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06/28/2004 Archived Entry: "Evidence of Niger uranium trade 'years before war'"

Posted by steve @ 12:31 AM EST [Link]

MUST BE ANOTHER ATTEMPT BY BUSH TO JUSTIFY THE WAR: The Financial Times reported Sunday that there is evidence that Iraq may have tried to procure yellow cake uranium from Niger several years ago.

The British government has said repeatedly it stands by intelligence it gathered and used in its controversial September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes. It still claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

But the US intelligence community, officials and politicians, are publicly sceptical, and the public differences between the two allies on the issue have obscured the evidence that lies behind the UK claim.

Until now, the only evidence of Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger had turned out to be a forgery. In October 2002, documents were handed to the US embassy in Rome that appeared to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials.

When the US State Department later passed the documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, they were found to be fake. US officials have subsequently distanced themselves from the entire notion that Iraq was seeking buy uranium from Niger.

However, European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.

I guess Joseph Wilson's tea sipping trip to Niger wasn't all that useful after all, was it Mr. Ambassador?

Read on.