Bilderberg.org

[TonyGosling]

Colonel Lang --
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/07/oops.html

Re the British end of the Niger uranium story.

It does seem to me that, since it was via us that the Niger uranium story actually made it into the President?s speech, the British end of this may perhaps merit more attention than it has been getting. I have watched with fascination the telltale glimpses of the enquiries in which you and others have been involved on sites like Joshua Micah Marshall?s Talking Points Memo, as also the repeated failure of the story really to break surface. Some questions which arise concerning the British end.

Marshall?s argument that the first source on which the British relied was a report of the Italian documents seems persuasive. But there is, surely, an obvious next question. One would expect that a competent intelligence organization, receiving a report of documents, would want to investigate the documents, would one not? Would not a request that copies be provided asap be a natural immediate response? It may be that SIS did ask, and that the Italians refused them access. And indeed, if the Italians were aware that they were not very good forgeries, one can see that they might have wanted to find some pretext for refusing access, such as fear of compromising sources.

But Marshall was suggesting back in August 2004 that Italian intelligence operatives were surreptitiously funneling copies of these documents through a ?document peddler? ? subsequently named as Rocco Martino ? ?with the knowledge that he would sell them to other intelligence services and likely to members of the Italian press?.

So it?s at the least not clear that the Italians were anxious about other intelligence services probing the documents, which pushes me back to the question of whether the British asked for them. If they did not, then either they were massively incompetent, or they displayed a lack of interest in checking the evidence which raises the question of whether they had at the least some inkling that the evidence was dubious.

The discussion of what happened after the IAEA got hold of the documents in the September 2003 Intelligence and Security Committee Report hardly clears matters up. I quote:

92. The third party then released its documents to the SIS. The SIS then contacted its source to check the authenticity of its documentary evidence. The SIS told us that its source was still conducting further investigations into this matter.

93. The SIS stated that the documents did not affect its judgement of its second source and consequently the SIS continues to believe that the Iraqis were attempting to negotiate the purchase of uranium from Niger. We have questioned the SIS about the basis of its judgement and conclude that it is reasonable.

The IAEA, it seems, established that the crucial documents were clumsy forgeries in hours using Google. One would expect that the SIS would conduct its own investigation into the origins of the forgeries. Furthermore, giving that the forgeries were so clumsy, questions obviously needed to be asked about the ?third party? ? the Italians. Were they incompetent or were they complicit in the forgery? If they were complicit in a disinformation operation, then what were the other conduits through which disinformation was channeled? If they were dupes of a disinformation operation, were other intelligence services similarly dupes? Who was behind the disinformation operation? Did this mean that other intelligence which appeared to confirm the Niger story was compromised?

And as soon as the possibility of complicity on the part of the Italians was raised, the notion that one could rely on their investigation of the origins of the documents was obviously called in question.

One would normally expect that alarm bells would ring. Instead, SIS contacts the Italians, and the Italians appear to do not very much very slowly. The impression the report gives is that the SIS were not seriously interested in getting to the bottom of what had happened. But this seems to be a common thread in the whole Niger story ? different people in different places being remarkably uninterested in asking obvious questions.

What also needs to be fitted in to the picture are the allegations which Scott Ritter made about ?Operation Rockingham? and ?Operation Mass Appeal?, operations in which elements in British intelligence were allegedly involved in ?cherry picking? intelligence to foster alarm worldwide about Iraqi WMD programmes. There was a clutch of stories about these activities, largely provoked by Ritter?s allegations, which appeared in the British press in 2003-4. This trail seems to have run somewhat cold, but is obviously part of a wider story.

It doesn?t seem to be surprising that British officials should have been worried about the possible implications of a lifting of sanctions ? and feared that, irrespective of what kind of weapons programmes Saddam Hussein had or didn?t have in the present, he might resume them if sanctions were lifted. It also does not seem to me surprising that British officials, in common with others, should have resorted to disinformation to rally opinion behind the retention of sanctions. And of course one of the difficulties with practicing disinformation is that you may come to believe your own propaganda and cease to practice proper methods of evaluating information. This may well have happened.

The larger charge was the British wanted not simply the retention of sanctions but regime change ? and indeed, that this had been a clear British goal since 1991. It also seems clear that there was an acrimonious falling out between Ritter and former colleagues which had a great deal to do with precisely this issue.

So Ritter is not an altogether neutral witness. But there are further puzzles. The Guardian published a letter from John Morrison, former Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, saying that he had set up Rockingham and that its only aim was to provide intelligence for Unscom teams. In response, Ritter repeated his charge that it was involved in the ?political massaging? of intelligence data. That was in November 2003. In July 2004, Morrison was sacked from his job as chief investigator for the Intelligence and Security Committee after he said on television that ?you could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall? in response to Blair?s claims about WMD. David Kelly, who committed suicide, was of course also a liaison with the Rockingham Group.

What precisely was going on is to put it mildly, not clear. The Butler report dismissed Ritter?s claims, but its dismissal is not really much more convincing than its defence of the uranium claims.

In relation to Butler, like Lord Hutton before him, one has to take into account the fact that they were in a very difficult position. Had they carried out their remits rigorously, they would have ended up having to tell a large part of the story of how Tony Blair drank the Koolaid ? and it probably have been the end of Blair?s political career. Even leaving aside other reasons, this is the kind of political intervention that civil servants and judges here don?t like making. So I am agnostic on what precisely what Butler was playing at in defending the credibility of the Niger intelligence.

The larger point is that those responsible in the SIS would appear either to have been notably incompetent, or to have behaved in ways which suggest at least some element of complicity with the disinformation process which Colonel Lang and others have been investigating.

It is curious to my mind that the British press have not pursued the story further, particular given the recent leaks of government documents. It is also to my mind curious that there is not more of a sense of outrage. John Scarlett, who was at the heart of the corruption of the process of intelligence, was subsequently made head of the SIS. The point is not simply that some of us don?t much relish a situation where if the British government made a claim about North Korean nukes and the North Koreans denied it, we would feel that there was no particular reason for believing our side rather than theirs. It is also that there is simply is no interpretation of the history which suggests that Scarlett is an appropriate person to be in charge of British intelligence gathering. This is a very dangerous world and we need good intelligence.

At the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, its rather as though Ulysses was fighting the Cyclops ? and put the stake in his own eye!

Posted by: David Habakkuk | Monday, 25 July 2005 at 05:33

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Kay, Powell, Backtrack on WMD
http://www.juancole.com/2004_01_01_juancole_archive.html

It is true that the US had no human intelligence assets of any significance in Iraq, who could have done a simple site check of things that had looked suspicious in the satellite photos. Since the US spread around millions to Iraqi tribal sheikhs and others, the problem was not money. There is no good reason for the failure to develop such intelligence, except that it would have required that somebody go out and do recruiting in dangerous conditions and be able to speak Arabic, etc.

But Bush and his officials were the real problem. They were determined to go to war regardless of the intelligence. Neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the Rockingham Group in the British military cherry-picked and politicized vague "intelligence" (i.e. unsupported anecdotes) fed to them by figures like corrupt expatriate Iraqi businessman Ahmad Chalabi and very likely Israeli intelligence. The groups that wanted the war, wanted it so badly that the shakiness of the "intelligence" did not matter. The intelligence was just spun.

For a good account of how US intelligence got into this mess, seeRobert Parry's "Why US Intelligence Failed".