The five W’s and Nigerien yellowcake
Josh Marshall has a long post up detailing some of his investigation into the sourcing of the Nigerien yellowcake documentation: “[T]he Italian middle-man who provided the notorious Niger uranium documents to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba (she later brought them to the US Embassy in Rome, you’ll remember) was himself given the documents by the Italian ...
Josh Marshall has a long post up detailing some of his investigation into the sourcing of the Nigerien yellowcake documentation: "[T]he Italian middle-man who provided the notorious Niger uranium documents to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba (she later brought them to the US Embassy in Rome, you’ll remember) was himself given the documents by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI." Read the whole thing, and then read Tom Maguire's critical take on one section of Marshall's post. For me, this is the key part of Marshall's post:
Josh Marshall has a long post up detailing some of his investigation into the sourcing of the Nigerien yellowcake documentation: “[T]he Italian middle-man who provided the notorious Niger uranium documents to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba (she later brought them to the US Embassy in Rome, you’ll remember) was himself given the documents by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI.” Read the whole thing, and then read Tom Maguire’s critical take on one section of Marshall’s post. For me, this is the key part of Marshall’s post:
The Financial Times article lead (sic) to a surge of articles and commentary suggesting that the forged documents were only a minor part of the case for the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. But, as we’ve noted earlier, that’s a willfully misleading account, one which both the Butler Report and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report helped to further. Contrary to arguments that there was lots of independent evidence of uranium sales between Iraq and Niger, US government sources have told us that almost all of the important evidence derived from the phony documents. Specifically, it came from summaries of the documents Italian intelligence was distributing to other western intelligence agencies — including those of the US, Britain and France — in late 2001 and 2002. The US has long known that the Italians had the forged documents in their possession at least as early as the beginning of 2002. And what we’ve uncovered is that at the same time Italian intelligence operatives were surreptiously funnelling copies of the documents to this document peddler with the knowledge that he would sell them to other intelligence services and likely to members of the Italian press.
Marshall and Maguire are hashing out the “what?” question of journalism. My big question is why? Assuming Marshall is correct on the sourcing (and he posted this because the Sunday Times of London also has the story), what, exactly, was SISMI’s motive in forging the documents and then passing them on to other western intelligence agencies?
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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