus que l'haute profession des militaires appartenants au "Global Support" soient dotes d'expériences considérables et très diversifiés dans le secteur de la défense et de la sécurité et sans aucun doute ils sont résponsables des charges qui seront leur assignées.Suggestively, this is not grammatical French. Moreover, as a rough translation shows, it's completely ridiculous:
The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have [plural in original] decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately. We are convinçed [sic] that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are [subjunctive plural in original] qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defense and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.That something so absurd could have formed the basis for an important line in a presidential speech says a lot about the degree of unseriousness with which the Bush administration went about building its case for war. That aside, it raises a couple of pretty obvious questions: Who produced these documents, and why? I don't even have a "gotcha" speculation to offer -- I'd genuinely like to know. What we do know is that according to a footnote in the SSCI report, "in March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator [Jay] Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, [clause redacted], the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI's investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues."
The FBI, so far, seems to have come up with, well, with nothing. What we do know about the documents is that they were brought to the U.S. Embassy in Rome by Elizabetta Burba, an Italian journalist. According to European press reports, she got the documents from Rocco Martino, a former Italian military-intelligence official turned businessman with some kind of ties to French intelligence services. Martino has been to the United States at least twice since being publicly identified as the source of the documents, and the FBI didn't bother to interview him.
It seems clear that some powerful elements in Washington don't want to know the truth, which should raise suspicions. This, after all, would seem to be an important matter. Somebody went to some lengths to do this. He ore she must have had some purpose in mind, and it's hard to see how that purpose could have been anything but nefarious. Republicans don't seem interested in finding out, perhaps because further scrutiny of the matter would simply reveal how willfully gullible the White House was, or perhaps for some deeper reason. Democrats' reticence to ask what happened to the FBI investigation is more puzzling, but someone ought to get on the case. That there's a partisan payoff at the end of this particular rainbow is far from clear, but unlike in the Plame case, knowing the truth might actually change how we think about a thing or two.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
