Bogus Uranium Documents in Plame Case Still Radioactive
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Bogus Uranium Documents in Plame Case Still Radioactive
Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame may have blown town, but the compost pile of fabricated documents at the bottom of the Niger affair is still smoldering.
Ex-CIA Director George Tenet is readying his version of the Iraq intelligence fiasco for “60 Minutes,” the de rigeur launching pad for spooks who have secrets to spill.
"Inevitably, the names of Plame and Wilson will dissolve into footnotes. But decades from now history will remember “the Italian letter,” shorthand for the fabricated documents at the heart of the Plame affair.
The most important of them purported to be a letter from the Niger foreign minister to Iraq agreeing to sell it 500 tons of uranium....
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In a fascinating book to be published April 3, investigative journalists Peter Eisner and Knut Royce compare the creation of “the Italian letter” to the so-called Zimmermann Telegram of 1917, the leak of which pushed the United States into World War I.
“A letter may not start or avert a war,” they write, “but it can have a profound effect.”