Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

What I’m Reading: The Italian Letter

I can’t put this book down.

Peter Eisner, deputy foreign editor at the Washington Post, and Knut Royce,
a member of the Center for Public Integrity (and a contributor to work winning the Pulitzer Prize), have crafted a tale from reporting that is
immensely engaging, while also offering a view into the ridiculous means the
Bush administration used to get us into war with Iraq. Knowingly using false documents is as low as you can go.

Peter Eisner teases part
of his story today. Eisner was online
today discussing his book: The
Italian Letter: How
the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq.
The transcript
is really worth reading, but here’s just one back and forth.

Washington: One of things that I really liked about your article was your explicitly stating that the Wilson trip to Niger was arranged by the CIA as a response to the VP’s questions. Hopefully, the editors at the newspaper will take notice. The other thing that I wanted to ask you is that, if I remember correctly, the content of your article was reported exhaustively in the Italian newspapers in 2004-2005. They had pointed out a couple of administration people involved in it. Do you have some information on that? Peter Eisner: Many aspects of this story have been reported in Italy, especially by my friend Carlo Bonini at La Repubblica. Our focuses have differed on obvious grounds. We’re looking at how the documents were used in Washington, while he and his colleagues have looked at the internal workings of the Italian intelligence service. One of our key new points is that the CIA had the chance with its verbatim text to debunk the entire claim. Another is tracking how the CIA was pummelled into going along with the weak case for WMD.

Having been sent an advance copy of the book, I couldn’t wait to read it. But I was moving servers and tech teams when it came to my door so it put off my efforts,
but I’m knee deep into it now. It’s a fabulous read. Eisner’s article
today is just the beginning.

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong. Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war. Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable. … .. How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim

If only someone had simply bothered to study the logistics of the yellowcake from Niger
nonsense we could have saved ourselves a lot of money and lives, not to mention
the prestige and reputation of the United States of America. The “she” below refers
to Elizabetta Burba, the Milan reporter from the Panorama who was given
the Italian letter.

She found that a French company controlled the uranium trade, and any shipment of uranium certainly would have been noticed. If a uranium sale had taken place, the logistics would have been daunting. Burba discovered that yellowcake was stored in 400-kilogram (880-pound) barrels, each filled only halfway, more or less 200 kilos for each barrel, to control weight and safety. With delivery in two shipments of 250 metric tons each, she estimated that each batch would have required a convoy of trucks; and since tractor-trailers are rarely seen in West Africa, ‘it would have meant an incredible amount of trucks,’ she said, describing her through process. ‘They would have needed hundreds of trucks,’ a large percentage of all the trucks in Niger, something that would have been impossible to conceal. Each truck would hve had to travel hundreds of miles southwest from the desert mine sites of Niger to Cotonou, a major port city in Benin, where the uranium would have had to be loaded on ships. … … The ship then would have had to sail, again unnoticed, along with west coast of Africa and into the Mediterranean, bound probably for a port in Turkey, secretly offloaded, and then transported by land once more, this time to Iraq, from its northern border in Kurdistan. Then there is the political aspect of the story. … … .. The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce (pgs. 40-42)

When you couple the sycophantic Berlusconi, who was Bush’s biggest fan in Europe,
with this absurd scenario of trucks and ships, it’s obvious the Bush administration
was counting on everyone being afraid and willing to look the other way. To our lasting shame they were right.

Eisner
and Royce peel away the facade of the WMD fantasy that started with the
Italian letter. Published soon after Valerie Plame’s testimony, it fills in
another fascinating piece of the story; that is, how Bush, Cheney, Rummy, the White House Iraq Group, Powell, Condi, et al. dragged us all into a needless, expensive and extracurricular war. Let us
never forget.

No tags for this post.