The Israeli connection to the Niger and Congo uranium forgeries.

November 4, 2005 -- The Israeli connection to the Niger and Congo uranium forgeries. The neo-cons who are behind the Niger forgeries that were used as justification for the war in Iraq have been aided by former KGB officers who honed their African forgery trade during the Cold War. A number of these KGB officers are now Israeli citizens who are working closely with a special activities unit in Ariel Sharon's office. The former KGB agents, having left the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s when a neo-con cell first nested in Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office and then migrated to the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, now work for Likud and specialize in creating forgeries, especially those attributed to African countries. These Israeli former KGB agents work closely with neocon units in Rome, Washington, and London. The State Department once maintained a full-time office dedicated to proving Soviet generated documents as forgeries. The documents were always easy to detect since the forgeries were crude and the information contained within them was capricious.

The Congo forgeries were overshadowed by the Niger forgeries

Although the focus is on the Niger forgeries, there was another case in which forgeries "proving" Iraq's nuclear ambitions were shopped by the neocons. It received little or no attention.

In July 2002, documents on CIA letterhead were "discovered" in a Nairobi hotel room. They described attempts by Mai Mai guerrillas in Bukavu in the DRC to negotiate the sale of uranium to Saddam Hussein's government. The discovery of the documents in Nairobi came after Wilson, CIA weapons of mass destruction experts -- including Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson -- the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the US ambassador to Niger, and the US European Command in Stuttgart concluded that there was no evidence to support the allegation that Iraq was shopping for nuclear materials in Africa -- a charge later leveled by President Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union address.

The "discovery" of the CIA documents -- clearly forgeries like the Niger documents -- were leaked to the press, including Le Soir in Belgium. Their leak was followed by the release of a British government dossier describing Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. The DRC government later produced photocopies of original false Bukavu documents -- on which the bogus CIA documents were based -- offering Iraq (or any other high bidder) 9 kilograms of "superior quality" uranium from Mai Mai units in the eastern DRC. U.S. intelligence sources maintain that the Nairobi and Bukavu documents were crude forgeries produced after then-Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner III met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali on January 15, 2002. The plan was to blame the DRC for providing uranium to Iraq in an attempt to destabilize Kabila and justify the continued presence of Rwandan troops in eastern DRC. Iraq's complicity in obtaining uranium in DRC would then be bolstered by the Niger "evidence" lending credence to Saddam's nuclear "ambitions."

Kansteiner was assisted in the operation by his deputy, Charles Snyder, a former US Special Forces officer who was involved in covert operations in Sierra Leone and is tied to the neo-conservative elements within the Pentagon. Kagame relies heavily on Israeli and Pentagon security advisers in his eastern Congo military operations.

Former KGB disinformation and forgery experts have also been behind illegal forgery operations tied to the Russian-Israeli Mafia's weapons, diamond, gold, platinum, uranium, and plutonium smuggling operations in other African countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Mozambique, Liberia, Congo (Brazzaville), and Benin.

======================

Forged Niger documents: From Italia with Amore

November 4, 2005 -- Bush's State of the Union contention about uranium based on forged documents. The chief of Italy's SISMI intelligence service, Gen. Nicolo Pollari, revealed before an Italian parliamentary committee that an Italian ex-spy and interlocutor for the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans was the source for forged Niger documents alleging Iraq attempted to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger. It was based on these forgeries that were shopped around by ex- Italian spy Rocco Martino and Pentagon neo-cons that Ambassador Joseph Wilson was dispatched to Niger by the CIA. Wilson also determined the documents were forgeries setting off a chain of events that led to a criminal probe of the White House and a five count indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby.

Although the FBI announced it was shutting down its two year investigation of the forgeries on the same day the Italian spy chief made his statement, it is known that much of the evidence collected by the Italians, including a classified parliamentary report, is now in the hands of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Italian Senator Massimo Brutti also stated that SISMI informed the CIA in early 2003 that the Niger documents were forgeries. However, it is also being reported by the Italian media that Pollari provided the Niger documents to the Bush White House knowing they were forgeries and that this was done on the orders of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.