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My favorite dropped narratives

by Justin Raimondo, March 19, 2010

"......My own favorite is the mystery of the Niger uranium forgeries [.pdf]. Remember that? President Bush’s infamous “sixteen words,” which loomed so large in the headlines at one point, have faded with the years, and yet the mystery lingers on. Who fed the White House “intelligence” based on crude forgeries, which imputed that the Iraqis had tried to buy uranium from the African country of Niger in an effort to construct a nuclear weapon?

The forgeries, which somehow made it onto the President’s desk embedded in a State of the Union speech, were so crude and obvious that it took IAEA scientists but a few hours to debunk them. So how did something so obviously fraudulent get injected into the US intelligence stream in the first place – and by whom? .......

The Niger forgeries were pretty clearly part of a highly successful effort to lie us into war, and the lies, in this case, did not originate with the White House – which was sorely embarrassed by the exposure of the fraud. Quite obviously the perpetrators didn’t care about that. So whodunit? We still don’t know.



My second favorite unsolved mystery is l’affaire Chalabi – the counterintelligence investigation into the double-and –triple-dealing Ahmed Chalabi, neocon hero and convicted embezzler. It was Chalabi’s group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress, that later dubbed themselves “heroes in error” for having fed the US government and the New York Times reams of lies about Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” (and were paidby the US taxpayers to do so).

Hailed by the neocons as the George Washington of “liberated” Iraq, Chalabi enjoyed access to top US government officials and was portrayed in the media as a staunch US ally, a veritable model of the kind of Arab leader that would emerge on the heels on George W. Bush’s “global democratic revolution.”.....

Today, Chalabi is riding high, having aligned himself with the ruling party in Iraq: the hero of the neocons is now an open Iranian agent. He played a key role in disqualifying mainly Sunni parties in the Iraqi elections, and his connections with militant Shi’ites are extensive. The question is: who in the Bush administration, among Chalabi’s many admirers and promoters, gave him access to the tightly-held highly sensitive information that the US had broken the Iranian code? If Chalabi is guilty – and he is – then he’s not alone, but who in our government – and it would’ve had to have been fairly high up – helped him betray the US? We still don’t know the answer to that question....."