I just cut and pasted this out of the E mail so if you want to follow all the links all the links go to this page and it should all work. also plenty of the Niger / Italian scam

www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATSaddamEuroOil.htm

'Fight Smart' Update - 30 October 2005
Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED 911 SUMMARY - CLICK HERE
Who is the enemy?

'It Was The Oil Jim,
But Much More So Than We Knew It'
Weapons Of Mass Financial Destruction
Iraq War And The Battle To Save The Petro-Dollar
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATSaddamEuroOil.htm
Berlusconi Visits White House
As Italian Parliament Passes Names Of Alleged Iraq Uranium Document Forgers
To 'Plamegate' Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald



A Move Too Far
Saddam Tried Anti Petro-Dollar Currency Blast In Run Up To US Election 2000
Just Before The 'Election' Of George W.Bush
Saddam Test Fired A Shot From His New Weapon Of Mass Financial Destruction

"Baghdad's switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington's hard-line on sanctions and to encourage Europeans to challenge it.... [Pierre Shammas, a Middle East expert at the Cyprus-based Arab Press Service] says the idea of switching to the euro has appeal to Iran and Iraq because they feel if several major oil producers did it they could create a stampede from the dollar which would weaken Washington. He says another possible candidate for a changeover if the euro were strong might be Venezuela, whose relations with Washington have turned rocky as President Hugo Chavez has stressed ties with Cuba's Fidel Castro. But so far, no big stampede to the euro is on the horizon -- except in Baghdad. And that leaves Saddam once again charting a highly individual course that guarantees he keeps other capitals guessing what his next move will be."
Iraq: Baghdad Moves To Euro
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1 November 2000

"A bizarre political statement by Saddam Hussein has earned Iraq a windfall of hundreds of million of euros. In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar - 'the currency of the enemy' - for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. Almost all of Iraq's oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001..... The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme. "
Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro
Observer, 16 February 2003

Making A Move To Switch Oil Trade Out Of The Dollar And Into The Euro
Just Before The 'Election' Of President George W Bush
Sealed Saddam Hussein's Fate Once And For All

"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed....
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US. An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat. Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration."
Secret US plans for Iraq's oil
BBC Online, 17 March 2005

Not Only Was Saddam Hussein A Threat To Persian Gulf Oil Supplies
He Was A Threat To The Very Dollar Itself
A Situation That Was Rectified By The Bremmer Regime Immediately After The Invasion

"Iraq on Thursday stepped back into the international oil market for the first time since the war, offering 10m barrels of oil from its storage tanks for sale to the highest bidder....The [post invasion]tender, for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars - the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar."
Iraq returns to the international market
Financial Times, 5 June 2003

And Washington Was Prepared To Do Anything To Clear The Way For That Invasion
Including The Use Of Forged Documents To Win International And Domestic Support

"President Bush's principal adviser Karl Rove is to be questioned again over the improper naming of a CIA official. Mohamed ElBaradei, accused by the American right of being insufficiently aggressive, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his stalwart work at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pentagon official Larry Franklin pleads guilty to passing on classified information to Israel. Just a normal week in politics. But there is a thread linking these events and it is Iraq. Politicians tell us they acted in good faith on the road to war, and maybe they did, but that leaves a prickly question: who was so keen to prove that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that they forged documents purporting to show that he was trying to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons? The forgery was revealed to the Security Council by ElBaradei. That was not an intelligence error. It was a straightforward lie, an invention intended to mislead public opinion and help start a war..... One man who might well know the answer to all this is Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counter terrorism operations at the CIA. His belief is that the documents were produced in the US but 'funnelled through the Italians'. When an interviewer asked Cannistraro 'if I said Michael Ledeen', he reportedly replied 'I don't think it's a proven case ...You'd be very close'... It seems it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?"
Tell us who fabricated the Iraq evidence
Independent, 9 October 2005

But Now The Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost

"Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries? Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald asked for and 'has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,' the former CIA officer tells me: 'Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.'"
Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?
Antiwar.com, 19 October 2005

"....according to Italian sources the sealed portions of the report [passed to US special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald] conclude the fraudulent papers were created by associates of Ahmed of Chalibi".
'Hardball'
MSNBC, 21 October 2005

"The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NATO intelligence sources. This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration. Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges. Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby. The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime. The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House. This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has 'sexed up' the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
United Press International, 24 October 2005

Or May Be Not

"...Back in the Reagan administration, a scheme was hatched to illegally sell weapons to Iran, which was in a long bloody war with none other than Iraq. Proceeds from the sales of weapons were then diverted to the Contras, the US-backed gang of thugs who were fighting to topple the democratically-elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh indicted several administration officials. Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. He was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and has now been appointed by President George W. Bush to the National Security Council....

Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of Congress and two counts of making false statements. Poindexter later surfaced under Bush II as the official in charge of the Defense Department's fascist Total Information Awareness scheme.

Though Walsh found that it was likely that President Ronald Reagan, Vice-President George H.W. Bush and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger knew entirely what was going on Bush I's lame-duck, pre-emptive pardon of Weinberger's perjury charge before he ever was tried, prevented the entire story from coming out.

The story of the overthrow of an elected government and any attempt to mete out justice for the Nicaraguans was shunted aside. And, the probe never got higher than the operatives convicted and pardoned.

Similarly, in the Plame case, the real story is not who revealed a covert CIA operative's name (indeed, an heroic act in some circles), but who provided the fake Niger documents that Bush II cited to justify those famous "sixteen words." [about the uranium claims in his 2003 State of the Union Address]. Tellingly, Poindexter's Iran/Contra conspiracy conviction was based on his efforts to falsify documents.

In December 2001, Cheney and Bush II senior advisor Karl Rove-connected neocons Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhodes, accompanied by now-in-custody Israeli spy Larry Franklin, met in Rome with Italy's intelligence agency SISMI chief Niccolo Pollari and Italian defense minister Antonio Martino.

Shortly thereafter, a break-in occurred at the Niger Embassy in Rome. The sole things taken were letterhead paper and official seals. Then, forged papers bearing the letterhead and seal of Niger were leaked to a magazine owned by Italy's rightist Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The journal promptly turned the papers over to the CIA, not the 'British Government' as Bush lied when he used the forgeries as the basis for his State of the Union Address.

