'Fight Smart' Update - 30 October 2005

Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE
Who is the enemy?

'It Was The Oil Jim,
But Much More So Than We Knew It'
Weapons Of Mass Financial Destruction
Iraq War And The Battle To Save The Petro-Dollar
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATSaddamEuroOil.htm
Berlusconi Visits White House
As Italian Parliament Passes Names Of Alleged Iraq Uranium Document Forgers
To 'Plamegate' Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

A Move Too Far Saddam Tried Anti Petro-Dollar Currency Blast In Run Up To US Election 2000

Just Before The 'Election' Of George W.Bush
Saddam Test Fired A Shot From His New Weapon Of Mass Financial Destruction

"Baghdad's switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington's hard-line on sanctions and to encourage Europeans to challenge it.... [Pierre Shammas, a Middle East expert at the Cyprus-based Arab Press Service] says the idea of switching to the euro has appeal to Iran and Iraq because they feel if several major oil producers did it they could create a stampede from the dollar which would weaken Washington. He says another possible candidate for a changeover if the euro were strong might be Venezuela, whose relations with Washington have turned rocky as President Hugo Chavez has stressed ties with Cuba's Fidel Castro. But so far, no big stampede to the euro is on the horizon -- except in Baghdad. And that leaves Saddam once again charting a highly individual course that guarantees he keeps other capitals guessing what his next move will be."
Iraq: Baghdad Moves To Euro
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1 November 2000

"A bizarre political statement by Saddam Hussein has earned Iraq a windfall of hundreds of million of euros. In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar - 'the currency of the enemy' - for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. Almost all of Iraq's oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001..... The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme. "
Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro
Observer, 16 February 2003

Making A Move To Switch Oil Trade Out Of The Dollar And Into The Euro
Just Before The 'Election' Of President George W Bush
Sealed Saddam Hussein's Fate Once And For All

"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed....
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US. An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat. Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration."
Secret US plans for Iraq's oil
BBC Online, 17 March 2005

Not Only Was Saddam Hussein A Threat To Persian Gulf Oil Supplies
He Was A Threat To The Very Dollar Itself
A Situation That Was Rectified By The Bremmer Regime Immediately After The Invasion

"Iraq on Thursday stepped back into the international oil market for the first time since the war, offering 10m barrels of oil from its storage tanks for sale to the highest bidder....The [post invasion]tender, for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars - the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar."
Iraq returns to the international market
Financial Times, 5 June 2003

And Washington Was Prepared To Do Anything To Clear The Way For That Invasion
Including The Use Of Forged Documents To Win International And Domestic Support

"President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq. Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war..... 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'... It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?"
Tell us who fabricated the Iraq evidence
Independent, 9 October 2005

But Now The Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost

"Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries? Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald asked for and 'has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,' the former CIA officer tells me: 'Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.'"
Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?
Antiwar.com, 19 October 2005

   "....according to Italian sources the sealed portions of the report [passed to US special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald] conclude the fraudulent papers were created by associates of Ahmed of Chalibi".
'Hardball'
MSNBC, 21 October 2005

"The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NATO intelligence sources.  This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration. Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges. Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby. The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime. The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House. This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has 'sexed up' the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
United Press International, 24 October 2005

Or May Be Not

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap
Lies, Fraud, And Corruption Produce Total Failure

"Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed. The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country. It demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation. The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which Tony Blair and George W Bush believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country... The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces.... The opinion poll, carried out in August, also debunks claims by both the US and British governments that the general well-being of the average Iraqi is improving in post-Saddam Iraq."
Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops
Sunday Telegraph, 23 October 2005

'Fight Smart' Overview
Iraq, Oil, Petro-Dollars, And High Crime Forgeries

Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction
Faking The Casus Belli
The Italian Connection And The Naming Of The Alleged Document Forgers
The British Connection And The Role Of Rocco Martino
Energy Apocalypse And The Petro-Dollar  - 'It's The Money Stupid'

Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction

According to former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as reported by the late Alistair Cooke in 2002, the first Gulf war in 1991 was primarily about preventing Saddam Hussein from becoming a threat to Saudi oil supplies, not the secondary consideration of protecting the sovereignty of Kuwait.

So what was the second Gulf war about?

Clearly it was not about weapons of mass destruction, as we now know that there was never any evidence of these. That is now beyond dispute. According to a recent statement by Mrs Thatcher reported in the Independent 14 October: "The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof."

If Saddam had disarmed after the first Gulf war (as the United States itself knew from the information that it had obtained from Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel in 1995 during the Clinton Administration - a fact publicly revealed by Newsweek magazine who obtained leaked documents only weeks before the 2003 invasion of Iraq began) what was the hurry to go into Iraq post the election of George W Bush in 2000? Defiantly finishing off the work of his father's 1991 intervention is sometimes cited as a reason.

But by the start of the 'Bush 43' presidency there were two pressing problems of much greater practical significance. With a neo-conservative regime also now in charge of the White House, these factors meant that regime change in Baghdad had become even more 'essential'.

The first pressing problem was the increasing al-Qaeda driven instability of Saudi Arabia following the issuing of Bin Laden's fatwa against the United States in 1996 entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places [in Saudi Arabia]" (America had built large military bases in Saudi Arabia as a result of the first Gulf War).

This situation threatened the loss of the USA's principal military platform for policing the security of Persian Gulf oil, the world's most important source of supply. It was also occurring just at the very time when oil supply and demand curves plotted by strategic analysts were set on a number of collision courses (see Centre For Strategic And International Studies report published 1998 and report by former CIA director James Woolsey published 1999).

A new military platform was required in a more stable secular environment from where the United States could more confidently supervise the maintenance of 'stability' in the Gulf.

At the time Iraq was the most suitable candidate. Although by now the US detested its former ally, Saddam Hussein had at least run a non-religious administration in Baghdad. Iraq was also neatly situated between both Iran and Saudi Arabia, making its position highly strategic should intervention in either of those other countries ever prove necessary. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, in that order, have the largest oil reserves in the world (Iran also has the world's second largest gas reserves after Russia).

Just as important, however, was Iraq's audacious decision in the autumn of 2000 to begin trading its oil under the euro instead of the dollar. Yet, outside the corridors of power little public attention has been paid to this major development in Saddam's international posture.

Whether by luck or good judgement Saddam decided to do this just at the depth of the weakness of the Euro was bottoming out. Financially it proved to be a highly rewarding move. According to the Observer 16 February 2003 "In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar - 'the currency of the enemy' - for the more multilateral euro. ... Almost all of Iraq's oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001..... The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme."

But the significance of the move was far greater than simply an improved economic situation for Baghdad. America's Prague based Radio Free Europe, a service funded by Congress to broadcast in Europe and the Middle East, was one news outlet that was not slow to spot the political significance at the time.

On 1 November 2000, just a few day before voting took place in the US presidential election, the network commented that "Baghdad's switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington's hard-line on sanctions and to encourage Europeans to challenge it.... [Pierre Shammas, a Middle East expert at the Cyprus-based Arab Press Service] says the idea of switching to the euro has appeal to Iran and Iraq because they feel if several major oil producers did it they could create a stampede from the dollar which would weaken Washington. He says another possible candidate for a changeover if the euro were strong might be Venezuela, whose relations with Washington have turned rocky as President Hugo Chavez has stressed ties with Cuba's Fidel Castro. But so far, no big stampede to the euro is on the horizon -- except in Baghdad. And that leaves Saddam once again charting a highly individual course that guarantees he keeps other capitals guessing what his next move will be."

Iraq was the first county in the world to take this step. But what would be the consequences for the United States if other major oil producers began to follow this lead and move away from the dollar as the pre-eminent petro-currency?

This concern is far from theoretical. The appetite amongst other countries for making such a move has been steadily increasing in the interim as concerns over America's missuse of its sole superpower status have grown. Most recently the new government of Iran has been planning the establishment of an oil bourse in Tehran with trade denominated in euros.

According to the Christian Science Monitor 30 August 2005 "Is the biggest threat Iran poses to the United States really its nuclear ambitions - or is it petropolitics? Last month the Iranian government quietly reaffirmed plans to create by next year a euro-denominated exchange in oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products. If successful, such an exchange could start to lap at the walls of the two existing oil exchanges - London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) - both owned by American companies. If the billions of dollars in oil sales ever got going in euros, experts say, that could dry up the demand for dollars that the heavily indebted US economy depends on, and it could mean big trouble for the US economy. It's enough to make the Great Satan-loathing visionaries behind the Iranian regime salivate... as much as a pipe dream as the plan may be, it suggests the lengths to which Iranian leaders could go to weaken Western (and largely American) controls on the international economy, analysts say... 'It's part of a very intelligent, creative Iranian strategy - to go on the offense in every way possible and mobilize other actors against the US,' says George Perkovich, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington....'"

William Clark is the American author of the book 'Petrodollar Warfare - Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar'. In an online article published by Media Monitors Network 9 August 2005 he made the following observations:

"Candidly stated, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. government in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of global Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency (i.e. 'petroeuro').[3] However, subsequent geopolitical events have exposed neoconservative strategy as fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia evaluates this option with the European Union.

In 2003 the global community witnessed a combination of petrodollar warfare and oil depletion warfare. The majority of the world’s governments – especially the E.U., Russia and China – were not amused – and neither are the U.S. soldiers who are currently stationed inside a hostile Iraq. In 2002 I wrote an award-winning online essay that asserted Saddam Hussein sealed his fate when he announced in September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export currency.[4]

Indeed, my original pre-war hypothesis was validated in a Financial Times article dated June 5, 2003, which confirmed Iraqi oil sales returning to the international markets were once again denominated in U.S. dollars – not euros.

'The tender, for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars -- the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar' [5]

The Bush administration implemented this currency transition despite the adverse impact on profits from Iraqi’s export oil sales.[6] (In mid-2003 the euro was valued approx. 13% higher than the dollar, and thus significantly impacted the ability of future oil proceeds to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure). Not surprisingly, this detail has never been mentioned in the five U.S. major media conglomerates who control 90% of information flow in the U.S., but confirmation of this vital fact provides insight into one of the crucial – yet overlooked – rationales for 2003 the Iraq war....

In essence, Iran is about to commit a far greater 'offense' than Saddam Hussein's conversion to the euro for Iraq’s oil exports in the fall of 2000. Beginning in March 2006, the Tehran government has plans to begin competing with New York's NYMEX and London's IPE with respect to international oil trades – using a euro-based international oil-trading mechanism.[7]

The proposed Iranian oil bourse signifies that without some sort of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given U.S. debt levels and the stated neoconservative project of U.S. global domination, Tehran’s objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on dollar supremacy in the crucial international oil market....

