Media Trying To Pin Forged Uranium Documents On Bush Administration

Sigh…

Bush aide denies ties to fake Iraq-Niger documents
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, denied on Wednesday that he or his staff received fake documents in 2002 that showed Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, a claim that formed part of the administration’s case for going to war.
After consulting with a member of his staff “to refresh my memory,” Hadley told reporters that the documents were first obtained by the State Department and then shared with the
CIA, and that he does not recall ever discussing the issue with Italian intelligence officials.
“Suffice to say they didn’t come to me. They didn’t come to the NSC,” Hadley said, referring to the National Security Council.
Bush, in making a case for war in his 2003 State of the Union address, said there was evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa to further apparent nuclear-weapons ambitions. Bush cited British intelligence as the source of the information.
The FBI has been investigating the origin of the forged documents. U.S. officials have said in the past that the information was partly traced back to Italian intelligence sources.

This story is hardly new. I first posted on it over a year ago and just recently did a refresher post on the subject in anticipation of this flaring up again.
The “Italian intelligence” source referred to in the article is a man named Rocco Martino, a/k/a Giacomo. He has admitted to investigators that he was employed to disseminate false intelligence originating from France to America and Great Britain in order to “set them up.” In other words, France was actively trying to derail the case for war in Iraq.
Yet that isn’t the picture the media is trying to paint now more than a year after the story broke. Rather than focusing on the deception of one of our alleged allies, the media is trying to spin this into some sort of calculated maneuver by the Bush administration. Clearly, that’s not what this is.
Why would France try to set us up? Well, that isn’t immediately clear, but I suspect it might have something to do with this. France had a fairly significant interest in keeping the oil-for-food gravy train rolling, and I’ve said before that international opposition to the war in Iraq had more to do with corruption than any actual concern over American imperialism.
If we had an honest, balanced media in this country that’s what we’d all be discussing right now. Instead, this is turning into just another “bash the President” session.