| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 10:34 am Post subject: Libby to Make First Court Appearance |
| Libby to Make First Court Appearance
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer 38 minutes ago
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff is making his first court appearance since his indictment in the CIA leak investigation, a case in which Bush administration officials including Cheney could be summoned to testify.
I. Lewis Libby was expected to plead innocent Thursday before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.
Libby signaled his client's determination to fight the charges after last week's grand jury indictment, which has provided more fuel to the political debate over the White House's possible misuse of prewar intelligence on Iraq. The Libby case stems from a 22-month criminal investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
Cheney's former top aide was charged Friday with lying to investigators about leaking the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Plame's name was exposed by conservative columnist Robert Novak after Wilson accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence in the run-up to the war to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
The indictment says Libby got information about Plame's identity in June 2003 from Cheney, the State Department and the CIA, then spread it to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. Libby told FBI agents and a federal grand jury that his information had come from NBC reporter Tim Russert.
Russert says he and Libby never discussed Wilson or his wife.
Miller, who never wrote a story, said Libby told her about the CIA connection of Wilson's wife. Cooper said Libby was one of his sources for a story identifying the CIA connection of Wilson's wife.
Libby attorney Joseph Tate said inconsistencies in recollections among people regarding long-ago events should not be charged as crimes. Libby, who says he is confident he will be exonerated, is accused of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of lying to FBI agents and two counts of perjury before a federal grand jury.
The judge handling Libby's case is an appointee of three Republican presidents.
Early in his career, Walton was a highly respected trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney's office in the District of Columbia. When President Reagan appointed him to D.C. Superior Court, Walton became known as a no-nonsense judge who was tough on sentencing street criminals. He served as the senior White House adviser for crime in the administration of President Bush's father before returning to Superior Court. In 2001, Bush nominated Walton to the U.S. District Court.
Senate Democrats have seized on the Libby indictment to put the Bush administration on the defensive, focusing attention on the possible manipulation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and the failure by Senate Republicans on the intelligence committee to promptly finish an investigation of the issue.
Democrats are pressing for the intelligence committee to examine:
_The administration's strongly worded prewar statements on the Iraqi threat and whether they match up with the actual intelligence.
_The role of the pro-war Iraq National Congress, an exile group run by Ahmad Chalabi, in feeding information from defectors to the Pentagon and to Cheney's office.
• The intelligence activities of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which fed policy-makers uncorroborated prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, particularly involving purported ties with the al-Qaida terror network.
_The prewar intelligence assessment and its failure to predict the postwar insurgency.
"Any line of questioning that has brought us too close to the White House has been thwarted," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee. "We have been undermined, avoided, put off and vilified by the other side."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Wednesday that the Clinton administration and fellow Democrats used intelligence to come to the same conclusion as the Bush administration, that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a threat. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 6:39 pm Post subject: Israel and the Neocons: The Libby Affair |
| http://www.counterpunch.org/petras11032005.html
November 3, 2005
Israel and the Neocons
The Libby Affair and the Internal War
By JAMES PETRAS
The national debate, which the indictment of Irving Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice has aroused in the mass media, has failed to address the most basic questions concerning the deep structural context, which influenced his felonious behavior. The most superficial explanation was that Libby, by exposing Valerie Plame (a CIA employee), acted out of revenge to punish her husband Wilson for exposing the lies put forth by Bush about Iraq's "importation" of uranium from Niger. Other journalists claim that Libby acted to cover up the fabrications to go to war. The assertion however raises a deeper question -- who were the fabricators of war propaganda, who was Libby protecting? And not only the "fabricators of war", but the strategic planners, speech-makers and architects of war who acted hand in hand with the propagandists and the journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all these high- level functionaries, propagandists and journalists?
Equally important given the positions of power which this cabal occupied, and the influence they exercised in the mass media as well as in designing strategic policy, what forces were engaged in bringing criminal charges against a key operative of the cabal?
Libby's rise to power was part and parcel of the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives to the summits of US policymaking. Libby was a student, protégé, and collaborator with Paul Wolfowitz for over 25 years. Libby along with Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Kagan, Cohen, Rubin, Pollack, Chertoff, Fleisher, Kristol, Marc Grossman, Shumsky and a host of other political operators were long term believers and aggressive proponents of a virulently militaristic tendency of Zionism linked with the rightwing Likud Party of Israel. Early in the 1980's, Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing confidential documents to Israel, the latter temporarily losing his security clearance.
