More about reporter Carlo Bonini and the forged intelligence documents.

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Carlo Bonini, investigative reporter for the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, broke the story about an Italian intelligence agency's involvement in forging documents (click on the left to enlarge) saying that Iraq secured uranium from Niger. Those documents helped the White House make the case for invading Iraq.

Here is the newspaper article by Bonini from La Repubblica translated in English by a blogger:

Berlusconi Behind Fake Yellowcake Dossier

Monday, October 24, 2005

All the Italians behind Nigergate were doublecrossers and dilletantes.The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: (1)Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe;(2)The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or of centrifuges) were the Italian Government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and handover of the dodgy dossier for war to British and American intelligence.

They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for the New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.

The "war dance" which followed Judith Miller’s scoop seemed like "carefully-prepared theater” to an attentive media-watcher, Roberto Reale of Ultime Notizie (The Latest News). [Note: Roberto Reale is a TV news commentator for RAI-3 and a professor of Language and Media at the University of Padua--Nur]

Condoleezza Rice, who was then White House Security Advisor, said on CNN: We don’t want the smoking gun to look like a mushroom cloud. A menacing Dick Cheney delivers a bolus injection on Meet the Press that We know with absolute certainty that Saddam is using his technical and commercial capabilities to acquire the material necessary to enrich uranium needed build a nuclear weapon. This was the beginning of an escalation of fear.