France. Again

Worst "ally" ever.

Italy blames France for Niger uranium claim
By Bruce Johnston in Brussels and Kim Willsher in Paris
(Filed: 05/09/2004)

A row has broken out between France and Italy over whose intelligence service is to blame for the Niger uranium controversy, which led to Britain and America claiming wrongly that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy material for nuclear bombs.

Italian diplomats say that France was behind forged documents which at first appeared to prove that Iraq was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium in Niger - evidence used by Britain and America to promote the case for last year's Gulf war.

They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims.

They have passed to The Sunday Telegraph a photograph which they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels. "The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said.

"Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war."

According to an account given to The Sunday Telegraph, France was driven by "a cold desire to protect their privileged, dominant trading relationship with Saddam, which in the case of war would have been at risk".

The allegation, which has infuriated French officials, follows reports last month that "Giacomo" claimed to have been unwittingly used by Sismi, Italy's foreign intelligence service, to circulate the false documents.

The papers found their way to the CIA and to MI6, and in September 2002 Tony Blair accused Saddam of seeking "significant quantities" of uranium from an undisclosed African country - in fact, Niger. President George W Bush made a similar claim in his State of the Union address to Congress four months later, using information passed to him by MI6.

The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed doubts over the documents' authenticity, however, and in March 2003 declared them false.

The suggestion that Italy, driven by its government's support for America, had forged the documents to help to justify the war in Iraq, has caused a furore and has now led to the revelation of new information about "Giacomo".

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that the man has a criminal record for extortion and fraud, but draws a monthly salary of €4,000 (£2,715) from the DGSE - the French equivalent of MI6 - for which he is said to have worked for the past five years.

He had an expense account and received bonuses in return for carrying out orders allegedly given him by the head of the French services' operations in Belgium.

"Giacomo" could not be reached for comment on the claims last week at either his home in Formello, a suburb on the northern edge of Rome, or at his second home in Luxembourg.

He is said to be wanted for questioning over the Niger affair by Italian investigating magistrates, and is believed to be in the United States.

He is said to have received an 18-month prison sentence in 1985 for threatening violence against a bank manager in an extortion attempt. More recently he was apparently reported by Carabinieri for using stationery forged to appear to be from the Italian prime minister's office. He is said to have previously worked for Italian military intelligence, but was "kicked out" for running up debts with illegal loan sharks.

"Giacomo" was allegedly first engaged by the French secret service to investigate genuine fears of illicit trafficking in uranium from Niger. He collected a dossier of documents - some real, some forged by a diplomat - by offering large sums of money to Niger officials.

American intelligence officials were further misled over Saddam's supposed attempt to buy uranium when France - which effectively controls mining in Niger - told Washington that it had reason to believe that Iraq was trying to do so. "Only later did Paris inform Washington that its belief had been based on the same documents that had tricked the Americans and the British," an Italian diplomat said.

"This was la grande trappola [the big trap]. The Americans were now convinced by the French that Saddam really was trying to buy uranium. They thought the French must be right, since not even a gram of uranium in Niger could be shifted without their knowledge."

British officials still say that the claim about Iraqi uranium purchases rested on a second source, not just the now-discredited documents. Intelligence officials from some other Western countries now believe, however, that the second source was also France - part of a "sinister trap" for Mr Blair.

French intelligence was asked by The Sunday Telegraph for a public comment on the allegations against it, but has yet to give one.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml

Hang on, you don't like France? Well I'll be!

Hmmm. A right-wing government that got suckered by bad American intelligence too is trying to pawn it off on France.

Hmmm.

I know that the conservatives here want to blame France for everything (I bet France whipped up those hurricanes hitting Florida too), but this story is lame beyond words. Berlosconi (sp) is going down for falling for Dubya's fish story, as will Blair, and, hopefully, Dubya himself. Making up bullshit stories about how France is to blame won't save them.

Well, it is OBVIOUS!! I mean Hurricane FRANCEs??? Helloooo?

Hurricane fucking GASTON???

FRANCE=Hurricane loving America haters!

This just proves you can't trust anything freench. I mean french fries aren't even from france and they eat frogs

France were saying the whole time that Saddam wasn't a threat. (even if it was for their own agenda)
Why would they forge intelligence to try and prove themselves wrong?

...

...

Wait, does this mean that you agree that the war against Iraq was wrong?

Bold added by me.

So let me get this straight, the argument is that France, in order to avert a war, forged documents that purportedly established that Iraq was attempting acquire uranium for a nuclear weapons program, so that those documents could be exposed as false, thus undermining one of the rationales for going to war that wouldn’t have existed to begin with had France not fabricated them?

Sorry Stock, but this seems to me to be the right-wing equivalent of “an American cruise missile, not a plane hit the Pentagon.”

Tell me, given the fact that all of the pretexts for war against Iraq were completely bogus, why would France need to invent even more?

So, the French fabricated documents to establish something that you still claim actually happened..

Gee, that makes ever so much sense.

And fried food is gross while frog legs are kinda good.

not to mention that the forgeries in question have been described as high-school level by intelligence experts, with such genius touches as including signatures of officials in niger who hadn't been in office for a decade.

say, it wasn't dated april 1, was it? maybe the french were just having a bit of harmless gallic fun, and had no idea bush and blair would be so dumb as to start a war on the basis of their little joke.

zut alors!

Haine et merde. Vous êtes un imbecile!

At least with frog's legs I know what the fuck I'm eating....frog's legs. (I love 'em)

care to take a guess what was in that last hotdog you just ate? (something tells me you ain't spending the extra dosh on the Kosher ones ,either)....

The documents in question were so painfully amateur , it's a hoot the administration would try to feebly pander them as "evidence"......dude, I made counterfeit Queens Transit passes in the early 80's with a rapidograph and Design markers that looked better than those weak-ass documents they circulated as proof.

France can do whatever they fuckin' want to, they're a sovereign country. Most countries have been assholes: France, USA, fuckin' Malta... So what?

What? That's so ridiculous it's funny. Putain de con de la droite, t'es vraiment incroyable.

Blame canada.

i especially dislike french women. they're so unsexy.

Who cares what france does?! They have nothing to offer us. They lose every time they get attacked. And the food is ok, but good luck finding a good filling meal without spending an arm and a leg! FUCK FRANCE, and that goes for those damn canadians too!!!



tehehe

UK sure whatever, I'm a New Zealander.

Actually they offer you quiet a lot. French philosophical ideas are the foundation of America. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas were taken on by Thomas Jefferson. "The Social Contract" by Rousseau was the architecture of the Bill of Rights.

Following that the French supported the American revolutionaries with money, troops and weapons. In fact France has been one of the USA closest friends since the birth of your country. Who the fuck do you think made and gave the Statue of Liberty to the US?

I find it amazing that people are so easily deluded by the Republican Propaganda Machine TM. Surely you aren’t so stupid that you have your understanding of history dictated to you?

Remember: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the future, controls the past” George Orwell.

Oi..! Leave it out!

i think he may have been kidding . . .

Fair cop... I should have posted that one as a general "you anti-Frenchies are nobs" post

Sorry I'm not really a sports fan...