The ideologues begin their "Long March" through the institutions of the state. In some cases, advisers to rightwing pro-Israel congressmen, others in the lower levels of the Pentagon and State Department, in other cases as academics or leaders of conservative think tanks in Washington during the Reagan and Bush senior regimes. With the election of Bush in 2001, they moved into major strategic positions in the government, and as the principal ideologues and propagandists for a sequence of wars against Arab adversaries of the Israeli State. Leading neocons, like Libby, drew up a war strategy for the Likud government in 1996, and then recycled the document for the US war against Iraq before and immediately after 9/11/01. Along with their rise to the most influential positions of power in the Bush administration, the neocons attracted new recruits, like New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
What is striking about the operations of the 'cabal' is the very open and direct way in which they operated: former Director of the National Security Agency (under Reagan) Lt. General William Odom, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff of Powell), retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, National Security Adviser to President George Bush (the First) Brent Scowcroft, and numerous disenchanted officials, including veterans of the intelligence agencies, high level observers, and former diplomats openly criticized the neocon takeover of US policy and the close relationship between them and Israeli officals.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and Libby were the architects of the military strategy for Rumsfeld and Cheney, their bosses. Douglas Feith established the "Office of Special Planning" to fabricate the lies to justify the war. Judith Miller, David Frum and Ari Fleisher served to disseminate the lies and war propaganda through articles, interviews, press conferences, and speechwriting for President Bush.
The neocons pushed to manipulate and marginalize many of the key institutions in the US imperial state. To circumvent intelligence from the CIA that didn't promote the Israeli agenda of war with Iraq, neocon Douglas Feith (number 3 in the Pentagon) established the Office of Special Planning, which fabricated propaganda and channeled it directly to the President's Office bypassing and marginalizing any critical review from the CIA. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld marginalized the leading generals, promoting nondescript "loyalists" and outsiders to the top positions, and discarding any advice which opposed or conflicted with their plans for war with Iraq. The Secretary of State referred to a speech prepared for him by Libby as "bullshit" because of its falsehoods. His chief aide, Colonel Wilkerson has written disparagingly of the cabal, which marginalized the State Department including his boss Powell.
The prosecution of Libby however reveals the intense internal struggle over the control of the US imperial state between the neocons and the traditional leaders of its major institutions. Along with the indictment of Libby by a grand jury at the request of the special prosecutor, the FBI has arrested the two leading policy makers of the most influential pro-Israeli lobby (AIPAC) for spying for the State of Israel. These are not simply isolated actions by individual officials or investigators. To have proceeded against Libby and AIPAC leaders , they had to have powerful institutional backing; otherwise the investigations would have been terminated even before they began.
The CIA is deeply offended by the neocon usurpation of their intelligence role, their direct channels to the President, their loyalty to Israel. The military is extremely angry at their exclusion from the councils of government over questions of war, the disastrous war policy which have depleted the armed forces of recruits, devastated troop morale, and the neocons' grotesque ignorance of the costs of a colonial occupation. It is no wonder that General Tommy Frank referred to Douglas Feith as "the stupidest bastard I have ever met."
The current institutional war recalls an earlier conflict between the rightwing Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Defense Department. At the time during the mid 1950's, Senator McCarty was accumulating power first by purging trade unions, Hollywood, the universities, and promoting likeminded conservative officials. He successfully extended his investigations and purges to the State Department and finally tried to do the same to the military. It was here that Senator McCarthy met his Waterloo, his attack backfired, the Army stood its ground, refuted his accusations and discredited his fabrications and grab for power.
In the meantime, the neocons are not at all daunted by the trials of their colleagues in AIPAC and the Vice President's office: they are pressing straight ahead for the US to attack Syria and Iran, via economic sanctions and military bombing. On October 30, 2005 the former head of the Israel Secret Police (Shin Bet) told AIPAC to escalate their campaign to pressure in the US to attack Iran (Israel National News.com). There was a near unanimous vote in the US Congress in favor of economic sanctions against Syria. Despite mass demonstrations, and because of a 'captured' congress, it appears paradoxically that the only force capable of defeating the neocon juggernaut, like the earlier Joe McCarthy, are powerful voices in the state threatened by new disastrous wars not of their making.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in brazil and argentina and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). His new book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and the State: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, will be published in October 2005.
