Authors of "The Italian Letter" to guest blog at TPM this week.

For those of you still trying to separate the Bush administration lies from the truth about whether Iraq was a danger to the United Stated, the best single book I have yet found has been The Italian Letter.

The authors, Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, will be guest blogging today and this week at TPM's Table for One. This should be quite fascinating.

I have previously discussed this book and its findings here:

• New story in WaPo re: Niger Forgeries
  4/3/07 and


• Why no investigation of Niger Forgeries by the FBI?
  5/1/07

Also you will find this books advertisement listed on the left side of Politics Plus Stuff, with the (implied) recommendation that you should buy and read it.

This book, "The Italian Letter", is also my source for the suspicions I voiced in my article Run! Hide! Sky is Falling! Iranians training Terrorists! Run! Run! Hide!! Kill Someone!! that the NeoCon Michael Ledeen was involved in the creation and/or transmission of the Niger forgeries.

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This is what they have posted

• Forget the Truth
  by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce - June 11, 2007
  
  WMD were not part of the reason why the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq. That decision was made for other reasons, but those other reasons were not reasons that the White House Iraq Group felt could be used as the anchor for the Public Relations effort needed to "sell" going to war. The pre-war talk of Iraqi doomsday weapons were nothing more than a killer sales pitch to sell the single most disastrous foreign policy decision ever made by any American administration. There was no acceptable rational reason to invade Iraq, so the Bush administration had to gin up a really scary threat - one that did not exist.

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• The Bush administration should have known.
  by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce - June 12, 2007
  
  The Bush administration recognizes now that many mistakes were made in the decision to go to war in Iraq, but they blame those mistakes on "bad" Intelligence they were given, not on their own incompetence. Eisner and Royce make the point that what the Bush administration needed to know was given to them, but that they intentionally buried or ignored it. They knew they were spouting bad Intelligence to justify the disastrous war they started.

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• Condi: Casting Assertions
  by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce - June 13, 2007
  
  Eisner and Royce admit surprise that Tenet, in his book, clearly describes that Condi Rice did not understand how to read an Intelligence assessment and could not properly interpret what the Intelligence community was trying to tell her.

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• Our Sources, On The Record
  by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce - June 14, 2007
  
  Eisner and Royce get four of their sources, former CIA analysts Mel Goodman and Larry Johnson; W. Patrick Lang, who ran the Middle East section for the Defense Intelligence Agency; and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, to expand on what they wrote in "The Italian Letter. None of the four are particularly happy with the way Dick Cheney started the Iraq War. A few other culprits are also named.
  
• Intelligence and Pressure Politics
  by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce - June 15, 2007
  
  How is a modern intelligence agency insulated from politics? Eisner and Royce discuss how the American Intelligence agancies failed to be insulated, and what can be done about that problem.
  

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Why no investigation of the Niger forgeries by FBI?

The basis for the "16 words in the State of the Union Speech" was a set of forged documents called, collectively, the Niger forgeries. They were provided by the Italian Intelligence Service (SISMI) to both the U.S. and to the British. They were the alleged "proof" that Dick Cheney was told several times by the FBI Director, George Tenet, was not credible. Tenet had references to them removed from at least two speeches given by Cheney in the Fall of 2002.

In his Sunday "60 Minutes" interview Tenet says that the reference to Iraq seeking Uranium in Africa should have been removed from Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, but that he did not himself read the speech before it was given and it slipped through. (This should be verified with whoever Tenet delegated the vetting of the speech to.)

Sen. Rockerfeller asked the FBI to thoroughly investigate the Niger forgeries years ago. And what has happened? Josh Marshall brings the story up to date.



Between Congressional the government oversight that the Democrats have reinstituted since regaining control of Congress, and the civil suit which Valerie Plame has filed (against Dick Cheney and a cast of characters from the White House), more will come out. Soon, I suspect.

Personally, I think that a key figure is going to be Michael Ledeen, a long-time radical Neoconservative who has strong right-wing connections in Italy and who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan administration.

So now we wait for the next shoe to drop.

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As always, references to Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative. They provide good references.

New story in WaPo re: the Niger Forgeries

TPM Muckraker refers to the new Washington Post story regarding the Niger Forgeries.

You remember those. They were the so-called Intelligence quickly rejected by all the American Intelligence Services, but used by Bush to base his statement in the 2003 State of the Union address. By attributing his 16 words to British Intelligence (also based on the Niger forgeries) Bush used them as a large part of the excuse for the preemptive invasion of Iraq.

One question that has remained in the back of my mind for four years now is - who forged the documents? Unfortunately, WaPo doesn't give us the answer to that in this story, either.

It does appear that this was an action by then Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlesconni, in support of both Bush and Blair. It may have been initiated by and enacted by the SISMI (Italian Intelligence Service) but was certainly supported by Berlesconni. With 2700 troops in Iraq, italy provided the third largest contingent in the Coalition. That's after the troops supplied by (surprise) Bush and Blair.

This WaPo story does more to keep it issue in the public than it does to really answer the key questions, but with my complaints about the right-wing drift of the WaPo, this is really a good omen. We still have reporters asking what the full story really was.

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This book offers background to the story.