The macroeconomic implications of a successful Iranian bourse are noteworthy. Considering that in mid-2003 Iran switched its oil payments from E.U. and ACU customers to the euro, and thus it is logical to assume the proposed Iranian bourse will usher in a fourth crude oil marker – denominated in the euro currency. This event would remove the main technical obstacle for a broad-based petroeuro system for international oil trades. From a purely economic and monetary perspective, a petroeuro system is a logical development given that the European Union imports more oil from OPEC producers than does the U.S., and the E.U. accounted for 45% of exports sold to the Middle East. (Following the May 2004 enlargement, this percentage likely increased).

Despite the complete absence of coverage from the five U.S. corporate media conglomerates, these foreign news stories suggest one of the Federal Reserve’s nightmares may begin to unfold in the spring of 2006, when it appears that international buyers will have a choice of buying a barrel of oil for $60 dollars on the NYMEX and IPE - or purchase a barrel of oil for €45 - €50 euros via the Iranian Bourse. This assumes the euro maintains its current 20-25% appreciated value relative to the dollar – and assumes that some sort of US 'intervention' is not launched against Iran.

The upcoming bourse will introduce petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world - global oil and gas trades. In essence, the U.S. will no longer be able to effortlessly expand its debt-financing via issuance of U.S. Treasury bills, and the dollar’s international demand/liquidity value will fall....

It is unclear at the time of writing if this project will be successful, or could it prompt overt or covert U.S. interventions – thereby signaling the second phase of petrodollar warfare in the Middle East. Regardless of the potential U.S. response to an Iranian petroeuro system, the emergence of an oil exchange market in the Middle East is not entirely surprising given the domestic peaking and decline of oil exports in the U.S. and U.K, in comparison to the remaining oil reserves in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

What we are witnessing is a battle for oil currency supremacy. If Iran’s oil bourse becomes a successful alternative for international oil trades, it would challenge the hegemony currently enjoyed by the financial centers in both London (IPE) and New York (NYMEX)...."

In this context the economic pressure for another US driven war in the Gulf, this time against Iran, is especially intense, and Clarke's noting of the blackout on reporting of this subject by major US media conglomerates is instructive.

In the post 9/11 geopolitical environment this potential petro-currency leverage is an extremely powerful weapon available to those parts of the world seeking to constrain the military power of the United States through economic means. At its simplest it can be utilised merely in the form of a veiled threat.

On 10 October 2003 Moscow Times reported that "President Vladimir Putin said Thursday Russia could switch its trade in oil from dollars to euros, a move that could have far-reaching repercussions for the global balance of power -- potentially hurting the U.S. dollar and economy and providing a massive boost to the euro zone. 'We do not rule out that it is possible. That would be interesting for our European partners,' Putin said at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Urals town of Yekaterinburg, where the two leaders conducted two-day talks."

What Putin also probably meant was "that would be interesting for our American rivals, so they had better not mess with us". Russia is the world's second largest exporter of oil. It is also a nuclear power that cannot be attacked as readily as Iraq and Iran in the event that Moscow were to switch petro-currencies.

But by the time US voters were attempting to cast their ballots in November 2000, Saddam Hussein was not making veiled threats. He had played his petro-currency card.

However, even if it might have been considered a good enough reason in the eyes of some at Wall St, this was not a factor that could be used in international law to justify an American invasion of Iraq. Moreover, fierce long-enduring economic sanctions had not prevented Saddam's latest move or loosened his grip on power.

Fabrication of WMD claims was the only route left for the Bush administration to pursue if regime change was going to be achieved.

Ultimately the Iraq war was about money. This financial warfare took place in the form of a battle both to control physical natural resources (oil and gas in the Middle East), and also to control financial instruments (petrodollars V petroeuros). The two, of course, are closely linked.

In the end the most imaginative and powerful threat to the United States from Saddam was not a military one but an economic one. He had replaced his chemical and biological weapons with the ultimate societal destroyer - weapons of mass financial destruction. Saddam was using oil as a economic weapon.

In these circumstance the US was increasingly desperate. There was no telling who might follow Saddam's lead if he was allowed to get away with it. As a joint report from the highly influential James Baker Policy Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations put it in April 2001: "... Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a 'Pan Arab' leader supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments..."

A investigative report by the BBC's Newsnight programme broadcast 17 March 2005 later confirmed that "The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the  9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil.....  Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001....The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields."

The BBC reported that not just Iraq, but OPEC as a whole, was a target in the unfolding game plan: "The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed  by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department."

However, fearing a possible ensuing political backlash within Iraq which might ultimately work against the long term interests of US oil companies "Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.... Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields..... New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas."

Foreign oil companies, especially those from countries which were part of the 'coalition of the willing', now hope to be offered contracts directly from the Iraqi government in the post-Saddam era.

Faking The Casus Belli

When, on 12 December 2000, the US Supreme Court opened the door to the final ascent to near unlimited power for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam's fate was effectively sealed. Economically speaking, Saddam had to go.

And that's why, amongst other approaches, Washington was prepared to use forged documents supposedly demonstrating Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium shipments from Niger in Africa when making its bogus case to the UN. It proved to be an effective strategy.

By the time that the UN had announced that the documents were "not authentic" at the beginning of March 2003 most of the world's press was looking the other way in anticipation of the commencement of a 'shock and awe' fireworks spectacular over the river Tigris. Even the BBC relegated its online coverage of this astonishing development to a single short paragraph in the middle of a longer report on weapons inspections and other Security Council matters.

Now, over two years later, more of the truth about the uranium forgeries is leaking out, and much of it appears to be pointing in the direction of Michael Ledeen or his associates.

Although his name is unfamiliar to most people, he is a key figure in Bush administration neo-conservative circles. Ledeen was described by the Christian Science Monitor in June this year as follows: "Seen by many as one of the most radical neoconservatives, Mr. Ledeen is said to frequently advise George W. Bush's top adviser Karl Rove on foreign policy matters. He is one of the strongest voices calling for regime change in Iran."

Rove himself has been deeply immersed, as a potential candidate for indictment, in the related 'Plamegate' grand jury inquiry lead by US special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald whose investigations are still continuing.

Fitzgerald's work has concerned the illegal leaking to the press of the identity of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame. The affair has already lead to the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby who, according to CNN, has been charged  "with lying to FBI agents and to the grand jury about two conversations with reporters, Tim Russert of NBC News and Matt Cooper of Time magazine". CNN reported 28 October that "Libby testified that he heard CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity from Russert when, in fact, he learned of Plame's identify from a CIA official, the indictment alleged. Libby also testified that he told Cooper that other reporters told him Plame's identity, which the indictment alleges was not the case. The indictments were not directly related to the actual leak Plame's name."

The front page of the London Times reported the next day that "The charges raise the prospect of a trial turning the spotlight on how the Administration built its case for war and on Mr Cheney. He was named in indictments but not accused. Mr Libby, 55, is accused of lying about how and when he learnt about Ms Plame’s identity in 2003, and how he came to pass information about her to reporters. The indictment states that Mr Libby told investigators that he learnt about Ms Plame’s CIA status from an NBC journalist. Instead, he learnt it from Mr Cheney, the indictment says, thrusting the Vice-President to the heart of the scandal."

Valerie Plame was an undercover agent working on WMD intelligence for the CIA. Her husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, became an enemy of the Bush administration when (in the summer of 2003) he publicly exposed as false the White House's claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger for an alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Many believe that the motive for the leaking of Ms Plame's name into the public domain by the Bush Administration (which destroyed her career at the CIA) was not simply retaliation against Wilson, but rather a direct attempt to intimidate anyone else who might have been considering leaking evidence of White House malfeasance in connection with its fabricated case for war. According to the New York Times 29 October "the charges [against Libby] suggest that White House officials did, in fact, use Mrs. Wilson's classified CIA job as a weapon against a critic of administration policy - to smear his reputation or to warn off other dissenters".

Although it has been widely reported, often breathlessly, that the charges against Libby are extremely serious, in reality they are just loose change compared to the big buck lies that were deployed by the Bush administration to fraudulently take America to war in Iraq. In the process history is steadily making a laughing stock out of those political and media 'cognoscenti' who have failed to confront those lies in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The key question, therefore, is whether or not Fitzgerald will stop at the Plame name leaking dimension to the uranium saga? Or will he allow this fringe incident to unravel the whole thread through to an investigation into who forged the Niger uranium documents?

It is not clear how far the powers delegated to Fitzgerald under his appointment in the case allow him to go. However, given the history of previous investigations into cases of US political conspiracy, as in the Iran-Contra and 'October Surprise' hearings, not everyone is holding their breath that Fitzgerald will branch out far enough, although the moral justification for pursuing such a line of inquiry continues to intensify.

There is a parallel investigation into the uranium forgeries themselves that has been going on for a couple of years now lead by the FBI.  But once again few are holding their breath - particularly given the way the Bureau's previous investigation into the post 9/11 anthrax attacks appears to have been frustrated once it became clear that the evidence was leading to people at the Department of Defence as the source of the material used.

According to the Washington Post 16 September 2005 "Four years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, one of the most exhaustive investigations in FBI history has yielded no arrests and is showing signs of growing cold as officials have sharply reduced the number of agents on the case.... The investigation has been so expansive that authorities now are in the process of taking inventory. The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation and explore issues including what has been the prevailing theory: The culprit is a U.S. scientist who had access to the high-grade anthrax and the knowledge of how to physically manipulate it and use it as a weapon. That theory emerged early in the investigation and remains viable today, authorities said.... The report will include the names of various people deemed to be 'persons of interest' over the years, as well as updates on the scientific tests. Authorities long ago narrowed down the type of anthrax to a strain called Ames but have been unable to identify the lab of origin. Much attention has focused on the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, housed at Fort Detrick in the Frederick area.Authorities hope that the report, which is to be completed soon and forwarded to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, will provide a concise road map of the probe and help determine its future direction. Current and former law enforcement authorities said investigators and prosecutors often prepare such reports in complex, high-profile cases that go unresolved for years. 'It doesn't sound like they're close to cracking the case,' said Eric H. Holder Jr., a Washington lawyer who was deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration.'.... Meanwhile, in the United States, FBI agents and scientists have been working to match the gene sequence of the mailed anthrax spores to a specific laboratory. They remain particularly interested in such laboratories as Fort Detrick, Louisiana State University and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.... In light of the obstacles facing investigators, some relatives of the victims are wondering if the anthrax case will ever be solved. 'It's been out there too long. I don't think they're going to find out' who did it, said Thomas L. Morris III of Suitland, whose father, D.C. postal worker Thomas Morris Jr., died of inhalation anthrax in October 2001."