Even before Joe Wilson called out this fraud, Rove et al. panicked. Embedded reporter Judith Miller's New York Times notes show that the disclosure of Plame's CIA employment status started weeks before Wilson's famous expose was published . Stupidly, Rove thought that threatening Plame would get Wilson to back off; as such heavy and under-handed tactics had worked so well at cowing the Democrats and the press. Just eight days after Wilson's NYT's op-ed was published, administration mouthpiece Robert Novak wrote the piece that first publicly revealed Plame's name and occupation.

How worried are the Bushites? Already, the administration's echo chamber at Fox News howls repeatedly of 'prosecutorial overzealousness.' With talk of some 22 indictments about to be handed down, this telling, takes-one-to-know-one quote appeared in the Oct. 24th NY Daily News : 'He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things,' one White House ally said, referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

Still, the real question remains; will Fitzgerald get to the heart of it and charge all of those, even up to Bush II himself, who engaged in the entire series of lies and forgeries that led us into war? Or, like during Iran/Contra, will we see some underlings such as Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby indicted for his leaks to Miller and other reporters? And, will we see hush pardons all around?

The Truth is out here. The path to finding it begins in Rome."
The Plame Game - Shades of Iran/Contra [extract]
Counterpunch, 24 October 2005

More On Iran Contra And 'October Surprise' - Click Here

'Fight Smart' Special Report
October 2003
Dr Kelly and 'Operation Rockingham'
'Axis of Weasel' - Washington, London and Rome
Iraqgate 2003
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATiraqgate2003.htm
Niger And Other Lies
Used As Pretext For War

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap
Lies, Fraud, And Corruption Produce Total Failure

"Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed. The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country. It demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation. The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which Tony Blair and George W Bush believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country... The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces.... The opinion poll, carried out in August, also debunks claims by both the US and British governments that the general well-being of the average Iraqi is improving in post-Saddam Iraq."
Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops
Sunday Telegraph, 23 October 2005

In This Bulletin
'Fight Smart' Overview
Iraq, Oil, Petro-Dollars, And High Crime Forgeries

Who Is Michael Ledeen
And Why Is He Under The Iraq Forgeries Microscope?
End Game In Iraq
James Woolsey On Oil And War In The Gulf
Margaret Thatcher On Oil And War In The Gulf
Iraq As Key Swing Oil Producer
The Book
Petrodollar Warfare - Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar
'PEAK OIL'
GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING
Transforming America
'Fight Smart' Overview
Iraq, Oil, Petro-Dollars, And High Crime Forgeries

Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction
Faking The Casus Belli
The Italian Connection And The Naming Of The Alleged Document Forgers
The British Connection And The Role Of Rocco Martino
Energy Apocalypse And The Petro-Dollar - 'It's The Money Stupid'

Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction

According to former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as reported by the late Alistair Cooke in 2002, the first Gulf war in 1991 was about primarily about preventing Saddam Hussein from becoming a threat to Saudi oil supplies, not the secondary consideration of protecting the sovereignty of Kuwait.

So what was the second Gulf war about?

Clearly it was not about weapons of mass destruction, as we now know that there was never any evidence of these. That is now beyond dispute. According to a recent statement by Mrs Thatcher reported in the Independent 14 October: "The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof."

If Saddam had disarmed after the first Gulf war (as the United States itself knew from the information that it had obtained from Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel in 1995 during the Clinton Administration - a fact publicly revealed by Newsweek magazine who obtained leaked documents only weeks before the 2003 invasion of Iraq began) what was the hurry to go into Iraq post the election of George W Bush in 2000? Defiantly finishing off the work of his father's 1991 intervention is sometimes cited as a reason.

But by the start of the 'Bush 43' presidency there were two pressing problems of much greater practical significance. With a neo-conservative regime also now in charge of the White House, these factors meant that regime change in Baghdad had become even more 'essential'.

The first pressing problem was the increasing al-Qaeda driven instability of Saudi Arabia following the issuing of Bin Laden's fatwa against the United States in 1996 entitled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places [in Saudi Arabia]" (America had built large military bases in Saudi Arabia as a result of the first Gulf War).

This situation threatened the loss of the USA's principal military platform for policing the security of Persian Gulf oil, the world's most important source of supply. It was also occurring just at the very time when oil supply and demand curves plotted by strategic analysts were set on a number of collision courses (see Centre For Strategic And International Studies report published 1998 and report by former CIA director James Woolsey published 1999).

A new military platform was required in a more stable secular environment from where the United States could more confidently supervise the maintenance of 'stability' in the Gulf.

At the time Iraq was the most suitable candidate. Although by now the US detested its former ally, Saddam Hussein had at least run a non-religious administration in Baghdad. Iraq was also neatly situated between both Iran and Saudi Arabia, making its position highly strategic should intervention in either of those other countries ever prove necessary. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, in that order, have the largest oil reserves in the world (Iran also has the world's second largest gas reserves after Russia).

Just as important, however, was Iraq's audacious decision in the autumn of 2000 to begin trading its oil under the euro instead of the dollar. Yet, outside the corridors of power little public attention has been paid to this major development in Saddam's international posture.

Whether by luck or good judgement Saddam decided to do this just at the depth of the weakness of the Euro was bottoming out. Financially it proved to be a highly rewarding move. According to the Observer 16 February 2003 "In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar - 'the currency of the enemy' - for the more multilateral euro. ... Almost all of Iraq's oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001..... The marked appreciation of the euro, higher interest rates, and the ability to pay mainly European suppliers in euros is believed to have made hundreds of millions for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme."

But the significance of the move was far greater than simply an improved economic situation for Baghdad. America's Prague based Radio Free Europe, a service funded by Congress to broadcast in Europe and the Middle East, was one news outlet that was not slow to spot the political significance at the time.