-----------------------------------
Treason in High Places: Pentagon Zionists, AIPAC and Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/08/treason-in-high-places-pentagon-zionists-aipac-and-israel.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 6:43 pm Post subject: Lies of the Neocons: From Leo Strauss to Scooter Libby |
| http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh11022005.html
November 2, 2005
Lies of the Neocons: From Leo Strauss to Scooter Libby
The Philosophy of Mendacity
By JOHN WALSH
All governments lie as I. F. Stone famously observed, but some governments lie more than others. And the neocon Bush regime serves up whoppers as standard fare every day. Why this propensity to lie? There are many reasons, but it is not widely appreciated that the neocons believe in lying on principle. It is the "noble" thing for the elite to do, for the "vulgar" masses, the "herd" will become ungovernable without such lies. This is the idea of the "noble lie" practiced with such success and boldness by Scooter Libby and his co-conspirators and concocted by the political "philosopher" Leo Strauss whose teachings lie at the core of the neoconservative outlook and agenda, so much so that they are sometimes called "Leocons."
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a Jewish-German émigré from the Nazi regime who eventually landed at the University of Chicago where he developed a following that has achieved enormous prominence in American politics. Among his students were Paul Wolfowitz who has openly acknowledged that he is a follower of Straus as has the godfather of neconservatism, Irving Kristol. Irving Kristol begat William Kristol, the director of operation for the DC neocons, editor of the Weekly Standard and "chairman" of the Project for the New American Century, which laid out the plans for the Iraq War. (PNAC also opined in 2000 that a Pearl Harbor-like event would be necessary to take the country to war, and one year later, presto, we had the strange and still mysterious attack of September 11.) For his part Paul Wolfowitz begat Libby, in the intellectual sense, when he taught Libby at Yale. Others stars in the necon firmament are Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and lesser figures like Abram Shulsky, director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created by Donald Rumsfeld. Shulsky, also a student of Strauss, was responsible for fabricating the lies masquerading as intelligence that were designed to get the U.S. into the war on Iraq. While the neocons have a passion for the Likud party and Zionism, they also count among their number not a few pre-Vatican II Catholics and an assortment of cranks like Newt Gingrich and John Bolton and crypto fascists like Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The list goes on and Justin Raimondo has documented it in great detail over the years on Antiwar.com. But it is enough to note that Cheney's alter ego was Libby, and Rumsfeld's second in command until recently was Wolfowitz. So both Cheney, the de facto president with an apparently ill perfused cerebrum, and the geezer commanding the Pentagon have been managed by younger and very prominent Straussians for the past five years.
A superb account of the ideas of Strauss, his followers and his influence is to be found in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (hereafter PI) and Leo Strauss and The American Right (hereafter AR), both by Shadia Drury, professor of politics at the University of Calgary. Her account of Strauss's ideas and the prominence they play in American politics today will give you chills or nausea, perhaps both. As she says in PI (p.xii), "Strauss is the key to understanding the political vision that has inspired the most powerful men in America under George W. Bush. In my view men who are in the grip of Straussian political ideas cannot be trusted with political power in any society, let alone a liberal democracy. This book explains why this is the case." For those who wish to understand the neocon agenda, Drury's books are essential reading. She is clear and thorough.
Of pertinence to "Scooter's" case and the pack of lies he was concealing is Strauss's idea that a "philosopher elite" (i.e., Straussians) must rule. Moreover they must do so covertly. As someone remarked before last Friday, "Who ever heard of I. Lewis Libby?" a man who shunned the spotlight and operated behind the scenes. The reason for such covert rule, or cabal, is that the "vulgar" herd, as Strauss liked to call the rest of us, cannot appreciate "higher truths" such as the inevitability and necessity of wars in relations between states and even the utility of wars in governing a state. So the covert elite must be certain that myths like religion or the glory of the nation are not weakened for these are among the best ways to rule over the ignorant herd and lead it into war. (Note that the Straussians themselves are not religious. They are "above" religion, capable of dealing with tough truths like man's mortality. But in their view, religion is a crucial factor in governing in their view. Irving Kristol, following Strauss, tells us that religion is "far more important politically" than the Founding Fathers believed and that to rescue America it is necessary "to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose religious orthodoxies." (AR, p. 148). Any religion will do except perhaps Islam, which is more or less verboten, given the affinity of all leading neocons for Israel. Hence the neocons readily embrace the ideology and leadership of Christian fundamentalism which can keep the crowd under control and get them to march off to war and death. The neocons are mainly interested in foreign policy, as was Strauss, but in exchange for the support of the religious Right in foreign affairs, the neocons line up behind the domestic program of the fundamentalists. It's a win win situation, from their point of view
But useful lies of the grand sort like religious myth or blind nationalism need support by lesser lies at crucial moments. And so we go to the "smaller" lies like "weapons of mass destruction," the "smoking gun that comes in the form of the mushroom cloud." And here too the elite has a role to play. They are to use their "superior rhetorical skills" to make the weak argument seem stronger. In other words the cabal not only has to protect myths and manufacture lies but go to work in selling them. What Strauss called "rhetoric," we call spin.