It appears there may be people within the system who would prefer if the case is never solved.

According to a BBC report 18 August 2002 entitled 'Anthrax killer is US defence insider' "An FBI forensic linguistics expert believes the US anthrax attacks were carried out by a senior scientist from within America's biological-defence community. Professor Don Foster - who helped convict Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and unveiled Joe Klein as the author of the novel Primary Colors - says the evidence points to someone with high-ranking military and intelligence connections. Speaking about the investigation for the first time, Prof Foster told the BBC he had identified two suspects who had both worked for the CIA, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and other classified military operations.... he fears the investigation is now being hampered in its gathering of vital documents that could lead to the killer.... He said: 'It's very frustrating. Ordinarily with the FBI if there's some documents needed - known writings - boom, they're on my desk the next day. 'My two suspects both appear to have CIA connections. These two agencies, the CIA and the FBI, are sometimes seen as rivals. 'My anxiety is that the FBI agents assigned to this case are not getting full and complete co-operation from the US military, CIA and witnesses who might have information about this case...."

The US anthrax attacks were a post-9/11 psychologically traumatising episode that played a key role in sensitising US public pinion to the 'need' to tackle Iraq's alleged biological and chemical weapons capability.

The Italian Connection And The Naming Of The Alleged Document Forgers

However, if the FBI has so far been unwilling or unable to come up with some names for indictment in the anthrax and uranium cases, it appears that the Italian parliament is prepared to be a little bolder when it comes to its own investigation of the latter. Some considerable time ago the source of the forged uranium documents had been traced to Italy.

The names of the alleged forgers (two former CIA officers) are now in the public domain and are reported to have been handed over to Fitzgerald during the course of his 'Plamegate' investigations. The information is understood to have been provided to Fitzgerald by the Italian parliament in a report of its own findings regarding the uranium saga, although the names are only in the public domain by virtue of a leak.

The names appear to have first surfaced in a French report in July citing the results of the inquiry by the Italian parliament even though its report has yet to be officially released. As in the anthrax case the evidence reportedly points to American suspects, with Michael Ledeen alleged as a conduit for the forgeries (see below).

Mr Ledeen's connections to Italian intelligence are well known. A major figure in the Iran-Contra arms scandal of the 1980s, Ledeen lived in Italy for many years.

The September 2004 edition of Washington Monthly reported that in December 2001 Ledeen and Pentagon officials met in Rome with (amongst others) Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (Italian foreign intelligence), and Antonio Martino, the Italian Minister of Defense. The Rome station chief of the CIA was not informed of the meeting.  Washington Monthly asks "why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA - a clear breach of U.S. government protocol?". The journal reports that the meeting was "a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq" and that, according to United Press International, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon.

The UK's Independent newspaper appears to be the only major British news outlet which has so far reported on Ledeen in this context. This it did on 9 October in an article by Norman Dombey, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear capability. The article was entitled "Tell us who fabricated the Iraq evidence". It referred directly to Ledeen's December 2001 meeting with SISMI in Rome.

Significantly United Press International reported 24 October that "NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House. This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has 'sexed up' the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

However, potentially the most important recent development (which has does not so far seem to have been covered by the mainstream media) is the claim that the names and details of the alleged forgers have been handed over to Fitzgerald by the Italians. Justin Raimondo, is editorial director of the Antiwar.com web site and a supporter of Pat Buchanan (a former Nixon aide and staunch critic of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy).

On 19 October Raimondo wrote that: "Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries? Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald asked for and 'has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,' the former CIA officer tells me: 'Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.'"

MSNBC's 'Hardball' TV programme on 21 October 2005 also confirmed that the Italian government had handed over a report to Fitzgerald. The MSNBC account states that "according to Italian sources the sealed portions of the report conclude the fraudulent papers were created by associates of Ahmed of Chalibi". It may well be that MSNBC also knows the names cited by Raimondo, but is hesitating to divulge them. Clearly, though Chalabi, is the overlap in the two versions from Raimondo and MSNBC concerning who is alleged to be responsible.

Chalabi is, of course, a central character amongst the dramatis personae of whole 'Iraqgate' saga.

An Iraqi exile with close ties to the Pentagon, Chalabi was one of the main lobbyists for the Iraq war and supplier of false intelligence to the Bush administration and the media. Much of this false information was fed by Chalabi to Judith Miller at the New York Times, who subsequently also became a central figure in Fitzgerald's Plame investigation. Miller has been characterised by many as a tame media outlet used by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) formed in August 2002 in order to publicise the claimed threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

It now looks as if the false information promoted by Chalabi may have included the Niger forgeries, albeit produced in conjunction with others connected to the US government.

Chalabi is currently Deputy Prime Minister in Iraq, as well as serving as President of its Energy Council which is responsible for the country's oil sector. The BBC reported 10 October that "Iraq is on course for a 20% rise in its oil exports by the start of 2006, the head of its energy council says. Ahmad Chalabi said output for export should hit 1.8 million barrels a day by January, when elections take place and a new administration takes power. Talking to Reuters, he backed the idea that US and UK oil firms should have priority in Iraq's oil sector."

According to TIME magazine 22 October Chalabi may end up running Iraq: "He currently serves as Deputy Prime Minister in Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government. And now—trumpet clarion here—he is coming back to Washington in November at the invitation of Treasury Secretary John Snow. But Chalabi will have potentially more significant meetings with National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and perhaps Condoleezza Rice, both of whom—according to high-ranking Administration officials—believe that he is a plausible and acceptable candidate to be the next Prime Minister of Iraq when that nation votes, yet again, for a new government on Dec. 15."

The British Connection And The Role Of Rocco Martino

For the moment public attention on any White House role in the leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity to the media as investigated by Patrick Fitzgerald is understandable, but it is far from being the main issue in the Niger-Iraq uranium affair.

The real significance of the Plame saga is the much greater web of lies surrounding the broader Iraq uranium episode, and the subsequent cover-up of the forgeries dimension once it had embarrassingly surfaced at the UN. This is not just an issue for the White House. It is an episode in which the British government (or its intelligence services for those who believe that the latter frequently operate beyond the reach of political control) is also very probably complicit.

After changing the detail of its position on the subject in a rush of extraordinary public contortions in the summer of 2003 the British government ultimately maintained that its own claims about Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium from Africa were based on other intelligence. Yet it has never been willing to publicly disclose that evidence even though it has responsibilities to do so under two UN security council resolutions (see 'Fight Smart' Special Report, October 2003: Iraqgate 2003 - 'Axis of Weasel' - Washington, London and Rome).

At the very least the handling of the uranium 'evidence' by the British government was, in the absurdly polite words of a Foreign Affairs Select Committee report in July 2003, "very odd indeed". The committee complained that "the Government asserts that it was not relying on the evidence which has since been shown to have been forged, but that eight months later it is still reviewing the other evidence .....We recommend that the Government explain on what evidence it relied for its judgment in September 2002 that Iraq had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

On 27 October 2005, the day of the Lewis Libby indictment, world affairs correspondent for the BBC News website Paul Reynolds wryly commented on the British dimension to the Niger uranium fraud: "In February 2002, Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador was sent to Niger in West Africa to investigate intelligence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake (compressed uranium ore) there. Since Iraq had no civilian nuclear programme, the supposition was that it was seeking a source of fuel for a military one. The British government certainly believed the Niger report - and strangely enough after all that has happened, still does."

'Strangely enough' (as Reynolds may really have wanted to say), the probability that the British government doesn't believe this at all, and has lied heavily during the affair, is high.

On 1 August 2004 the Sunday Times in London ran the following eyebrow-raising disclosure: "The Sunday Times has tracked down a mysterious middleman who was a key figure in the notorious Niger uranium hoax before the Iraq war, writes Nicholas Rufford.   Speaking to a reporter in a cafe in Brussels last week, he claimed he had been an unwitting dupe in the scam, which embarrassed both Tony Blair and George W Bush over Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. The middleman, an Italian who uses the name Giacomo, is a small-time tipster said to have worked for Italy’s armed forces and intelligence services. He says Sismi, the Italian foreign intelligence service, used him to disseminate fake documents purporting to show Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. I received a call from a former colleague in Sismi,' Giacomo said. 'I was told a woman in the Niger embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents. Sismi wanted me to pass on the documents but they didn’t want anyone to know they had been involved.' He came into possession of a bundle of telexes, letters and contracts that appeared to show Saddam had struck a deal with Niger for 500 tons of uranium ore, enough when refined to make several weapons. Giacomo said he regretted the hoax but had believed the documents were genuine when he passed them to intelligence contacts and a journalist. The hoax had far-reaching effects. Presenting his dossier on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002, Blair accused Saddam of seeking 'significant quantities of uranium from Africa'. Bush reiterated the charge in his state of the union speech. When Giacomo’s documents were discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, apologised. The British government and MI6 claim, however, they have independent evidence of Iraq’s 'Niger connection'”.

A day later the Financial Times in London identified 'Giacomo' as one Rocco Martino, an Italian business man. The article also described Mr Martino's relationship with French intelligence with whom he had been involved since 1999 as part of an "operation to safeguard Niger's uranium industry and prevent weapons proliferation".

According to the FT "The operation, begun in 1999, reflected concern among several intelligence services that rogue states may have been trying to procure uranium. France was also concerned about the security of its own uranium supplies from Niger, as well as the security of the two French companies that control Niger's uranium industry."

The paper adds "[Martino] subsequently provided France with more documents, which turned out to have been forged when they were handed to the International Atomic Energy Agency by US diplomats. ..... According to the Sunday Times, which interviewed him under his pseudonym of Giacomo, Mr Martino said the Italian foreign intelligence service, the SISMI, had forged the documents and had arranged for them to be passed to him by an official of Niger's embassy in Rome. Mr Martino, who has not returned telephone calls since first contacted by the Financial Times a month ago, has retained personal contacts with some serving and retired officers in the SISMI since he briefly served in the intelligence services in the 1970s. The Italian government yesterday strongly denied it had played any role in the forging of the documents or their dissemination, saying the accusations are 'completely false'".

The news outlet which has reported most extensively on the Italian investigations into the Niger uranium forgeries is the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It ran a new three part series on 24, 25 and 26 of October.