On 1 November 2000, just a few day before voting took place in the US presidential election, the network commented that "Baghdad's switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington's hard-line on sanctions and to encourage Europeans to challenge it.... [Pierre Shammas, a Middle East expert at the Cyprus-based Arab Press Service] says the idea of switching to the euro has appeal to Iran and Iraq because they feel if several major oil producers did it they could create a stampede from the dollar which would weaken Washington. He says another possible candidate for a changeover if the euro were strong might be Venezuela, whose relations with Washington have turned rocky as President Hugo Chavez has stressed ties with Cuba's Fidel Castro. But so far, no big stampede to the euro is on the horizon -- except in Baghdad. And that leaves Saddam once again charting a highly individual course that guarantees he keeps other capitals guessing what his next move will be."

Iraq was the first county in the world to take this step. But what would be the consequences for the United States if other major oil producers began to follow this lead and move away from the dollar as the pre-eminent petro-currency?

This concern is far from theoretical. The appetite amongst other countries for making such a move has been steadily increasing in the interim as concerns over America's missuse of its sole superpower status have grown. Most recently the new government of Iran has been planning the establishment of an oil bourse in Tehran with trade denominated in euros.

According to the Christian Science Monitor 30 August 2005 "Is the biggest threat Iran poses to the United States really its nuclear ambitions - or is it petropolitics? Last month the Iranian government quietly reaffirmed plans to create by next year a euro-denominated exchange in oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products. If successful, such an exchange could start to lap at the walls of the two existing oil exchanges - London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) - both owned by American companies. If the billions of dollars in oil sales ever got going in euros, experts say, that could dry up the demand for dollars that the heavily indebted US economy depends on, and it could mean big trouble for the US economy. It's enough to make the Great Satan-loathing visionaries behind the Iranian regime salivate... as much as a pipe dream as the plan may be, it suggests the lengths to which Iranian leaders could go to weaken Western (and largely American) controls on the international economy, analysts say... 'It's part of a very intelligent, creative Iranian strategy - to go on the offense in every way possible and mobilize other actors against the US,' says George Perkovich, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington....'"

William Clark is the American author of the book 'Petrodollar Warfare - Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar'. In an online article published by Media Monitors Network 9 August 2005 he made the following observations:

"Candidly stated, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. government in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of global Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency (i.e. 'petroeuro').[3] However, subsequent geopolitical events have exposed neoconservative strategy as fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia evaluates this option with the European Union.

In 2003 the global community witnessed a combination of petrodollar warfare and oil depletion warfare. The majority of the world’s governments – especially the E.U., Russia and China – were not amused – and neither are the U.S. soldiers who are currently stationed inside a hostile Iraq. In 2002 I wrote an award-winning online essay that asserted Saddam Hussein sealed his fate when he announced in September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq’s oil export currency.[4]

Indeed, my original pre-war hypothesis was validated in a Financial Times article dated June 5, 2003, which confirmed Iraqi oil sales returning to the international markets were once again denominated in U.S. dollars – not euros.

'The tender, for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars -- the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar' [5]

The Bush administration implemented this currency transition despite the adverse impact on profits from Iraqi’s export oil sales.[6] (In mid-2003 the euro was valued approx. 13% higher than the dollar, and thus significantly impacted the ability of future oil proceeds to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure). Not surprisingly, this detail has never been mentioned in the five U.S. major media conglomerates who control 90% of information flow in the U.S., but confirmation of this vital fact provides insight into one of the crucial – yet overlooked – rationales for 2003 the Iraq war....

In essence, Iran is about to commit a far greater 'offense' than Saddam Hussein's conversion to the euro for Iraq’s oil exports in the fall of 2000. Beginning in March 2006, the Tehran government has plans to begin competing with New York's NYMEX and London's IPE with respect to international oil trades – using a euro-based international oil-trading mechanism.[7]

The proposed Iranian oil bourse signifies that without some sort of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given U.S. debt levels and the stated neoconservative project of U.S. global domination, Tehran’s objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on dollar supremacy in the crucial international oil market....

The macroeconomic implications of a successful Iranian bourse are noteworthy. Considering that in mid-2003 Iran switched its oil payments from E.U. and ACU customers to the euro, and thus it is logical to assume the proposed Iranian bourse will usher in a fourth crude oil marker – denominated in the euro currency. This event would remove the main technical obstacle for a broad-based petroeuro system for international oil trades. From a purely economic and monetary perspective, a petroeuro system is a logical development given that the European Union imports more oil from OPEC producers than does the U.S., and the E.U. accounted for 45% of exports sold to the Middle East. (Following the May 2004 enlargement, this percentage likely increased).

Despite the complete absence of coverage from the five U.S. corporate media conglomerates, these foreign news stories suggest one of the Federal Reserve’s nightmares may begin to unfold in the spring of 2006, when it appears that international buyers will have a choice of buying a barrel of oil for $60 dollars on the NYMEX and IPE - or purchase a barrel of oil for €45 - €50 euros via the Iranian Bourse. This assumes the euro maintains its current 20-25% appreciated value relative to the dollar – and assumes that some sort of US 'intervention' is not launched against Iran.

The upcoming bourse will introduce petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world - global oil and gas trades. In essence, the U.S. will no longer be able to effortlessly expand its debt-financing via issuance of U.S. Treasury bills, and the dollar’s international demand/liquidity value will fall....

It is unclear at the time of writing if this project will be successful, or could it prompt overt or covert U.S. interventions – thereby signaling the second phase of petrodollar warfare in the Middle East. Regardless of the potential U.S. response to an Iranian petroeuro system, the emergence of an oil exchange market in the Middle East is not entirely surprising given the domestic peaking and decline of oil exports in the U.S. and U.K, in comparison to the remaining oil reserves in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

What we are witnessing is a battle for oil currency supremacy. If Iran’s oil bourse becomes a successful alternative for international oil trades, it would challenge the hegemony currently enjoyed by the financial centers in both London (IPE) and New York (NYMEX)...."

In this context the economic pressure for another US driven war in the Gulf, this time against Iran, is especially intense, and Clarke's noting of the blackout on reporting of this subject by major US media conglomerates is instructive.

