VANITY FAIR Connects Niger Yellow Cake Forgery to WH: "'It was the Italians and Americans together who were behind it. It was all a disinformation operation,' Martino told a reporter at England's Guardian newspaper. He called himself 'a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me.'
What exactly might those games have been? Berlusconi defined his role on the world stage largely in terms of his relationship with the U.S., and he jumped at the chance to forge closer ties with the White House when Bush took office, in 2001. In its three-part series on Nigergate, La Repubblica charges that Berlusconi was so eager to win Bush's favor that he 'instructed Italian Military Intelligence to plant the evidence implicating Saddam in a bogus uranium deal with Niger.' (The Berlusconi government, which lost power in April, denied the charge.)
Because the Niger break-in happened before Bush took office, La Repubblica and many others assume that the robbery was initiated as a small-time job. 'When the story began, they were not thinking about Iraq,' says La Repubblica's Bonini. 'They were just trying to gather something that could be sold on the black market to the intelligence community.'
But it is also possible that from its very inception the Niger operation was aimed at starting an invasion of Iraq. As early as 1992, neoconservative hawks in the administration of George H. W. Bush, under the aegis of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, unsuccessfully lobbied for regime change in Iraq as part of a grandiose vision for American supremacy in the next century."
What exactly might those games have been? Berlusconi defined his role on the world stage largely in terms of his relationship with the U.S., and he jumped at the chance to forge closer ties with the White House when Bush took office, in 2001. In its three-part series on Nigergate, La Repubblica charges that Berlusconi was so eager to win Bush's favor that he 'instructed Italian Military Intelligence to plant the evidence implicating Saddam in a bogus uranium deal with Niger.' (The Berlusconi government, which lost power in April, denied the charge.)
Because the Niger break-in happened before Bush took office, La Repubblica and many others assume that the robbery was initiated as a small-time job. 'When the story began, they were not thinking about Iraq,' says La Repubblica's Bonini. 'They were just trying to gather something that could be sold on the black market to the intelligence community.'
But it is also possible that from its very inception the Niger operation was aimed at starting an invasion of Iraq. As early as 1992, neoconservative hawks in the administration of George H. W. Bush, under the aegis of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, unsuccessfully lobbied for regime change in Iraq as part of a grandiose vision for American supremacy in the next century."
posted by gr8fuldaniel | 10:53 PM