La Repubblica's account of 24 October quotes Martino directly as saying (English translation)"It’s true, I had a hand in the dissemination of those (Niger uranium) documents, but I was duped. Both Americans and Italians were involved behind the scenes. It was a disinformation operation.... At the end of 2001, SISMI handed the [Niger uranium] yellowcake dossier to British MI6". The report also describes SISMI officer Antonio Nucera's role in assembling the fraudulent documents. Nucera was Deputy Chief of the SISMI centre in viale Pasteur in Rome, and head of the 1st and the 8th divisions covering weapons and technology transfers and WMD proliferation counter-espionage, respectively, for Africa and the Middle East.

However, it would appear La Repubblica has only been able to find out so much. It states that "Martino conceals the identify of the architects behind the 'operation' and appears to be merely a pawn, like his partners in crime. So who is the puppeteer pulling the strings behind their sordid adventure?"

But unambiguously the paper claims "The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminium tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war. They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the [New York Times] reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002."

The 25 October edition provided Part 2 of La Repubblica's account in which it further claims that:

"It is a known fact that on the eve of the war on Iraq and under the guidance of Palazzo Chigi [official residence of the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi] Diplomacy Advisor Gianni Castellaneta (today Italian Ambassador to the United States), SISMI chief Pollari organizes his appointment book in Washington with the help of the staff of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. La Repubblica has documented the dual channel used by the Italian government and by Italian intelligence. According to intelligence agents, in at least one of the backdoor meetings in which Pollari participated, the the creation of a conduit took place linking government, security agencies and intelligence.

[Our] Brief synopsis [is]: Pollari’s SISMI wants to give credence to the story of acquisition of uranium ore for the purpose of building a nuclear bomb. The scheme is transparent. The 'authentic' papers concerning an attempt to acquire uranium in Niger (stale Italian intelligence left over from the 80’s) are a legacy of a former SISMI Deputy Chief in Rome, Antonio Nucera. They are bundled up together with other worthless documents assembled helter-skelter after a simulated burglary of the Niger Embassy (embassy letterhead and stamps are taken). The documents are exhibited by Pollari’s men to the CIA Station Chief in Rome while SISMI’s 'postman', a certain individual by the name of Rocco Martino, delivers a copy to Richard Dearlove’s MI6 in London. ......

We’ll now provide the second chapter of the Great Italian Yellowcake Scam orchestrated in Italy to provide the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. We reintroduce Greg Thielmann, former director of the US Department of State's intelligence bureau, who encounters the Italian report on the uranium on his desk. He does not recall the precise date.

Thielmann recounts the events of autumn 2001 in generalities. But the precise date may prove revealing: it is October 15, 2001. On that date three events are woven together to produce an astounding coincidence: Nicolò Pollari is appointed to head SISMI by the Italian government on September 27, after serving as Number Two at CESIS (a coordinating intelligence agency at Palazzo Chigi). Silvio Berlusconi is finally invited to the White House by George W. Bush. October 15 marks the date of the first CIA report on the evidence assembled by the Italians. It’s impossible to say if all this is coincidence, but one cannot ignore the context: The Italians possess a burning desire score a win.... It is a known fact that Bush shows the West Wing’s Rose Garden to Berlusconi and the CIA acknowledges, as reported by Russ Hoyle (who has been analyzing the conclusions of the US Congressional Investigation Committee) that Italian intelligence has some neatly prepackaged information with a pretty bow on the box: Negotiations (between Niamey and Baghdad) on the purchase of uranium have been ongoing since the start of 1999; the sale [of uranium to Baghdad] was approved by the Niger Supreme Council in 2000. No documentary evidence is offered to show that any shipment of uranium has occured. CIA analysts consider the report to be 'somewhat limited' and 'lacking in necessary detail'. Intelligence and Research analysts at the US Department of State qualify the intelligence as 'highly suspect.'

The first contact with the American intelligence community is not particularly gratifying for Pollari but it is still highly useful. The SISMI director, who is no fool, surveys the landscape and the players of the ongoing behind-the-scenes battle in the American Administration between those who stress caution and pragmatism (the US Department of State and the CIA) and those who are looking for an excuse to start a war (Cheney and the Pentagon), which is already on the drawing board. However, when the SISMI director returns to Italy, he perceives a similar battle underway in Rome. Gianni Castellaneta advises Pollari to look in other directions, while Defense Minister Antonio Martino tell Pollari to expect a visit from an old friend of Italy.

This old friend is Michael A. Ledeen... Ledeen is in Rome on a mission from the Office of Special Plans, created at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz to collect intelligence which would support a war on Iraq. A source at Forte Braschi [SISMI headquarters] tells La Repubblica: 'On the subject of intelligence collected on the uranium purchase, Pollari gets the cold shoulder from [Rome] CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli. Apparently, Castelli has dropped the matter entirely. Taking a hint, Pollari discusses the matter with Michael Ledeen....' No one knows what prompts Ledeen to return to Washington. But at the beginning of 2002, Paul Wolfowitz convinces Dick Cheney that the uranium trail picked up by Italian intelligence should be explored in closer detail."

On 8 September 2002 Judith Miller co-authored a piece in the New York Times claiming evidence of Iraq's purchase of aluminium tubes for the purpose of uranium enrichment as part of a nuclear weapons programme.

In its third and final article of the series on 26 October La Repubblica focuses on SISMI's assistance with this additional bogus claim. But first some further background is useful.

Today Stephen Hadley is National Security Adviser to President Bush. In 2002 he was deputy to Condoleezza Rice when she held that position. Hadley is also a ''former Pentagon aide to Vice President Cheney" according to Senator Bob Graham.

Hadley was the person who had been responsible for allowing the uranium claim to be included in Bush's State of the Union address on 28 January 2003.

When this was subsequently discovered the Washington Post 24 July 2003  reported as follows: "Hadley is [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice's top aide. He says he forgot about the warnings from Tenet -- two memos and one phone call -- and did not tell her. If that's the case, he's in the wrong job. If it's not the case -- and a reasonable man could have reasonable doubt -- is it possible Rice said nothing to Bush? Maybe not. But if not, why not? That's her job. By now it is clear that the White House was so desperate to buttress its unsupportable claims of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat that it was willing to include the most questionable of evidence. That happened not only with the uranium reference but also with another piece of supposedly significant evidence -- those aluminum tubes that turned out to play no role in any nuclear weapons program. Who was behind this? Rice? Dick Cheney? The president himself? The uranium reference kept turning up like a bad penny. It had a sponsor -- someone awfully high up. Each time the buck passes, another level of incompetence -- or shenanigans -- is exposed. Now in the chain of supposed bumblers we have Hadley and, by extension, Rice. Either they did not do their jobs or the jobs they did were so frankly political that they both ought to move over to the Republican National Committee, where, on a given day, spin and exaggeration are the sole product. Tenet, though, gets pride of place. He has put a huge dent in the vaunted -- and valued -- independence of the CIA. It's impossible to see him now as a pillar of integrity, someone who speaks his mind no matter what and values keeping his independence over keeping his job. He's shilled for the president once too often. He's got to go."

So now let's consider what La Repubblica's article of 26 October has to say about Hadley, the aluminium tubes and the role of SISMI.

La Repubblica reports that "On September 9, 2002, seated in front of Stephen Hadley, Pollari has the means to address even this aspect of the issue. SISMI claims that it has documentary proof of the acquisition of aluminum tubes by Iraq..... So what does he tell him? Pollari keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t reveal what he knows about the aluminum tubes, which are the source of so much concern (or even enthusiasm) for the Bush Administration. The shame is that those 7075-T6 tubes, 900 millimeters long, 81 millimeters in diameter, 3.3 millimeters thick, are well-known hardware to the Italian Army. They are 81-mm rocket artillery shells used in the Medusa air-to-ground missile system installed on Italian Army and Navy helicopters. In reality, the Iraqis are merely attempting to reproduce weaponry with which they became familiar during the long years of economic, military and nuclear cooperation between Rome and Baghdad."

In other words the Italians knew what the tubes were really for but chose not to disclose this to the Bush administration.

At this point the paper also reminds its readers that "scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (where uranium for the US nuclear arsenal is enriched using centrifuges) ........ [had said] that the tubes are too narrow, too heavy, too long and likely to split if used as centrifuge components. They conclude with: Those tubes are used for manufacturing a specific type of artillery shell."

In the article La Repubblica also interviews Greg Thielmann, former head of the State Department's Intelligence Service who resigned before the war over the Bush administration's distortions of intelligence about Iraq. Theilman provides the following explanation for Italian participation in Washington's fraudulent game: "But seriously, haven’t you yet understood why the chief of Italian military intelligence did not provide us with any indication that would have allowed us to definitively discard the notion that the tubes would be used in someone’s nuclear program? Well, I have an idea for you. SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the US Administration."

In this respect the article also appears to shed some light on the sole remaining 'evidence' left today of Saddam's supposed efforts to acquire uranium after the first Gulf war. This is the claim that the British government alone is now left hanging onto, and then only by its fingertips. Many presume it is doing so in order to sheild itself from accusations of complicity in the use of the Italian forged documents, having committed itself to the uranium story in the Downing St dossier of September 2002.

La Repubblica states "Even today, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw continues to repeat that the 'Italian dossier' was not the basis behind Blair’s words and that MI6 is in possession of previously acquired intelligence. Yet such intelligence 'evidence' has never been produced. If it were to come out--a source at [SISM headquarters] Forte Braschi tells La Repubblica, it would be easily discovered with a little sleuthing that that the 'evidence' is in fact stale Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980s and shared with our friend, Hamilton MacMillan [of MI6]." (in another context an earlier PBS report dated 23 October 1990 confirms the existence of MacMillan as an MI6 agent in relation to drug dealing and the IRA).

If this account is to be believed all the British government is left clutching at is its intelligence material from before the first Gulf war. If so, then it's no wonder it hasn't disclosed it.

Unfortunately for London, Washington and Rome, La Repubblica's articles have not gone completely unnoticed and the temperature of the political water is getting hotter.

According to an Associated Press report 25 October "The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday. Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman. She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.... Pollari's hearing will not be open to the public, but the commission's president, Enzo Bianco, was expected to brief reporters after the meeting, Panella said. La Repubblica claimed that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Pollari was under pressure from Premier Silvio Berlusconi to make a strong contribution to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The newspaper is a strong opponent of Berlusconi. To satisfy the request, Pollari used a dossier that originally had been fabricated in early 2001 with material stolen from Niger's embassy in Rome, La Repubblica reported. Between the end of 2001 and 2002, Pollari allegedly used official and unofficial channels to pass on the forged documents about the uranium deal to CIA officers in Rome and to the British intelligence agency. When foreign intelligence agencies met the documents with skepticism, Pollari used his own contacts in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and an aide to the president's national security adviser to promote the dossier, La Repubblica said, without elaborating."