All of this comes down to one word: lying. But for Strauss, these lies are necessary for the smooth function of society and triumph of one's own nation in war. Hence for Strauss, the lie becomes "noble." This phrase Strauss borrows and distorts from Plato who meant by a "noble lie" a myth or parable that conveyed an underlying truth about morality or nature. But in Strauss's hands the "noble lie" becomes a way of deceiving the herd. Strauss's "noble lies are far from "noble." They are intended to "dupe the multitude and secure power for a special elite" (AR, p. 79).
One other idea of Strauss's bears on the situation of "Scooter" Libby. How is the Straussian philosophical elite going to get from the halls of academe to the corridors of power? This depends on good luck and the "chance" encounter between the powerful and the Straussian. Here the contemporary neocons go beyond Strauss and leave nothing to chance. It would even appear that they look for the stupid, gullible or those who are mentally compromised. So William Kristol becomes Vice President Quayle's chief of Staff, and Libby becomes the right hand man to the addled Cheney as well as assistant to the Quayle-like Bush. And there are many more.
Finally, Drury makes the point the Strauss and the neocons are not really conservative at all. They are radicals, at war with the entire modern enterprise which makes them turn to the ancients for their inspiration and even there they need to distort the teachings of Socrates or Plato to make their case. But the Enlightenment comes to us with the advance of science to which Strauss is also hostile. He says that he is not against science as such "but popularized science or the diffusion of scientific knowledge.Science must remain the preserve of a small minority; it must be kept secret from the common man" (PI, p. 154). But this is impossible. Science by its very nature is a vast social enterprise requiring the widest possible dissemination of its findings. Any society that puts a lid on this will fail, and so by natural selection, the Straussian project is doomed to fail.
But before that happens the Straussians can do a lot of damage. As Drury says, they "cannot be trusted with political power." But we can learn from them the importance of boldness, not in the pursuit of the "noble lie" but of the truth. And we must be certain that we are vigorous as we hunt them down and get them out of power. In that effort Shadia Drury has done us a great service.
John Walsh can be reached at jvwalshmd@gmail.com.
He thanks Gary Leupp a regular on CounterPoint.com for pointing him to Shadia Drury's books. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 5:02 pm Post subject: What Libby indictment left out says a lot |
| What Libby indictment left out says a lot
By Mark Memmott,
USA TODAY
Fri Nov 4, 7:49 AM ET
When an investigation began two years ago into who leaked a CIA officer's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, it made sense to think Novak would be a key player at any trial.
However, he's barely mentioned in the indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, who was arraigned Thursday on five counts of lying to investigators and the grand jury probing the leak. (Related story: Libby pleads innocent)
Now, as Libby prepares for a trial next year, attorneys and legal experts say the fact that Novak is not critical to the case says a lot about what Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has decided about the alleged original crime - the leak. It also signals that Libby was not one of Novak's sources on the story, they say.
Novak's absence from the case, says attorney Steven Reich, supports the assumption that Fitzgerald decided the leak itself wasn't a crime. Reich was a senior associate counsel in the Clinton White House. He's now with the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
No one who leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame's name has been charged with a crime for doing so and Fitzgerald has said his investigation is nearly over. It can be illegal to disclose a CIA officer's name, but the laws prohibiting it are very narrowly written and make it very difficult to prove any violation.
"So, given that the case seems to turn squarely on what happened inside the grand jury and in conversations (Libby had) with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigators," Reich says, "it seems that what happened with Mr. Novak is essentially beside the point," because no crime was likely committed by the person who told Novak about Plame.
Novak's role in the "outing" of Plame remains a fascinating part of a complicated story because it was his July 14, 2003, column that disclosed her identity. Novak wrote that he had been told that Plame was an "operative" at the agency by "two senior administration officials," neither of whom he named. Novak has said the original source was "not a partisan gunslinger," and he said the second source merely confirmed what the first had said. That second source, according to a person with knowledge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's testimony to the grand jury, was Rove. Rove spoke with at least one other reporter about Plame: Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper has written that he discussed Plame with Rove in July 2003.
Novak has said little else about who his sources were. Both Novak, through an assistant, and his attorney declined to comment further this week.
