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Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
By
David Corn
In October 2002, a file of documents from the U.S. embassy in Rome arrived on the desk of one of the State Department\'s senior nuclear proliferation analysts. The papers had been handed over by an Italian journalist, who had been given them by an informer who had, in turn, obtained them from a mysterious source in the embassy of Niger. The documents purported to show that Niger had signed a July 2000 deal to supply Iraq with 500 tons of yellowcake uranium -- about one-sixth of the African country\'s annual production and a key ingredient in a uranium-enrichment process that could provide Saddam Hussein\'s regime with a nuclear bomb.
As Simon Dodge of the State Department\'s intelligence bureau began to review the documents in Washington, he soon concluded that they were fakes. One of the papers described a secret meeting in Rome at which representatives of Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Pakistan formed a joint \"plan of action\" to defend themselves against the West in alliance with \"Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations.\" Dodge later told Senate investigators that he considered the claim \"completely implausible,\" or, as Michael Isikoff and David Corn put it, \"something out of James Bond -- or maybe Austin Powers.\" Niger embassy stamps, palpably fake, linked the \"plan of action\" document to those depicting the Iraq deal. The papers are a hoax, Dodge e-mailed colleagues.
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