Following up on the details provided in the reporting by La Repubblica the US journal 'The American Prospect' already appears to have found its own independent confirmation that Pollari has been caught lying about at least some of his involvement with the White House.

In its edition of 25 October the Prospect reports that"In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax. Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then - Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday. Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the US administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet."

Based on Repubblica's reporting the Prospect also points out "the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proffered less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.) The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the US government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries. The forged documents were cabled from the US embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the US embassy. Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to US and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion. What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.... if anyone knew who was actually responsible for the White House's trumpeting of the Niger claims, it would seem from the Repubblica report that Hadley did. He also knew that the CIA, which had initially rejected the Italian claims, was not to blame. Hadley's meeting with Pollari, at precisely the time when the Niger forgeries came into the possession of the US government, may explain the seemingly hysterical White House overreaction to Wilson's article almost a year later. "

Energy Apocalypse And The Petro-Dollar - 'It's The Money Stupid'

In an article 26 July 1998 entitled "Energy apocalypse looms as the world runs out of oil" the Observer newspaper in London quoted Franco Bernabe, chief executive of the Italian oil company Eni SpA on the issue of global peak oil. Bernabe said "My forecast is that between 2000 and 2005 the world will be reaching peak production from our known fields."  Since then new oil discoveries have been trifling.

According to a Dow Jones Newswire 4 July 2003 "The Italian state holds 30% of [oil company] Eni's capital and is by far the company's biggest shareholder. Eni's strategy to reduce exposure to petrochemicals and invest more resources into its lucrative exploration and production business is a key part of Mincato's strategy, which was well-received during a January presentation to institutional investors in London...'The Treasury expresses its deep satisfaction with Eni's results and programs,' ministry spokesman Mario Stella Richter told a shareholders meeting in May."

It may not come as a complete surprise, therefore, to discover that Italy is not a disinterested party when considering the future of oil production in Iraq. According to a Reuters's Italian language report of 9 May 2003 (English translation)"Eni has the aspiration of being in Iraq, even if at the moment the situation in the Middle Eastern country still is confused after the conflict with the USA".

Having apparently provided so much of the casus belli it would be surprising if Italy did not have expectations of being invited by the White House to any subsequent feast at the Mesopotamian oil trough, albeit that so far the outcome in Iraq has worked out rather differently (on 24 October the BBC reported that "Oil exports from Iraq have been completely halted by a combination of attacks and bad weather, reports say. Four sabotage attacks brought exports from Northern Iraq to a halt on Sunday and officials warned the damage may take a month to repair. The problem worsened on Monday when a pipeline carrying crude to the Turkish port of Ceyhan was hit in an attack.")

And just exactly why was British Prime Minister Tony Blair invited to take his summer holiday with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2004? Did they have more to discuss than just tennis, given that the Italian parliamentary investigations into 'Nigergate' had been on-going since 2003?

Certainly the latest developments emerging from the parliamentary inquiry in Rome are likely to provide a certain edge to talks between the Bush administration and Berlusconi as he visits the White House on 31 October, organised "to discuss a range of issues" according to a Reuters report 17 October.

Berlusconi appears to be squirming. According to a Reuters report 29 October "Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on the eve of a trip to Washington, said he repeatedly tried to persuade U.S. President George W. Bush against invading Iraq. The Italian leader voiced his unease with the military operation to remove Saddam Hussein in a television interview to be broadcast on Monday, the day he meets Bush. The Italian leader has been defending himself against accusations at home that the country's intelligence agency, possibly after government pressure, passed off fake documents to Washington used to bolster claims of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The documents purported that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger. His office has sent out statements in the past week categorically denying the accusations, made by left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper. Sismi intelligence agency chief Nicolo Pollari is due to address a closed-door parliamentary panel over the matter on November 3."

Given that Italy's parliament and some of its media apparently now have most of the story behind the Niger uranium forgeries the New York Times is moved to ask whatever happened to the FBI investigation into the matter. The answer answer seems to be 'not much'.

Prompted by the stories breaking from La Repubblica earlier in the week the New York Times reports 28 October that "A two-year inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and intelligence officials say.... The continuing inquiry into the source of the forged documents has been conducted separately from the investigation by the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak case, which has to do with whether Bush administration officials committed crimes related to disclosing the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, an undercover C.I.A. officer."

That of course begs an important question. If the names of US citizens allegedly implicated in the Niger forgeries have been handed over to Fitzgerald during the 'Plamegate' investigation (as reported by Raimondo), does the FBI inquiry also have them? And if they do, what are they doing with them?

The New York Times adds that "Law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the two issues are related", a suggestion which is, of course, highly improbable.

Nonetheless, if a report by Newsweek back on 22 September 2004 is anything to go by the FBI hasn't been rushing to find one: "At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger documents in an effort to determine if the United States government had been duped by a deliberate 'disinformation' campaign organized by a foreign intelligence agency or others with a political agenda relating to Iraq. So far, the bureau appears to have made little progress in unraveling the case. 'The senator is frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,' said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Senator Rockefeller, who was recently briefed on the status of the FBI probe. One striking aspect of the FBI’s investigation is that, at least as of this week, (Rocco) Martino has told associates he has never even been interviewed by the bureau—despite the fact that he was publicly identified by the Financial Times of London as the source of the documents more than six weeks ago and was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be interviewed for the   '60 Minutes' report."

Moreover CBS cancelled the broadcast of the Martino interview and related material just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of September 8 2004 despite the fact that "A team of '60 Minutes' correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud" according to CBS sources who spoke to Newsweek.

At the heart of the 'Plamegate' affair was, besides retribution against Wilson himself, the attempt by the White House (as the New York Times has since observed following the indictment of Libby) to send an intimidating message to anyone else who might be disposed to leak information about the false evidence presented in relation to Iraq's alleged WMD programmes - particularly anyone within the CIA (once an agent's cover is blown that is likely to be the end of their job).

A day after the Libby indictment Wilson wrote in the Los Angeles Times "The attacks on Valerie and me were upsetting, disruptive and vicious. They amounted to character assassination. Senior administration officials used the power of the White House to make our lives hell for the last 27 months.  But more important, they did it as part of a clear effort to cover up the lies and disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That is the ultimate crime. The war in Iraq has claimed more than 17,000 dead and wounded American soldiers, many times more Iraqi casualties and close to $200 billion. It has left our international reputation in tatters and our military broken. It has weakened the United States, increased hatred of us and made terrorist attacks against our interests more likely in the future. It has been, as Gen. William Odom suggested, the greatest strategic blunder in the history of our country. We anticipate no mea culpa from the president for what his senior aides have done to us. But he owes the nation both an explanation and an apology."

Meanwhile the New York Times report of 28 October confirms that "Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, have received classified briefings on the status of the F.B.I. inquiry. The two are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the intelligence committee.... Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, would say only that he and Mr. Roberts had been briefed by the F.B.I. about the Niger inquiry. An aide to Mr. Roberts said only that 'ongoing investigations of that type are the kinds of things they are briefed on.'"

No doubt if the invasion of Iraq had turned out to be a success in terms of creating greater stability in the region, all of this might long have since been forgotten about. But it hasn't and the situation has only been deteriorating.

Damningly for the British government The Sunday Telegraph 23 October reported that "Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed. The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country. It demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation. The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which Tony Blair and George W Bush believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country... . The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces.... The opinion poll, carried out in August, also debunks claims by both the US and British governments that the general well-being of the average Iraqi is improving in post-Saddam Iraq."

Throughout this long saga further pressure of an economic kind has also been building. This is particularly so on the US side of the Anglo-American alliance as additional weapons of mass financial destruction emerge and threaten to proliferate. These have already been serving to exert downward pressure on the dollar, further exacerbating the enormous financial strain incompetently imposed on the US Treasury as a result of the Cheney-Rumsfeld misadventure in the Gulf. Since the original analysis of the Iraq 'problem' provided by the James Baker Policy Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations in April 2001 America's energy and general financial security has only deteriorated further.

According Agence France Presse 8 June 2003 "The inexorable rise in Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves is being accompanied by a steady shift from the dollar to the euro that is likely to continue as Russia draws closer to Europe, Moscow analysts believe.... Russia's reserves have been increasing relentlessly, buoyed by high oil prices.... The decline in the value of the dollar relative to the euro is encouraging the process...."

A China Daily story of 8 May 2004 also reported that "China is looking to diversify its foreign exchange reserves out of US dollars, according to its top foreign exchange manager. China's chief forex regulator, Guo Shuqing, said in a recent Financial Times interview the make-up of the country's US$440-billion forex cash pile was being altered to include more European and Asian bonds, given concerns over a weaker US dollar."

And just like Saddam Hussein it now appears President Chavez of Venezuela is trying to do his financial bit to weaken the US by taking Venezuelan capital out of the US financial system and moving it to Europe. This follows a recent call by Bush supporter and Christian TV evangelist, the Rev Pat Robertson, for Chavez to be assassinated.

Associated Press reported 30 September that "Venezuela has moved its central bank foreign reserves out of U.S. banks, liquidated its investments in U.S. Treasury securities and placed the funds in Europe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday. 'We've had to move the international reserves from U.S. banks because of the threats,' from the U.S., Chavez said during televised remarks from a South American summit in Brazil. 'The reserves we had (invested) in U.S. Treasury bonds, we've sold them and we moved them to Europe and other countries,' he said."

Whether motivated by power politics or prudent financial management, Chavez would seem to be in good company.

On 29 January the financial news service Bloomberg ran the following surprise story: "Bill Gates, whose net worth of $46.6 billion makes him the world's richest person, is betting against the U.S. dollar. 'I'm short the dollar,' Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told Charlie Rose in an interview late yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 'The ol' dollar, it's gonna go down.' Gates's concern that widening U.S. budget and trade deficits are undermining the dollar was echoed in Davos by policymakers including European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The dollar fell 21 percent against a basket of six major currencies from the start of 2002 to the end of last year. The trade deficit swelled to a record $609.3 billion last year and total U.S. government debt rose 8.7 percent to $7.62 trillion in the past 12 months. 'It is a bit scary,' Gates said. 'We're in uncharted territory when the world's reserve currency has so much outstanding debt. A week before Group of Seven officials meet to discuss currency policy, Trichet repeated the ECB's concern over the dollar's drop to record lows against the 12-nation euro currency.... Gates reflected the views of his friend Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has bet against the dollar since 2002. Buffett said last week that the U.S. trade gap will probably further weaken the currency.'''

