Niger Forgery and Michael Ledeen

For all of the many details and connections related to the Niger forgeries, please go to wikipedia’s page for details, timelines and links. I don’t want to bulk up the diary unecessarily….

Also, Josh Marshall mentions it again in a recent entry…

My thoughts are below concerning Michael Ledeen being the person who was behind the forgery of the documents.

 
From the Alternet interview with former counterterrorism chief, Vincent Cannistaro:

Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated … it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE–I’m not sure which one.

It was SISME, yeah. …

[D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq–there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion …

I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case …

If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?

You’d be very close…

What I didn’t know until today was that there was a companion piece to the forged Yellowcake document that was also a forgery. A quote from this source says:

…included with the yellowcake documents was a completely over-the-top memo in which all the countries under sanctions conspired together to have the sanctions lifted.

Here is a link to more information on the companion piece.

Now, in terms of a timeline, we know the Niger forgeries were given to the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002. So, was Michael Ledeen, neo-con extroadinaire, resposible for the forgery?

Well, I think it’s curious that in September 2002 (one month before the Niger forgeries were provided to the US Embassy, with the companion forgery), Ledeen wrote an article for the National Review where he says in the last paragraph the following:

Let’s hope they’ve learned their lesson and realize that Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are now working together against us.

Now this is not conclusive evidence of any sort, but it does strike me as curious that a month before the forged companion piece was “given” to the US Embassy in Rome, Ledeen was giving a heads up to a conspiracy of Middle Eastern countries in the National Review. If he was behind the forgery, the acceptance of the companion letter as a valid document would have more legitimacy if it was mentioned previously….