In the post 9/11 geopolitical environment this potential petro-currency leverage is an extremely powerful weapon available to those parts of the world seeking to constrain the military power of the United States through economic means. At its simplest it can be utilised merely in the form of a veiled threat.

On 10 October 2003 Moscow Times reported that "President Vladimir Putin said Thursday Russia could switch its trade in oil from dollars to euros, a move that could have far-reaching repercussions for the global balance of power -- potentially hurting the U.S. dollar and economy and providing a massive boost to the euro zone. 'We do not rule out that it is possible. That would be interesting for our European partners,' Putin said at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Urals town of Yekaterinburg, where the two leaders conducted two-day talks."

What Putin also probably meant was "that would be interesting for our American rivals, so they had better not mess with us". Russia is the world's second largest exporter of oil. It is also a nuclear power that cannot be attacked as readily as Iraq and Iran in the event that Moscow were to switch petro-currencies.

But by the time US voters were attempting to cast their ballots in November 2000, Saddam Hussein was not making veiled threats. He had played his petro-currency card.

However, even if it might have been considered a good enough reason in the eyes of some at Wall St, this was not a factor that could be used in international law to justify an American invasion of Iraq. Moreover, fierce long-enduring economic sanctions had not prevented Saddam's latest move or loosened his grip on power.

Fabrication of WMD claims was the only route left for the Bush administration to pursue if regime change was going to be achieved.

Ultimately the Iraq war was about money. This financial warfare took place in the form of a battle both to control physical natural resources (oil and gas in the Middle East), and also to control financial instruments (petrodollars V petroeuros). The two, of course, are closely linked.

In the end the most imaginative and powerful threat to the United States from Saddam was not a military one but an economic one. He had replaced his chemical and biological weapons with the ultimate societal destroyer - weapons of mass financial destruction. Saddam was using oil as a economic weapon.

In these circumstance the US was increasingly desperate. There was no telling who might follow Saddam's lead if he was allowed to get away with it. As a joint report from the highly influential James Baker Policy Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations put it in April 2001: "... Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a 'Pan Arab' leader supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments..."

A investigative report by the BBC's Newsnight programme broadcast 17 March 2005 later confirmed that "The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil..... Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001....The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields."

The BBC reported that not just Iraq, but OPEC as a whole, was a target in the unfolding game plan: "The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department."

However, fearing a possible ensuing political backlash within Iraq which might ultimately work against the long term interests of US oil companies "Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.... Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields..... New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas."

Foreign oil companies, especially those from countries which were part of the 'coalition of the willing', now hope to be offered contracts directly from the Iraqi government in the post-Saddam era.

Faking The Casus Belli

When, on 12 December 2000, the US Supreme Court opened the door to the final ascent to near unlimited power for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam's fate was effectively sealed. Economically speaking, Saddam had to go.

And that's why, amongst other approaches, Washington was prepared to use forged documents supposedly demonstrating Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium shipments from Niger in Africa when making its bogus case to the UN. It proved to be an effective strategy.

By the time that the UN had announced that the documents were "not authentic" at the beginning of March 2003 most of the world's press was looking the other way in anticipation of the commencement of a 'shock and awe' fireworks spectacular over the river Tigris. Even the BBC relegated its online coverage of this astonishing development to a single short paragraph in the middle of a longer report on weapons inspections and other Security Council matters.

Now, over two years later, more of the truth about the uranium forgeries is leaking out, and much of it appears to be pointing in the direction of Michael Ledeen or his associates.

Although his name is unfamiliar to most people, he is a key figure in Bush administration neo-conservative circles. Ledeen was described by the Christian Science Monitor in June this year as follows: "Seen by many as one of the most radical neoconservatives, Mr. Ledeen is said to frequently advise George W. Bush's top adviser Karl Rove on foreign policy matters. He is one of the strongest voices calling for regime change in Iran."

Rove himself has been deeply immersed, as a potential candidate for indictment, in the related 'Plamegate' grand jury inquiry lead by US special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald whose investigations are still continuing.

Fitzgerald's work has concerned the illegal leaking to the press of the identity of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame. The affair has already lead to the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby who, according to CNN, has been charged "with lying to FBI agents and to the grand jury about two conversations with reporters, Tim Russert of NBC News and Matt Cooper of Time magazine". CNN reported 28 October that "Libby testified that he heard CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity from Russert when, in fact, he learned of Plame's identify from a CIA official, the indictment alleged. Libby also testified that he told Cooper that other reporters told him Plame's identity, which the indictment alleges was not the case. The indictments were not directly related to the actual leak Plame's name."

The front page of the London Times reported the next day that "The charges raise the prospect of a trial turning the spotlight on how the Administration built its case for war and on Mr Cheney. He was named in indictments but not accused. Mr Libby, 55, is accused of lying about how and when he learnt about Ms Plame’s identity in 2003, and how he came to pass information about her to reporters. The indictment states that Mr Libby told investigators that he learnt about Ms Plame’s CIA status from an NBC journalist. Instead, he learnt it from Mr Cheney, the indictment says, thrusting the Vice-President to the heart of the scandal."

Valerie Plame was an undercover agent working on WMD intelligence for the CIA. Her husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, became an enemy of the Bush administration when (in the summer of 2003) he publicly exposed as false the White House's claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger for an alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Many believe that the motive for the leaking of Ms Plame's name into the public domain by the Bush Administration (which destroyed her career at the CIA) was not simply retaliation against Wilson, but rather a direct attempt to intimidate anyone else who might have been considering leaking evidence of White House malfeasance in connection with its fabricated case for war. According to the New York Times 29 October "the charges [against Libby] suggest that White House officials did, in fact, use Mrs. Wilson's classified CIA job as a weapon against a critic of administration policy - to smear his reputation or to warn off other dissenters".

Although it has been widely reported, often breathlessly, that the charges against Libby are extremely serious, in reality they are just loose change compared to the big buck lies that were deployed by the Bush administration to fraudulently take America to war in Iraq. In the process history is steadily making a laughing stock out of those political and media 'cognoscenti' who have failed to confront those lies in the face of overwhelming evidence.

The key question, therefore, is whether or not Fitzgerald will stop at the Plame name leaking dimension to the uranium saga? Or will he allow this fringe incident to unravel the whole thread through to an investigation into who forged the Niger uranium documents?