So in the end it seems money can speak louder than patriotism.

But then this is nothing new. Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W, was only too happy to continue his business dealings with Nazi Germany during the second world war until such time as the assets of the New York bank of which he was director were seized under the 'Trading With The Enemy Act' in 1942 (Newsweek; Associated Press; Guardian).

Whether in Washington, London, Baku, Almaty, Lagos or Riyadh there are few things in life which are a bigger motivator of human behaviour in circles of real power. So in the end, the stark reality has to be faced up to. Forget 'freedom and democracy'. Because beneath it all much boils down to something far simpler.

Yes, 'it's the money stupid'.

The Iraq war episode was no exception.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

"The relationship with Berlusconi is one of three friendships which are crucial to Blair and say something significant about him - the others being with George Bush and Rupert Murdoch.... Berlusconi is perhaps the most unexpected of these pivotal friendships, and thereby the most definitive of Blair. It is an apparently curious closeness, between the billionaire mass-media mogul, member of the terrifying P2 masonic lodge, forever skirting the law and changing it to suit his ends ... and the Labour leader elected in 1997 not least for his untaintedness. Between the man who made his fortune by building an empire based on trash television and dancing girls, and the devout Christian installed in Downing Street. When Berlusconi first came to power in 1994, we suspected, but could not prove, that the 'special secretary' managing his Forza Italia campaign, Marcello Dell'Utri, was mobilising the blood-stained voting clout of the Mafia - for which he was jailed last December. And Dell'Utri's patron was the man Blair this summer called his closest friend in Europe. The construction of Berlusconi's palatial villa in which the Blairs stayed (built specially for their visit), was under criminal investigation at the time, for allegedly having been built illegally, but why should Blair or Berlusconi care? The latter simply passed an amnesty law exempting all hitherto 'abusively' constructed buildings. Presumably, Blair courts these captains of the political right not just because he needs their power or is enamoured by their wealth, but because they stand for something within him."
By their friends shall we know the Sultans of Bling
Guardian, 26 October 2005

Who Is Michael Ledeen
And Why Is He Under The Forgeries Microscope?

".......In this context the following exchange 28 July at a White House press briefing between a journalist and White House press secretary Scott Mcllenan is 'interesting' (source White House web site):

Q: Scott, an article in the American Conservative by Philip Giraldi, former intelligence operative, indicated the Vice President has revamped strategy towards Iran where there are now 300 to 400 missiles targeted various sites in Iran, including tactical nuclear missiles, especially aimed at the Iranian nuclear capabilities. These are now, according to Giraldi, also under command of the theater commander.

Given our problems with Iran and the fact that now that they have decided to go for the full cycle of their peaceful nuclear program, might we be anxious that if there were a terrorist incident here in the United States in any way connected to Iran, that there might be a knee-jerk reaction of utilizing this hair-trigger against the Iranians?

MR. McCLELLAN: One, I appreciate your question. I'm not going to get into accepting anything that you alleged in your comments. I'm not going to get into discussing matters relating to national security of that nature.

According to Giraldi this is another Cheney 'initiative'. In the American Conservative article referred to Giraldi states "The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."

The 'American Conservative' is a magazine co-published by Pat Buchanan, a former aide to Richard Nixon who also served for a time as White House Communications Director during the Reagan administration. He twice unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president.

Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism official who also gave a detailed US radio interview on this subject 26 July (presumed web site, not broadcast, date) in which he referred to the 'war on terror' as "basically a fiction". He points out that "we do have a vital strategic interest in the oil reserves that are in that [Persian Gulf] area. But what I would like to see is a candid discussion of what our interests in the area are, what our equities are, and what the downside of maintaining a presence in the area is. We haven't seen any of that .... It's policy that has created these issues, and the policy should be openly debated in front of the American public, and not just kind of brushed away and disguised as a 'war against terror'".

Giraldi also says in the last few minutes of the interview that he believes two former CIA officers were responsible for the forged documents used by the United States to claim that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium from Niger as part of an alleged nuclear weapons programme. The documents were revealed by officials at the UN to be 'not authentic' shortly before the invasion of Iraq.

The 'intelligence' origin of the documents was later traced to SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, who are reported to have passed the documents to MI6 in 2002 although this is denied by the British government (TIME, 13 July 2003; Sunday Herald, 14 July 2003; Newsweek, 16 July 2003; Fox News, 16 July 2003; London Times, 17 July 2003; Washington Post, 18 July 2003; Guardian, 31 July 2003 ).

Giraldi's claim appears to be backed by Vincent Cannistraro. Cannistraro was Director of National Security Council Intelligence from 1984 to 1987. He went on to serve as chief of operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and he lead the CIA's investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103. When asked by a journalist in April if Michael Ledeen was responsible for the Niger forgeries, his response was "You’d be very close".

Giraldi says the former CIA officers are associated with Michael Ledeen, a major figure in the Iran-Contra arms scandal of the 1980s who also lived in Italy for many years. The September 2004 edition of Washington Monthly reports that in December 2001 Ledeen and Pentagon officials met in Rome with (amongst others) Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI, and Antonio Martino, the Italian Minister of Defense. The Rome station chief of the CIA was not informed of the meeting.

Washington Monthly asks "why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA - a clear breach of U.S. government protocol?". The journal reports that the meeting was "a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq" and that, according to United Press International, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon.

Ledeen has denied that he had any connection to the forged documents. Well, maybe. But what about his associates formerly from the CIA? Although he hasn't publicly named them, Giraldi seems to know who they are.

According to the BBC's Panorama programme 18 May 2003 "Michael Ledeen has been branded an 'ultra neo-conservative' and is seen by his critics as the most sinister and radical of them all.... A former Rome Correspondent for the New Republic newspaper, Ledeen first rose to political prominence as a member of the National Security Council during Ronald Reagan's reign. But it was in 1985, that he became a well-known figure in the US when his Israeli intelligence contacts were used to help broker the illegal Iran/contra rebel affair.... Prof Ledeen is also a student of Machiavelli and has written a book about the Renaissance philosopher whose name has become synonymous with strong and brutal governments... Prof Ledeen is also believed to have the ear of the White House's current Chief of Staff Karl Rove..."

Ledeen wrote in the National Review 6 August 2002 that "One can only hope that we turn the [Middle East] region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That's our mission in the war against terror."

This would seem to fit in neatly with Cheney's reported contingency plan to 'nuke' Iran in the event of another terrorist strike on America, whether Iran is connected to it or not.

However, under the title "War-Gaming the Mullahs" Newsweek magazine reported 27 September 2004 that "Israel, which has long regarded Iran as a more dire threat than Iraq, is making thinly veiled threats of a unilateral pre-emptive attack, like its 1981 airstrike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.... Iran's facilities (which it insists are for peaceful purposes) are at the far edge of combat range for Israel's aircraft; They're also widely dispersed and, in many cases, deep underground . But America certainly could do it—and has given the idea some serious thought. 'The U.S. capability to make a mess of Iran's nuclear infrastructure is formidable,' says veteran Mideast analyst Geoffrey Kemp. 'The question is, what then?' NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA and DIA have war-gamed the likely consequences of a U.S. pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. No one liked the outcome. As an Air Force source tells it, 'The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating.'"

'Dealing With Oil Presssure' Energy Update, September 2005 www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/EnergySept2005.htm

End Game In Iraq

"By the time the war against Iraq began, much of the media had been conditioned to believe, almost as an article of faith, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was bulging with chemical and biological weapons, despite years of United Nations inspections..... In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a battery of 'independent' weapons experts who repeated the mantra of Iraq concealment over and over. Journalists used these experts as outside sources who could independently evaluate the administration's claims. Yet often these 'experts' were simply repeating what they heard from U.S. officials, forming an endless loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering. Some 'experts' had a political axe to grind. Charles Duelfer, another former [weapons] inspector, had been a State Department functionary for years before joining the UNSCOM inspection team. At the U.N. Security Council, critics of U.S. policy viewed him with suspicion as a Trojan horse. Once his U.N. tour of duty was over, he became a 'resident scholar' at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, appearing on TV news shows as an impartial authority. He answered technical questions on subjects like liquid bulk anthrax and aerial satellite photos, offering his considered judgment that Iraq unquestionably was hiding a huge arsenal.  But off-camera, Duelfer admitted he was a committed proponent of regime change whether Saddam was harboring illegal weapons or not (Endgame, Scott Ritter)."
The Great WMD Hunt
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, July/August 2003

"It's now clear that the US will accept neither UN weapons inspectors nor the present chief inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, returning to Iraq..... Defiantly and arrogantly, the US has set up not one but two teams to do the job, a JIACG team and the Iraq Survey Group..... The other team is the Iraq Survey Team, described here by BBC  'Worse, the Americans have sought to poach several dozen of the UN's brightest inspectors from under his nose. The leader of the US team, called the Iraq Survey Group, is himself a former UN man, Charles Duelfer, who has been sharply critical of Mr Blix's leadership.' Where had I come across the name of Charles Duelfer before? Ah, yes! In former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter's magnificent book, End Game. Solving the Iraq Crisis. Duelfer was deputy to Richard Butler, UNSCOM's executive chairman. It was Butler's leadership, co-ordination and timing with US interests, as well as the fact that American spies infiltrated UNSCOM's work that led to the breakdown of the inspections in 1998, also well-described in Ritter's book and here in a Washington Post article. Ritter has nothing negative to say about Duelfer except in the Afterword. I quote: 'Charles Duelfer, the former deputy executive chairman for UNSCOM, retired State Department official, and currently a guest scholar at the Center for Stratgeic and International Studies, put it to me this way during a telephone conversation: 'I think it would be a mistake to focus on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. To do so ignores the larger issue of whether or not we want this dictator [Saddam Hussein] to have control over a nation capable of producing 6 million barrels of oil per day. We simply cannot allow Iraq to have that kind of power and influence. If you focus on the weapons issue, then the first thing you know, Iraq will be given a clean bill of health, sanctions will be lifted, and then Iraq will, at the first excuse, kick the inspectors out. We will be left with having no leverage over Iraq or how Saddam chooses to spend his money.' (Ritter 2002, p. 225)".
Dr Jan Oberg, former member of the Danish government's Committee on security and disarmament
The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, 24 April 2003

