As Larry Johnson reminded us in his piece Mambo Italiano and Plame Gate, there is much involved in the overall forged Niger documents story that we still don’t have concrete answers about. Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s grand jury will only take us so far and is not designed to answer all of those questions. Will we ever know the full story?
The Independent’s Norman Dombey asked that question in his recent commentary, Tell Us Who Fabricated the Iraq Evidence, and ties together three figures involved in their own major news stories lately: Karl Rove the possible leaker of Valerie Plame’s name, Mohamed ElBaradei who revealed the forgery to the UN Security Council, and Larry Franklin who pleaded guilty last week to providing classified DoD information to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC .
It’s a retelling of events worthy of a Tom Clancy spy novel.
He begins with the fact that, in early 2001, the Niger Embassy in Rome was broken into, yet it appeared that nothing substantial was taken. That break in, however, could well have been the source of the official Niger government letterhead used in the forthcoming forgeries. According to Dombey’s theory, in December, 2001, Michael Ledeen, “an American specialist on Italy with a long-standing commitment to Israel”…” ” flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin. In Rome they met the head of Sismi. Some months later, the documents were published, having been sold to an Italian journalist by a Roman businessman linked to Sismi.”
Adding weight to the connection is the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA:
One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but “funnelled through the Italians”. When an interviewer asked Cannistraro “if I said Michael Ledeen”, he reportedly replied “I don’t think it’s a proven case …You’d be very close”
Ledeen has denied any involvement.
It’s a tangled web but it’s vital to understand what happened in order to appreciate how we have arrived at this point in history – the month someone may or may not be held responsible for leaking the name of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph Wilson who blew the lid off the forgeries and antagonized the Bush administration as a result.