But attorneys and former prosecutors draw this conclusion about Novak's "original" source: It almost surely was not Libby. Why they say that:
• In the indictment, Fitzgerald details conversations Libby had about Plame with Time's Cooper and with Judith Miller of The New York Times. He mentions no conversations between Libby and Novak.
• Fitzgerald also lays out in great detail the conversations Libby had about Plame with seven government officials, including Cheney.
If Fitzgerald is aware of a conversation between Libby and Novak, it is likely he would have mentioned it in the indictment, says Randall Eliason, an adjunct law professor at American University and George Washington University and a former assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia.
"Either Libby never spoke to Novak or if he did, the prosecutor felt he didn't lie about it" later and it wasn't pertinent to the case against Libby, says Michael Madigan, an attorney at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. He was a counsel to Republicans on the Senate Watergate Committee.
Other clues that lead to the conclusion that Libby was not a source for Novak on the Plame leak come from outside Fitzgerald's investigation:
• Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote in his 2004 book The Politics of Truth that four days before Novak's column ran, Novak told him a "CIA source" said Plame worked at the CIA.
• A mystery source - who wasn't Libby - also apparently talked to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus about Plame a month before Novak's column was published. That's a sign that some other "senior administration official" was pitching the story and may also have been Novak's original source.
The Post has reported that Libby was not Pincus' source. Pincus, who covers intelligence issues, has written that the person was a "senior administration official" whom he was interviewing about "a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities" - a topic he is unlikely to have called Rove to discuss. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 5:33 pm Post subject: Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified |
| Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified
By Elaine Sciolino and Elisabetta Povoledo
The New York Times
Friday 04 November 2005
Rome - Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.
The spymaster, Gen. Nicolň Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.
Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.
The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.
The information about Iraq's desire to acquire the ore, known as yellowcake, was used by the Bush administration to help justify the invasion of Iraq, notably by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But the information was later revealed to have been based on forgeries.
The documents were the basis for sending a former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, on a fact-finding mission to Niger that eventually exploded into an inquiry that led to the indictment and resignation last week of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Mr. Martino has long been suspected of being responsible for peddling the false documents. News reports have quoted him as saying he obtained them through a contact at the Niger Embassy here. But this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency.
Neither Mr. Martino nor his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, were available for comment.
Senator Brutti also told reporters that Italian intelligence had warned Washington in early 2003 that the Niger-Iraq documents were false.
"At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Senator Brutti said. He said he did not know whether the warning was given before or after President Bush's address.
He made the claim more than once, but gave no supporting evidence. Amid confusing statements by various lawmakers, he later appeared to backtrack in conversations with both The Associated Press and Reuters, saying that because Sismi never had the documents, it could not comment on their merit.
There had long been doubts within the United States intelligence community about the authenticity of the yellowcake documents, and references to it had been deleted from other presentations given at the time.
Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview that General Pollari had told the committee that Mr. Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Mr. Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.
A senior French intelligence official interviewed Wednesday in Paris declined to say whether Mr. Martino had been a paid agent of France, but he called General Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."
General Pollari also said that no Italian intelligence agency officials were involved in either forging or distributing the documents, according to both Senator Brutti and the committee chairman, Enzo Bianco.
Committee members said they were shown documents defending General Pollari, including a copy of a classified letter from Robert S. Muller III, the director of the F.B.I., dated July 20, which praised Italy's cooperation with the bureau.
In Washington, an official at the bureau confirmed the substance of the letter, whose contents were first reported Tuesday in the leftist newspaper L'Unitŕ. The letter stated that Italy's cooperation proved the bureau's theory that the false documents were produced and disseminated by one or more people for personal profit, and ruled out the possibility that the Italian service had intended to influence American policy, the newspaper said.
As a result, the letter said, according to both the F.B.I. official and L'Unitŕ, the bureau had closed its investigation into the origin of the documents.
The F.B.I. official declined to be identified by name.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Italy's military intelligence service sent reports to the United States and Britain claiming that Iraq was actively trying to acquire uranium, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Senator Brutti told reporters on Thursday that indeed Sismi had provided information about Iraq's desire to acquire uranium from Niger as early as the 1990's, but that it had never said the information was credible.
Thursday's hearing followed a three-part series in La Repubblica, which said General Pollari had knowingly provided the United States and Britain with forged documents. The newspaper, a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also reported that General Pollari had acted at the behest of Mr. Berlusconi, who was said to be eager to help President Bush in the search for weapons in Iraq.
Mr. Berlusconi has denied such accounts.
La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.
"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."
At the time, Mr. Hadley took responsibility for including the faulty information in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