"... the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages. These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention.... Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a 'Pan Arab' leader supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments... Like it or not, Iraqi reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade.... There are few options available to United States to expand supply in the short run whether or not there are energy supply shortfalls. There are even fewer options available to reduce short-term demand. Fortunately, in the area of petroleum, the government has a fairly robust strategic reserve. But beyond petroleum, the options are severely limited. It is in this context that the Task Force recommends that the government consider all possible means of de-bottlenecking supplies and removing obstacles to delivery of supplies, both domestically and internationally.... In addition, the government needs to establish permanent machinery for integrating energy policy with economic, environmental, and foreign policy on a sustained basis. Virtually all domestically available raw-material energy resources are being produced that can be. In fact, there are virtually no actions that can be taken in the short term to increase these home-grown supplies.... Middle East Gulf crude oil currently makes up around 25 percent of world oil supply, but could rise to 30–40 percent during the next decade as the region’s key producers pursue higher investments to capture expanding demand for oil in Asia and the developing world. If political factors were to block the development of new oil fields in the Gulf, the ramifications for world oil markets could be quite severe."
STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the
James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations - April 2001

"For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."
Dick Cheney, Chief Executive of Halliburton, now Vice President of the United States
Speech at London Institute of Petroleum, Autumn Lunch 1999

The Bush Administration Has Every Intention Of Keeping US Troops In Iraq Permanently
In Order To Control The Whole Of The Middle East
And Syria And Iran Are Next In Line

It Was Never Any Different

"Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war. After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe, the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East."
Former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey
NATO conference, Prague, November 2002

"The United States is planning to establish up to four long-term military bases in Iraq. The proposal would transform America's ability to project its power in the Middle East. Future arrangements depend largely on who takes over as leader of Iraq.... One reason senior officials in the Pentagon favour Ahmad Chalabi, of the exile group the Iraqi National Congress, as the new leader is that he would be pro-American and happy to facilitate US bases.... With US troops also stationed in Afghanistan, Iran is now almost surrounded by American forces.... The new bases would also enable America to scale back its presence in Saudi Arabia..... Permanent US bases in Iraq would be just one element of a dramatic change in America's strategic posture since the September 11 attacks."
America plans military bases in Iraq to apply pressure on Middle East
Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2003

"America began a historic reshaping of its presence in the Middle East yesterday, announcing a halt to active military operations in Saudi Arabia and the removal of almost all of its forces from the kingdom within weeks. The withdrawal ends a contentious 12-year-old presence in Saudi Arabia and marks the most dramatic in a set of sweeping changes in the deployment of American forces after the war in Iraq. Withdrawal of 'infidel' American forces from Saudi Arabia has been one of the demands of Osama bin Laden, although a senior US military official said that this was 'irrelevant'.... Behind the dry talk of rearranging America's military 'footprint' in the Gulf, the great imponderables were bin Laden and Muslim radicals' complaints about the presence of 'infidels' in the birthplace of Islam. That presence was cited as one of the main justifications for the September 11 attacks. Despite American insistence that the withdrawal had not been 'dictated' by al-Qa'eda and that bin Laden was 'irrelevant', there can be little doubt that undercutting a central plank of al-Qa'eda's platform is one of several advantages offered by withdrawal from Saudi Arabia."
America to withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia
Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2003

"The United States is indeed pursuing a hard-edged regime change strategy for Syria. It’s happening right before your eyes. With the ever-complacent U.S. media itself bogged down in Iraq, and with the supine U.S. Congress unwilling to challenge our foreign policy apparatus, Syria is under the gun. As in Iraq, the United States is aggressively pursuing a regime change there without the slightest notion of what might come next or who might replace President Bashar Assad. Might it be the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood, by far the most powerful single force in largely Sunni Syria? Might the country fragment into pieces, as Iraq is now doing? The Bush administration doesn’t know, just as they didn’t know what might happen to Iraq in 2003. But they are going ahead anyway... Various U.S. Syria analysts who have not swallowed the neoconservative Kool-Aid argue that the United States is pursuing Regime Change II in Syria.  Among them is Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution, who suggests that Assad is moving slowly in the direction of political and economic reform—and might want our help. Others, including several former U.S. ambassadors, tell me that Syria can be a key partner in quieting down the crisis in Iraq, but U.S. belligerence is driving Syria in the other direction. And Scott Ritter and Sy Hersh, speaking in New York last week, noted that Syria (and its spy services) has been an important behind-the-scenes partner in attacking Al Qaeda since 2001. But 'So what?' argue the neoconservatives. It’s regime-change time, and they won’t let rational arguments get in their way.... Is it possible, after everything we’ve learned about the Bush administration’s lies and deception over Iraq, after the staggering cost of that misguided war to the United States, is it possible that the American body politic is going to let Bush, Cheney and Co. get away with shattering another Middle East state? It’s possible. Because it’s happening."
Syria: The Next Iraq
TomPaine.com, 24 October 2005

"While the countries of the eastern Mediterranean region produce only modest quantities of energy, they occupy a strategic location in terms of regional security and potential energy transit routes.... The pipeline between the Syrian port of Banias and the 'Strategic Pipeline' in Iraq, which connects its northern and southern oil infrastructure, has been inoperative since the war began in March 2003. Another international pipeline option under consideration for the future involves a pipeline which would run from Haditha in Iraq to an export terminal at Aqaba in Jordan."
Country Brief - Eastern Mediterranean Region (Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria)
US Energy Information Administration, August 2005

"The real reasons for regime change in Syria have less to do with Hariri’s assassin and more to do with oil and Israel. An April 20, 2003 article in the UK Observer, 'Israel seeks Pipeline for Iraqi Oil', clarifies this point.  The Observer notes that Washington and Tel Aviv are hammering out the details for a pipeline that will run through Syria and 'create an endless and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia'. The pipeline 'would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke.' This is the driving force behind the confrontation with Syria. At present, Bashar al Assad refuses to normalize relations with Israel until Israel surrenders the land it seized in the Golan Heights during the 1967 war. Israeli hawks have no intention of returning the land and are planning to remove al Assad instead. It’s widely known that Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) is already operating in Mosul where the pipeline will originate and have developed good relations with the Kurds in the area. The only remaining obstacle is the current Syrian regime which has already entered the US-Israeli crosshairs. Originally, the pipeline was the dream of the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, who said that it would 'cut Israel's energy bill drastically - probably by more than 25 per cent - since the country is currently largely dependent on expensive imports from Russia.' The Observer quotes a CIA official who said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States. The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream, and is now a viable project - albeit with a lot of building to do.' James Akins, a former US ambassador to the region and critic of the pipeline plan said, 'This is a new world order now. This is what things look like particularly if we wipe out Syria. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally.'”
Assassinations in Lebanon, and the Mosul-Haifa Oil Pipeline
Al-Jazeera, 27 October 2005

"Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad to embrace Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Reagan-Bush government in December 1983 was driven by similar motives. In particular they included preserving access to Gulf oil as Iran became a threat to US supplies following Tehran's Islamic revolution of 1979 which ousted the Shah, and led to the ensuing Iran-Iraq war.  One of Rumsfeld's specific goals during his 1983 visit, according to the New York Times 14 April, was to do a deal with Iraq over the building of an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian Port of Aqaba. The project was to be built by Bechtel, a company previously led by George Shultz who had become Secretary of State by the time of Rumsfeld's courtship of Saddam as special representative of the US government. According to the National Security Archive at George Washington University "The U.S. promoted the Aqaba pipeline project strenuously for several years during the early to mid 1980s. It would have carried oil from northern Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan, alleviating the disruptive effect on Iraq's oil output that resulted from Iran's attacks on oil transshipment facilities in the Persian Gulf and from Syria's closing of a pipeline that had transported Iraqi oil. The proposed project reflected the U.S.'s extreme nervousness about threats to the world oil supply resulting from the Iran-Iraq war.' In the end Saddam would not play ball with the US on the pipeline, but in the meantime the US offered some 'interesting' assistance to Iraq. In an article entitled 'Who Armed Iraq ' 17 April the highly respected and authoritative Jane's Defence News wrote 'An investigation of US corporate sales to Iraq, headed by Republican Congressman Donald Riegle and published in May 1994, listed some of the biological agents exported by US corporations with George Bush's approval as head of the CIA and later as vice-president under Ronald Reagan. The Iraqis are reported to have acquired stocks of anthrax, brucellosis, gas gangrene, E. coli and salmonella bacteria from US companies.'"
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report, October 2003

James Woolsey On Oil And War In The Gulf

"The key holdout is Saudi Arabia -- and it is indeed aggravating that even though we went to war in 1991 principally to protect its oil, they are unwilling to let us launch air strikes [on Iraq] from their country."
James Woolsey - The Former CIA Director Speaks on Iraq
TIME, 18 February 1998

"Energy is vital to a country's security and material well-being. A state unable to provide its people with adequate energy supplies or desiring added leverage over other people often resorts to force. Consider Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, driven by his desire to control more of the world's oil reserves, and the international response to this threat. The underlying goal of the U.N. force, which included 500,000 American troops, was to ensure continued and unfettered access to petroleum...."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world..... The recent report by the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology... concluded  'A plausible argument can be made that the security of the United States is at least as likely to be imperiled in the first half of the next century by the consequences of inadequacies in the energy options available to the world as by inadequacies in the capabilities of U.S. weapons systems.  It is striking that the Federal government spends about 20 times more R&D money on the latter problem than on the former.'... The nearly $70 billion spent annually for imported oil represents about 40 percent of the current U.S. trade deficit.... Research is essential to produce the innovations and technical improvements that will lower the production costs of ethanol and other renewable fuels and let them compete directly with gasoline. At present, the United States is not funding a vigorous program in renewable technologies.... The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources....Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"... the mideast will increasingly become the source of the world's oil, and this is a strategic problem for us and for many other countries."
James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA
Interview with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Post: June 7, 2000

"Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war. After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe, the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East."
Former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey
NATO conference, Prague, November 2002

"I fear we're going to be at war for decades, not years ..... one major component of that war is oil."
James Woolsey, Former Director of The CIA
Report On The Annual Policy Forum Of The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)
Washington, 6-7 December 2004
RenewableEnergyAccess.com, 14 December 2004

