Niger Was Trading Its Uranium To Iraq

[NATO AIR]

kathianne started me on the path to conversion to the light, christopher hitchens finished it (as usual) here's a better explanation of why joseph wilson was lying and niger was selling uranium and what not to iraq and other rogue states.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2103795/Plame's Lame Game
What Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife forgot to tell us about the yellow-cake scandal.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, July 13, 2004, at 9:27 AM PT


Two recent reports allow us to revisit one of the great non-stories, and one of the great missed stories, of the Iraq war argument. The non-story is the alleged martyrdom of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilson, supposed by many to have suffered cruel exposure for their commitment to the truth. The missed story is the increasing evidence that Niger, in West Africa, was indeed the locus of an illegal trade in uranium ore for rogue states including Iraq.

The Senate's report on intelligence failures would appear to confirm that Valerie Plame did recommend her husband Joseph Wilson for the mission to Niger. In a memo written to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, she asserted that Wilson had "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines [of Niger], not to mention lots of French contacts." This makes a poor fit with Wilson's claim, in a recent book, that "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." (It incidentally seems that she was able to recommend him for the trip because of the contacts he'd made on an earlier trip, for which she had also proposed him.)

Wilson's earlier claim to the Washington Post that, in the CIA reports and documents on the Niger case, "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong," was also false, according to the Senate report. The relevant papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after he made his trip. Wilson now lamely says he may have "misspoken" on this. (See Susan Schmidt's article in the July 10 Washington Post.)


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[Annie]

Thanks Nato, did you see the Uzbekistan post?

 

[TheOne]

FWIW....

Ex-Niger premier denies Iraq link


Niger's former prime minister has said that Iraq did not try to buy uranium, contradicting claims made in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Ibrahim Mayaki told the BBC that no Iraqi delegation went to Niger while he was foreign minister or prime minister.

An official report into UK intelligence supported the claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

Although some documents backing up this claim were shown to be forgeries, the UK has not withdrawn the charge.

Last week's US Senate report on the intelligence leading up to the Iraq invasion said that Saddam Hussein's government may have tried to buy uranium from Africa.

Following the discovery of the forgeries, President George W Bush withdrew the charges.

'Easily verified'

Mr Mayaki denies allegations in the Senate report that he admitted meeting a delegation from Iraq in 1999.

The report says that he expected to discuss uranium with the Iraqi delegation but managed to steer the conversation in another direction.

But Mr Mayaki now says he has no recollection of such a meeting, while he was in government from 1999-2001.

"I think this could be easily verified by the Western intelligence services and by the authorities in Niger," he said.

Claims that an African country had supplied Iraq with uranium were first made in a dossier compiled by the British intelligence services on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, made public in September 2002.

The chair of the UK enquiry into the quality of British intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction said this information had come from several sources.

The forged documents were not available to the British government when it was making its case for the war and so did not undermine its conclusion, Lord Butler said.

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