Okay, there’s clearly something to this. Martin Walker of UPI is now reporting that …
that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald’s team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald’s team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.
Now, some of you have pointed out in your emails that this is the Moonie UPI and don’t know what to think of it on that basis. But whatever you think of UPI, Martin Walker is Martin Walker and he brings his own credibility with him.
So what is this Italian report? A blockbuster dossier or a cursory recitation of known facts? Unlike some other recent reports, Walker doesn’t say. Fitzgerald’s interest in obtaining such a dossier is big news in itself certainly, whatever specifics might have been obtained. But what’s in it? What might Fitzgerald have discovered?
My reporting on this from Italian sources has always suggested that the Italian government had been much, much less than aggressive in its pursuit of the facts in this story. Certainly, that was the case with the separate judicial inquiry in Rome.
An even more interesting question is how the Italians might have dealt with what they found since at least some factions within SISMI, Italian military intelligence, are almost certainly implicated in the documents affair.
Rocco Martino is the Italian ‘security consultant’ who attempted to sell the documents to journalist Elisabetta Burba in October of 2002. When I interviewed Martino in New York last year he named a SISMI colonel and a female Italian national who works at the Nigerien embassy in Rome as his sources for the documents. The SISMI colonel proved, shall we say, unwilling to be interviewed. But in a separate interview the woman, who is herself a longtime SISMI asset, eventually conceded her role in the transaction.
More to come later.
