arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Some info/desinfo/fantasy? about the uranium-Niger thing.

". On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office."

Powell:

"ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.”

.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030331fa_fact1

Powell now:

"Powell said the issue was "overblown." The president's remarks in January reflected the best available intelligence at the time, Powell said. He said that as he prepared his own Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations, the information on uranium "was not standing the test of time" and he decided not to use it.

"I didn't use it, and we haven't used it since," Powell said. ``But to think that somehow we went out of our way to insert this single sentence into the State of the Union Address for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the American people is an overdrawn, overblown, overwrought conclusion."
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1057875014339&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968705899037