It is not clear how far the powers delegated to Fitzgerald under his appointment in the case allow him to go. However, given the history of previous investigations into cases of US political conspiracy, as in the Iran-Contra and 'October Surprise' hearings, not everyone is holding their breath that Fitzgerald will branch out far enough, although the moral justification for pursuing such a line of inquiry continues to intensify.

There is parallel investigation into the uranium forgeries themselves that has been going on for a couple of years now lead by the FBI. But once again few are holding their breath - particularly given the way the Bureau's previous investigation into the post 9/11 anthrax attacks appears to have been frustrated once it became clear that the evidence was leading to people at the Department of Defence as the source of the material used.

According to the Washington Post 16 September 2005 "Four years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, one of the most exhaustive investigations in FBI history has yielded no arrests and is showing signs of growing cold as officials have sharply reduced the number of agents on the case.... The investigation has been so expansive that authorities now are in the process of taking inventory. The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation and explore issues including what has been the prevailing theory: The culprit is a U.S. scientist who had access to the high-grade anthrax and the knowledge of how to physically manipulate it and use it as a weapon. That theory emerged early in the investigation and remains viable today, authorities said.... The report will include the names of various people deemed to be 'persons of interest' over the years, as well as updates on the scientific tests. Authorities long ago narrowed down the type of anthrax to a strain called Ames but have been unable to identify the lab of origin. Much attention has focused on the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, housed at Fort Detrick in the Frederick area.Authorities hope that the report, which is to be completed soon and forwarded to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, will provide a concise road map of the probe and help determine its future direction. Current and former law enforcement authorities said investigators and prosecutors often prepare such reports in complex, high-profile cases that go unresolved for years. 'It doesn't sound like they're close to cracking the case,' said Eric H. Holder Jr., a Washington lawyer who was deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration.'.... Meanwhile, in the United States, FBI agents and scientists have been working to match the gene sequence of the mailed anthrax spores to a specific laboratory. They remain particularly interested in such laboratories as Fort Detrick, Louisiana State University and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.... In light of the obstacles facing investigators, some relatives of the victims are wondering if the anthrax case will ever be solved. 'It's been out there too long. I don't think they're going to find out' who did it, said Thomas L. Morris III of Suitland, whose father, D.C. postal worker Thomas Morris Jr., died of inhalation anthrax in October 2001."

It appears there may be people within the system who would prefer if the case is never solved.

According to a BBC report 18 August 2002 entitled 'Anthrax killer is US defence insider' "An FBI forensic linguistics expert believes the US anthrax attacks were carried out by a senior scientist from within America's biological-defence community. Professor Don Foster - who helped convict Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and unveiled Joe Klein as the author of the novel Primary Colors - says the evidence points to someone with high-ranking military and intelligence connections. Speaking about the investigation for the first time, Prof Foster told the BBC he had identified two suspects who had both worked for the CIA, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and other classified military operations.... he fears the investigation is now being hampered in its gathering of vital documents that could lead to the killer.... He said: 'It's very frustrating. Ordinarily with the FBI if there's some documents needed - known writings - boom, they're on my desk the next day. 'My two suspects both appear to have CIA connections. These two agencies, the CIA and the FBI, are sometimes seen as rivals. 'My anxiety is that the FBI agents assigned to this case are not getting full and complete co-operation from the US military, CIA and witnesses who might have information about this case...."

The US anthrax attacks were a post-9/11 psychologically traumatising episode that played a key role in sensitising US public pinion to the 'need' to tackle Iraq's alleged biological and chemical weapons capability.

The Italian Connection And The Naming Of The Alleged Document Forgers

However, if the FBI has so far been unwilling or unable to come up with some names for indictment in the anthrax and uranium cases, it appears that the Italian parliament is prepared to be a little bolder when it comes to its own investigation of the latter. Some considerable time ago the source of the forged uranium documents had been traced to Italy.

The names of the alleged forgers (two former CIA officers) are now in the public domain and are reported to have been handed over to Fitzgerald during the course of his 'Plamegate' investigations. The information is understood to have been provided to Fitzgerald by the Italian parliament in a report of its own findings regarding the uranium saga, although the names are only in the public domain by virtue of a leak.

The names appear to have first surfaced in a French report in July citing the results of the inquiry by the Italian parliament even though its report has yet to be officially released. As in the anthrax case the evidence reportedly points to American suspects, with Michael Ledeen alleged as a conduit for the forgeries (see below).

Mr Ledeen's connections to Italian intelligence are well known. A major figure in the Iran-Contra arms scandal of the 1980s, Ledeen lived in Italy for many years.

The September 2004 edition of Washington Monthly reported that in December 2001 Ledeen and Pentagon officials met in Rome with (amongst others) Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (Italian foreign intelligence), and Antonio Martino, the Italian Minister of Defense. The Rome station chief of the CIA was not informed of the meeting. Washington Monthly asks "why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA - a clear breach of U.S. government protocol?". The journal reports that the meeting was "a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq" and that, according to United Press International, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon.

The UK's Independent newspaper appears to be the only major British news outlet which has so far reported on Ledeen in this context. This it did on 9 October in an article by Norman Dombey, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex and an expert on Iraq's nuclear capability. The article was entitled "Tell us who fabricated the Iraq evidence". It referred directly to Ledeen's December 2001 meeting with SISMI in Rome.

Significantly United Press International reported 24 October that "NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House. This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has 'sexed up' the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

However, potentially the most important recent development (which has does not so far seem to have been covered by the mainstream media) is the claim that the names and details of the alleged forgers have been handed over to Fitzgerald by the Italians. Justin Raimondo, is editorial director of the Antiwar.com web site and a supporter of Pat Buchanan (a former Nixon aide and staunch critic of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy).

On 19 October Raimondo wrote that: "Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries? Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald asked for and 'has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document,' the former CIA officer tells me: 'Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi.'"

