Layers of deceit that built a case for war

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent

NEW YORK - Last week in Baghdad, a serendipitous discovery turned up a box of files that nailed Scottish anti-war MP George Galloway as the kept creature of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service.

The Glasgow firebrand denies everything, angrily suggesting the documents were planted in the rubble for the conservative London Daily Telegraph's reporter to stumble upon.

Galloway is a nasty piece of work by all accounts, but it might be best to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. While it's easy to imagine the worst of a man independently accused of bilking a charity for Iraqi children, the fact remains that the Iraq war has been a meal ticket for forgers and pedlars of misinformation.

There were those centrifuge tubes, for example, the ones the United States insisted were being used to enrich uranium and which the International Atomic Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei, convincingly rebutted as being anything of the kind.

And then there was the phoney war's other great hoax: the dossier Secretary of State Colin Powell finally presented to the UN in early March as proof Iraq had imported illicit uranium ore from Niger.

For months before that, the Bush Administration kept the file close to its chest, citing it constantly even in the President's State of the Union address.

Now, quietly, quite a few people are paying them a good deal more attention, including a handful of congressional investigators.

What they have achieved isn't much, having teased just a few tantalising strands of truth from a dark web of deceit.

"Who falsifies this?" chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix demanded last week, when arguing that his team should be readmitted to occupied Iraq. "Is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?"

Disturbing indeed. The documents appeared to prove that Saddam Hussein was in flagrant breach of UN sanctions. As Powell explained, they constituted an irrefutable smoking gun.

But within hours of being made available to the UN they were exposed as fictions, and poor ones at that.

First, there was the quantity of uranium ore said to be involved - 500 tonnes - which would have represented 20 per cent of Niger's total annual output, a quantity so large it stretches credulity to imagine it being siphoned off unnoticed.

Then there were the documents themselves. One bore the alleged signature of Niger's Foreign Minister - except that the man in question hadn't held that job for 11 years. Same thing with the letter alleged to have originated in the President's office. A simple internet check by UN officials revealed that the letterhead dated back to an earlier regime, one that had left office two years before.

So who concocted them and why? The New Yorker magazine's Seymour Hersh points the finger at British intelligence, which he suggests may have dummied up the documents to help Bush quell congressional opposition to the looming war. Says Hersh: "In September, late September, before the Senate voted on the resolution authorising the war, [the documents were displayed] at a series of top-secret briefings in a secure room over in the Congress."

As a theory, Hersh's scenario fits neatly with the chronology of the march to war. Bush needed persuasive proof and - voila! - it materialised at just the right time.

Yet that could also be the Hersh explanation's fatal flaw: Facts and circumstances dovetail a bit too well.

The Administration says the documents came not from a single source but from several.

Mentioned often as the point of origin is Italy, where one off-the-record Administration explanation insists they were the work of a con man in cahoots with a Niger diplomat out to make a quick buck.

From Rome, according to this provenance, the file went to Paris. "The forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man and passed on to French authorities," investigative reporter Jeffrey Sallot wrote in an unchallenged story in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Other reports say the Italian forger also has ties to French intelligence.

But hold on a tick. If the documents were relayed to the intelligence service of the country leading the opposition to the war, why would Jacques Chirac's spooks have distributed them any further? If true, they could only have lent considerable weight to Bush's argument.

Except, that is, if the people passing them along realised that they would be exposed as frauds. What better way to discredit Washington's case than to see prime exhibits for the prosecution revealed as frauds?

Thanks to the Bush Administration's eagerness to believe whatever suited its case, that is exactly what happened.

When the US spy agency declined to give the Niger documents any credence, the true believers at the White House simply cut the agency out of the loop.

The result: a US humiliation at the UN that destroyed its credibility and helped scuttle a Security Council vote authorising military force. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Tony Blair's advocacy of the war was interrupted by the need to put down, a revolt within his own party - a revolt in which the bogus evidence figured prominently.

And who gained? Why the French, of course. C'est la guerre.

Herald Feature: Iraq