Margaret Thatcher On Oil And War In The Gulf

"For just so long Kuwait, a small country at the head of the Persian Gulf, had been set free and independent from its long-time British protector. And during that time Kuwait had developed its oil fields and become immensely rich. Saddam Hussein claimed that Kuwait was part of Iraq. To have and to hold it would put him on the way to achieving something that the Soviets had yearned for right after the Second War and been denied by the intervention of the United Nations, which was to be sovereign of the Gulf - and so, as Churchill foresaw and warned about, soon to be able to conquer Europe without a war by possessing 60% of the oil Western Europe lived by and so be able to dictate to countries like Britain, France, Germany, that they should abandon their precious democratic ways and get themselves governments friendly to Iraq.....[Following Saddam's invasion of Kuwait] President Bush - the first that is - called a dawn meeting of the National Security Council at which the likely commander of any military action, one General Schwarzkopf, expressed the general feeling that the United States might fight for Saudi Arabia but hardly for Kuwait. President Bush told the press there was no thought of American intervention. The United Nations anyway had voted to impose a total embargo on Iraq. Two days after the invasion President Bush took a half day out to keep a promise to the British prime minister who was addressing a conference in Aspen, Colorado, a resort town in the Rockies. He found Mrs Thatcher in finer fighting fettle than all but one of his own advisers. She stressed that fighting for Kuwait now might be a necessary step to saving Saudi Arabia from invasion later on. ..... What so swiftly transformed the views and policy of the United States and the onlooking allies-to-be was the recognition, first pressed on President Bush by Mrs Thatcher and then rather late in the day realised by the King of Saudi Arabia, that once he held Kuwait there was nothing to stop Saddam from seizing the Saudi oil fields."
Alistair Cooke's Letter From America
BBC Online, 24 June 2002

"Baroness Thatcher has criticised Tony Blair for taking Britain to war in Iraq on the basis of flawed evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons. The former prime minister's embarrassing criticism emerged as Mr Blair was among the 670 guests who attended a party to mark her 80th birthday. Although Lady Thatcher remains a strong supporter of the decision to topple Saddam by invading Iraq, it is the first time she has questioned the basis for the war. Yesterday's Washington Post reported that when asked whether she would have invaded Iraq given the intelligence at the time, Lady Thatcher replied: 'I was a scientist before I was a politician. And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof - and then you check, recheck and check again.'. She added. .'The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return."
Thatcher reveals her doubts over basis for Iraq war
Independent, 14 October 2005

Iraq As Key Swing Oil Producer

"To make it clear that a post-war U.S. military operation in Iraq is not a nation-building exercise, the Bush Administration should state that the U.S. military will be deployed to Iraq to secure the vital U.S. security interests for which the campaign is undertaken in the first place. Specifically, these war aims should be [amongst other goals] to .... Protect Iraq's energy infrastructure against internal sabotage or foreign attack to return Iraq to global energy markets and ensure that U.S. and world energy markets have access to its resources.... Removing that regime from power and contributing a post-war military presence in Iraq to assure stability in the region and in energy markets is justified."
In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building
Heritage Foundation Report, 25 September 2002

What Is The Heritage Foundation?
And What Does It Have To Do With The Bush Administration's Policy Towards Afghanistan And Iraq?
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"....For the most part, U.S. oil policy has relied on maintenance of free access to Middle East Gulf oil and free access for Gulf exports to world markets, relying heavily on military preparedness. The U.S. has forged a special relationship with certain key Middle East exporters that had an expressed interest in stable oil prices and, we assumed, would adjust their oil output to keep prices at levels that would neither discourage global economic growth nor fuel inflation. Taking this dependence a step further, the U.S. government has operated under the assumption that the national oil companies of these countries would make the investments needed to maintain enough surplus capacity to form a cushion against disruptions. But recently, things have changed. These Gulf allies are finding their domestic and foreign policy interests increasingly at odds with America’s strategic considerations. They have become less inclined to lower oil prices in exchange for security of markets, and evidence suggests that adequate investment is not being made in a timely enough manner to increase production capacity in line with growing global needs. The opening of new media outlets in the Middle East has also increased the likelihood that a linkage will emerge in the minds of citizens there between the U.S. alliance with Israel and cooperation on oil prices. Moreover, a trend toward anti-Americanism could affect regional leaders’ abilities to cooperate with the U.S. in the energy area. The resulting tight markets have increased U.S. and global vulnerability to disruption and provided adversaries undue potential influence over the price of oil. Iraq has become a key 'swing' producer,  posing a difficult situation for the U.S. government."
STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY AND THE COUNCIL FOR FOREIGN RELATIONS, APRIL 2001

"When President George W. Bush took office last January, energy matters were a high-priority issue of public policy. Heating-oil and gasoline prices were reaching historic levels and consumers throughout the industrial world were concerned about what their governments were doing to relieve their burden. Natural gas prices in the United States had risen 400 percent over the previous 18 months, forcing many industrial users of gas to shut operations rather than make uneconomic fuel purchases. Electric power shortages disrupted daily life as well as economic growth in California and other U.S. states, as well as in Brazil, India, and other areas of rapid economic expansion. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) were producing at capacity and a supply interruption of significant international dimensions loomed on the horizon, whether because of internal conflict in an oil-producing country, political manipulation by Iraq or another oil-producing government, or surging energy demand.... One of the first acts of the new U.S. administration was to convene an energy policy task force, chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney. The task force was given high political importance and charged with formulating a coherent approach toward energy policy that would aim to provide long-term solutions to the critical shortages looming along the energy supply chain. The vice president’s chairmanship gave the administration an opportunity to consolidate and assess the inevitably contradictory interests of different government departments, which themselves reflected contradictory interests among the American public. This review created a process that for the first time allowed international strategic concerns to be balanced against domestic energy interests — hence the participation of both the State and Energy Departments.... Even before the [2000] presidential election occurred, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations had decided to convene their own task force on strategic energy policy. The aim was to bring together individuals representing various public and private energy constituencies in order to map out for the new administration and for the public at large the main issues at stake. Our task force report was issued before the administration was able to produce its own study. Our report warned that years of negligence by policymakers had brought the U.S. energy sector to critical condition... it is incorrect for the public or for policymakers to assume that the oil situation is 'solved' or was simply fabricated all along.... it is certain that without an energy policy, energy shortages and temporary dislocations can easily reemerge once economic growth resumes its earlier accelerated path, or if international political events, extreme weather, or accident tilts demand back above available supply in certain locations.... reliance on volatile Middle East oil resources could increase dramatically over the next two decades unless policies are put in place to promote oil development in other regions, to shift to alternative sources, or to rein in unbridle or wasteful consumption.... Failure to respond would, in turn, leave the country vulnerable to the unacceptable future costs, as well as to the leverage that foreign adversaries could exert over our economy, if we were unnecessarily exposed to the possibility of recurrent dislocations stemming from a fresh round of volatile energy prices.....[more effective proposals are required for] Making progress in fostering the reopening of key oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia to foreign investment in their hydrocarbons sector......[and] Putting together more-realistic strategies in the Caspian Basin, which appear to be easing both decision-making on resource projects in the region and the speed with which new resources will be brought to market..... The administration has correctly shifted debate away from discussion of the need for U.S. energy independence. Such independence is not attainable at a reasonable cost. Policy must therefore focus on increasing the number of energy suppliers.... [We recommend that] U.S. encourages reopening of international investment in foreign oil fields [which] Provides U.S. firms long-term presence in important oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; encourages capacity expansion; strengthens U.S. ties to oil producers and open investment opportunities for U.S. firms...."
STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY UPDATE
JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY AND THE COUNCIL FOR FOREIGN RELATIONS, SEPTEMBER 2001

"For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."
Dick Cheney, Chief Executive of Halliburton, now Vice President of the United States
Speech at London Institute of Petroleum, Autumn Lunch 1999

"In the context of the recent history of 'regime change' as a foreign policy tool, it is interesting to note that the PFC figures show that within OPEC the country whose oil reserves are least depleted in percentage terms is Iraq. Besides its importance as a new military platform from which to police the whole of the Gulf, Iraq (with the third largest reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) therefore has the greatest proportional capacity for increased production within OPEC. The US Energy Information Administration's (EIA) 2004 International Energy Outlook report has Iraq moving up the table of OPEC daily production from fourth in 2001 behind Iran and Venezuela (both these countries' production is already close to or past peak according to PFC data), to second in 2025 with only Saudi Arabia remaining ahead. To 2025 the EIA is projecting an increase of 136% in Iraqi production over 2001 levels, a higher increase than projected for any other country in the world. Realising as much as possible of this Iraqi potential will become increasingly important as the global 'peak' gets closer. However, the White House miscalculation of the Iraqi response to the occupation of their country has resulted in the opposite effect. Iraqi oil production has fallen as the fighting continues, thereby threatening an acceleration of the onset of the global peak all the time the situation has not been recovered (according to the London Times 4 January the director of Iraq's intelligence service estimates there are more than 200,000 insurgents in the country, a figure now greater than coalition forces)."
Peak Oil To Arrive As Early As 2014
'Peak Oil' Update, 4 January 2005

The Book
Petrodollar Warfare - Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar

'PEAK OIL'
GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING
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www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/energycrisis.htm

".... a series of crises in oil supply is likely over the coming decades. The first, related to the peak and decline of non-OPEC production, is practically upon us and underpins the currently high oil prices...... The imminent inability of non-OPEC production to meet incremental demand and its decline after 2010 precipitates the second crisis as OPEC’s diminishing spare capacity (even with Iraq’s production back to preinvasion levels) becomes less and less able to accommodate short-term fluctuations.....The third crisis, due to OPEC’s incremental supply being unable to meet incremental demand, follows in the first half of the next decade. This assumes that OPEC’s reserves are as published. .....These crises will have global economic and geopolitical significance: The oil price will be high and volatile, and demand growth will have to be curtailed..."
Oil Supply Challenges - 2: What Can OPEC Deliver?
Oil and Gas Journal, 7 March 2005

Oil And Gas Journal Predicts Emerging Oil Supply Crisis - Click Here

"Russian oil output could peak .... in 2010..... Russian Industry and Energy Minister Victor Khristenko said on Monday, Oct. 24. 'It will reach a certain plateau of production within the time frame of 2010,' Khristenko, quoted by the Reuters agency, told reporters.... On his first U.S. trip as industry and energy minister, Khristenko met with President George W. Bush and senior administration officials including U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.... Russia’s oil production has stagnated since growing 9 percent in 2004 and a record 11 percent in 2003."
Russia Aims to Produce 510M Tons of Oil Annually by 2010 — Energy Minister
Moscow News, 25 October 2005

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