MSNBC's 'Hardball' TV programme on 21 October 2005 also confirmed that the Italian government had handed over a report to Fitzgerald. The MSNBC account states that "according to Italian sources the sealed portions of the report conclude the fraudulent papers were created by associates of Ahmed of Chalibi". It may well be that MSNBC also knows the names cited by Raimondo, but is hesitating to divulge them. Clearly, though Chalabi, is the overlap in the two versions from Raimondo and MSNBC concerning who is alleged to be responsible.

Chalabi is, of course, a central character amongst the dramatis personae of whole 'Iraqgate' saga.

An Iraqi exile with close ties to the Pentagon, Chalabi was one of the main lobbyists for the Iraq war and supplier of false intelligence to the Bush administration and the media. Much of this false information was fed by Chalabi to Judith Miller at the New York Times, who subsequently also became a central figure in Fitzgerald's Plame investigation. Miller has been characterised by many as a tame media outlet used by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) formed in August 2002 in order to publicise the claimed threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

It now looks as if the false information promoted by Chalabi may have included the Niger forgeries, albeit produced in conjunction with others connected to the US government.

Chalabi is currently Deputy Prime Minister in Iraq, as well as serving as President of its Energy Council which is responsible for the country's oil sector. The BBC reported 10 October that "Iraq is on course for a 20% rise in its oil exports by the start of 2006, the head of its energy council says. Ahmad Chalabi said output for export should hit 1.8 million barrels a day by January, when elections take place and a new administration takes power. Talking to Reuters, he backed the idea that US and UK oil firms should have priority in Iraq's oil sector."

According to TIME magazine 22 October Chalabi may end up running Iraq: "He currently serves as Deputy Prime Minister in Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government. And now—trumpet clarion here—he is coming back to Washington in November at the invitation of Treasury Secretary John Snow. But Chalabi will have potentially more significant meetings with National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and perhaps Condoleezza Rice, both of whom—according to high-ranking Administration officials—believe that he is a plausible and acceptable candidate to be the next Prime Minister of Iraq when that nation votes, yet again, for a new government on Dec. 15."

The British Connection And The Role Of Rocco Martino

For the moment public attention on any White House role in the leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity to the media as investigated by Patrick Fitzgerald is understandable, but it is far from being the main issue in the Niger-Iraq uranium affair.

The real significance of the Plame saga is the much greater web of lies surrounding the broader Iraq uranium episode, and the subsequent cover-up of the forgeries dimension once it had embarrassingly surfaced at the UN. This is not just an issue for the White House. It is an episode in which the British government (or its intelligence services for those who believe that the latter frequently operate beyond the reach of political control) is also very probably complicit.

After changing the detail of its position on the subject in a rush of extraordinary public contortions in the summer of 2003 the British government ultimately maintained that its own claims about Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium from Africa were based on other intelligence. Yet it has never been willing to publicly disclose that evidence even though it has responsibilities to do so under two UN security council resolutions (see 'Fight Smart' Special Report, October 2003: Iraqgate 2003 - 'Axis of Weasel' - Washington, London and Rome).

At the very least the handling of the uranium 'evidence' by the British government was, in the absurdly polite words of a Foreign Affairs Select Committee report in July 2003, "very odd indeed". The committee complained that "the Government asserts that it was not relying on the evidence which has since been shown to have been forged, but that eight months later it is still reviewing the other evidence .....We recommend that the Government explain on what evidence it relied for its judgment in September 2002 that Iraq had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

On 27 October 2005, the day of the Lewis Libby indictment, world affairs correspondent for the BBC News website Paul Reynolds wryly commented on the British dimension to the Niger uranium fraud: "In February 2002, Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador was sent to Niger in West Africa to investigate intelligence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake (compressed uranium ore) there. Since Iraq had no civilian nuclear programme, the supposition was that it was seeking a source of fuel for a military one. The British government certainly believed the Niger report - and strangely enough after all that has happened, still does."

'Strangely enough' (as Reynolds may really have wanted to say), the probability that the British government doesn't believe this at all, and has lied heavily during the affair, is high.

On 1 August 2004 the Sunday Times in London ran the following eyebrow-raising disclosure: "The Sunday Times has tracked down a mysterious middleman who was a key figure in the notorious Niger uranium hoax before the Iraq war, writes Nicholas Rufford. Speaking to a reporter in a cafe in Brussels last week, he claimed he had been an unwitting dupe in the scam, which embarrassed both Tony Blair and George W Bush over Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. The middleman, an Italian who uses the name Giacomo, is a small-time tipster said to have worked for Italy’s armed forces and intelligence services. He says Sismi, the Italian foreign intelligence service, used him to disseminate fake documents purporting to show Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. I received a call from a former colleague in Sismi,' Giacomo said. 'I was told a woman in the Niger embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents. Sismi wanted me to pass on the documents but they didn’t want anyone to know they had been involved.' He came into possession of a bundle of telexes, letters and contracts that appeared to show Saddam had struck a deal with Niger for 500 tons of uranium ore, enough when refined to make several weapons. Giacomo said he regretted the hoax but had believed the documents were genuine when he passed them to intelligence contacts and a journalist. The hoax had far-reaching effects. Presenting his dossier on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002, Blair accused Saddam of seeking 'significant quantities of uranium from Africa'. Bush reiterated the charge in his state of the union speech. When Giacomo’s documents were discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, apologised. The British government and MI6 claim, however, they have independent evidence of Iraq’s 'Niger connection'”.

A day later the Financial Times in London identified 'Giacomo' as one Rocco Martino, an Italian business man. The article also described Mr Martino's relationship with French intelligence with whom he had been involved since 1999 as part of an "operation to safeguard Niger's uranium industry and prevent weapons proliferation".

According to the FT "The operation, begun in 1999, reflected concern among several intelligence services that rogue states may have been trying to procure uranium. France was also concerned about the security of its own uranium supplies from Niger, as well as the security of the two French companies that control Niger's uranium industry."

The paper adds "[Martino] subsequently provided France with more documents, which turned out to have been forged when they were handed to the International Atomic Energy Agency by US diplomats. ..... According to the Sunday Times, which interviewed him under his pseudonym of Giacomo, Mr Martino said the Italian foreign intelligence service, the SISMI, had forged the documents and had arranged for them to be passed to him by an official of Niger's embassy in Rome. Mr Martino, who has not returned telephone calls since first contacted by the Financial Times a month ago, has retained personal contacts with some serving and retired officers in the SISMI since he briefly served in the intelligence services in the 1970s. The Italian government yesterday strongly denied it had played any role in the forging of the documents or their dissemination, saying the accusations are 'completely false'".

The news outlet which has reported most extensively on the Italian investigations into the Niger uranium forgeries is the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It ran a new three part series on 24, 25 and 26 of October.

La Repubblica's account of 24 October quotes Martino directly as saying (English translation)"It’s true, I had a hand in the dissemination of those (Niger uranium) documents, but I was duped. Both Americans and Italians were involved behind the scenes. It was a disinformation operation.... At the end of 2001, SISMI handed the [Niger uranium] yellowcake dossier to British MI6". The report also describes SISMI officer Antonio Nucera's role in assembling the fraudulent documents. Nucera was Deputy Chief of the SISMI centre in viale Pasteur in Rome, and head of the 1st and the 8th divisions covering weapons and technology transfers and WMD proliferation counter-espionage, respectively, for Africa and the Middle East.

However, it would appear La Repubblica has only been able to find out so much. It states that "Martino conceals the identify of the architects behind the 'operation' and appears to be merely a pawn, like his partners in crime. So who is the puppeteer pulling the strings behind their sordid adventure?"

But unambiguously the paper claims "The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminium tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war. They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the [New York Times] reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002."

The 25 October edition provided Part 2 of La Repubblica's account in which it further claims that:

"It is a known fact that on the eve of the war on Iraq and under the guidance of Palazzo Chigi [official residence of the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi] Diplomacy Advisor Gianni Castellaneta (today Italian Ambassador to the United States), SISMI chief Pollari organizes his appointment book in Washington with the help of the staff of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. La Repubblica has documented the dual channel used by the Italian government and by Italian intelligence. According to intelligence agents, in at least one of the backdoor meetings in which Pollari participated, the the creation of a conduit took place linking government, security agencies and intelligence.

[Our] Brief synopsis [is]: Pollari’s SISMI wants to give credence to the story of acquisition of uranium ore for the purpose of building a nuclear bomb. The scheme is transparent. The 'authentic' papers concerning an attempt to acquire uranium in Niger (stale Italian intelligence left over from the 80’s) are a legacy of a former SISMI Deputy Chief in Rome, Antonio Nucera. They are bundled up together with other worthless documents assembled helter-skelter after a simulated burglary of the Niger Embassy (embassy letterhead and stamps are taken). The documents are exhibited by Pollari’s men to the CIA Station Chief in Rome while SISMI’s 'postman', a certain individual by the name of Rocco Martino, delivers a copy to Richard Dearlove’s MI6 in London. ......

We’ll now provide the second chapter of the Great Italian Yellowcake Scam orchestrated in Italy to provide the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. We reintroduce Greg Thielmann, former director of the US Department of State's intelligence bureau, who encounters the Italian report on the uranium on his desk. He does not recall the precise date.

Thielmann recounts the events of autumn 2001 in generalities. But the precise date may prove revealing: it is October 15, 2001. On that date three events are woven together to produce an astounding coincidence: Nicolò Pollari is appointed to head SISMI by the Italian government on September 27, after serving as Number Two at CESIS (a coordinating intelligence agency at Palazzo Chigi). Silvio Berlusconi is finally invited to the White House by George W. Bush. October 15 marks the date of the first CIA report on the evidence assembled by the Italians. It’s impossible to say if all this is coincidence, but one cannot ignore the context: The Italians possess a burning desire score a win.... It is a known fact that Bush shows the West Wing’s Rose Garden to Berlusconi and the CIA acknowledges, as reported by Russ Hoyle (who has been analyzing the conclusions of the US Congressional Investigation Committee) that Italian intelligence has some neatly prepackaged information with a pretty bow on the box: Negotiations (between Niamey and Baghdad) on the purchase of uranium have been ongoing since the start of 1999; the sale [of uranium to Baghdad] was approved by the Niger Supreme Council in 2000. No documentary evidence is offered to show that any shipment of uranium has occured. CIA analysts consider the report to be 'somewhat limited' and 'lacking in necessary detail'. Intelligence and Research analysts at the US Department of State qualify the intelligence as 'highly suspect.'

The first contact with the American intelligence community is not particularly gratifying for Pollari but it is still highly useful. The SISMI director, who is no fool, surveys the landscape and the players of the ongoing behind-the-scenes battle in the American Administration between those who stress caution and pragmatism (the US Department of State and the CIA) and those who are looking for an excuse to start a war (Cheney and the Pentagon), which is already on the drawing board. However, when the SISMI director returns to Italy, he perceives a similar battle underway in Rome. Gianni Castellaneta advises Pollari to look in other directions, while Defense Minister Antonio Martino tell Pollari to expect a visit from an old friend of Italy.

This old friend is Michael A. Ledeen... Ledeen is in Rome on a mission from the Office of Special Plans, created at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz to collect intelligence which would support a war on Iraq. A source at Forte Braschi [SISMI headquarters] tells La Repubblica: 'On the subject of intelligence collected on the uranium purchase, Pollari gets the cold shoulder from [Rome] CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli. Apparently, Castelli has dropped the matter entirely. Taking a hint, Pollari discusses the matter with Michael Ledeen....' No one knows what prompts Ledeen to return to Washington. But at the beginning of 2002, Paul Wolfowitz convinces Dick Cheney that the uranium trail picked up by Italian intelligence should be explored in closer detail."

On 8 September 2002 Judith Miller co-authored a piece in the New York Times claiming evidence of Iraq's purchase of aluminium tubes for the purpose of uranium enrichment as part of a nuclear weapons programme.

In its third and final article of the series on 26 October La Repubblica focuses on SISMI's assistance with this additional bogus claim. But first some further background is useful.

Today Stephen Hadley is National Security Adviser to President Bush. In 2002 he was deputy to Condoleezza Rice when she held that position. Hadley is also a ''former Pentagon aide to Vice President Cheney" according to Senator Bob Graham.

Hadley was the person who had been responsible for allowing the uranium claim to be included in Bush's State of the Union address on 28 January 2003.

When this was subsequently discovered the Washington Post 24 July 2003 reported as follows: "Hadley is [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice's top aide. He says he forgot about the warnings from Tenet -- two memos and one phone call -- and did not tell her. If that's the case, he's in the wrong job. If it's not the case -- and a reasonable man could have reasonable doubt -- is it possible Rice said nothing to Bush? Maybe not. But if not, why not? That's her job. By now it is clear that the White House was so desperate to buttress its unsupportable claims of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat that it was willing to include the most questionable of evidence. That happened not only with the uranium reference but also with another piece of supposedly significant evidence -- those aluminum tubes that turned out to play no role in any nuclear weapons program. Who was behind this? Rice? Dick Cheney? The president himself? The uranium reference kept turning up like a bad penny. It had a sponsor -- someone awfully high up. Each time the buck passes, another level of incompetence -- or shenanigans -- is exposed. Now in the chain of supposed bumblers we have Hadley and, by extension, Rice. Either they did not do their jobs or the jobs they did were so frankly political that they both ought to move over to the Republican National Committee, where, on a given day, spin and exaggeration are the sole product. Tenet, though, gets pride of place. He has put a huge dent in the vaunted -- and valued -- independence of the CIA. It's impossible to see him now as a pillar of integrity, someone who speaks his mind no matter what and values keeping his independence over keeping his job. He's shilled for the president once too often. He's got to go."

So now let's consider what La Repubblica's article of 26 October has to say about Hadley, the aluminium tubes and the role of SISMI.

La Repubblica reports that "On September 9, 2002, seated in front of Stephen Hadley, Pollari has the means to address even this aspect of the issue. SISMI claims that it has documentary proof of the acquisition of aluminum tubes by Iraq..... So what does he tell him? Pollari keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t reveal what he knows about the aluminum tubes, which are the source of so much concern (or even enthusiasm) for the Bush Administration. The shame is that those 7075-T6 tubes, 900 millimeters long, 81 millimeters in diameter, 3.3 millimeters thick, are well-known hardware to the Italian Army. They are 81-mm rocket artillery shells used in the Medusa air-to-ground missile system installed on Italian Army and Navy helicopters. In reality, the Iraqis are merely attempting to reproduce weaponry with which they became familiar during the long years of economic, military and nuclear cooperation between Rome and Baghdad."

In other words the Italians knew what the tubes were really for but chose not to disclose this to the Bush administration.

At this point the paper also reminds its readers that "scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (where uranium for the US nuclear arsenal is enriched using centrifuges) ........ [had said] that the tubes are too narrow, too heavy, too long and likely to split if used as centrifuge components. They conclude with: Those tubes are used for manufacturing a specific type of artillery shell."

In the article La Repubblica also interviews Greg Thielmann, former head of the State Department's Intelligence Service who resigned before the war over the Bush administration's distortions of intelligence about Iraq. Theilman provides the following explanation for Italian participation in Washington's fraudulent game: "But seriously, haven’t you yet understood why the chief of Italian military intelligence did not provide us with any indication that would have allowed us to definitively discard the notion that the tubes would be used in someone’s nuclear program? Well, I have an idea for you. SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the US Administration."

In this respect the article also appears to shed some light on the sole remaining 'evidence' left today of Saddam's supposed efforts to acquire uranium after the first Gulf war. This is the claim that the British government alone is now left hanging onto, and then only by its fingertips. Many presume it is doing so in order to sheild itself from accusations of complicity in the use of the Italian forged documents, having committed itself to the uranium story in the Downing St dossier of September 2002.

La Repubblica states "Even today, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw continues to repeat that the 'Italian dossier' was not the basis behind Blair’s words and that MI6 is in possession of previously acquired intelligence. Yet such intelligence 'evidence' has never been produced. If it were to come out--a source at [SISM headquarters] Forte Braschi tells La Repubblica, it would be easily discovered with a little sleuthing that that the 'evidence' is in fact stale Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980s and shared with our friend, Hamilton MacMillan [of MI6]." (in another context an earlier PBS report dated 23 October 1990 confirms the existence of MacMillan as an MI6 agent in relation to drug dealing and the IRA).

If this account is to be believed all the British government is left clutching at is its intelligence material from before the first Gulf war. If so, then it's no wonder it hasn't disclosed it.

Unfortunately for London, Washington and Rome, La Repubblica's articles have not gone completely unnoticed and the temperature of the political water is getting hotter.

According to an Associated Press report 25 October "The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday. Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman. She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.... Pollari's hearing will not be open to the public, but the commission's president, Enzo Bianco, was expected to brief reporters after the meeting, Panella said. La Repubblica claimed that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Pollari was under pressure from Premier Silvio Berlusconi to make a strong contribution to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The newspaper is a strong opponent of Berlusconi. To satisfy the request, Pollari used a dossier that originally had been fabricated in early 2001 with material stolen from Niger's embassy in Rome, La Repubblica reported. Between the end of 2001 and 2002, Pollari allegedly used official and unofficial channels to pass on the forged documents about the uranium deal to CIA officers in Rome and to the British intelligence agency. When foreign intelligence agencies met the documents with skepticism, Pollari used his own contacts in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and an aide to the president's national security adviser to promote the dossier, La Repubblica said, without elaborating."

Following up on the details provided in the reporting by La Repubblica the US journal 'The American Prospect' already appears to have found its own independent confirmation that Pollari has been caught lying about at least some of his involvement with the White House.

In its edition of 25 October the Prospect reports that"In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax. Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then - Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday. Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the US administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet."

Based on Repubblica's reporting the Prospect also points out "the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proffered less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.) The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the US government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries. The forged documents were cabled from the US embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the US embassy. Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to US and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion. What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.... if anyone knew who was actually responsible for the White House's trumpeting of the Niger claims, it would seem from the Repubblica report that Hadley did. He also knew that the CIA, which had initially rejected the Italian claims, was not to blame. Hadley's meeting with Pollari, at precisely the time when the Niger forgeries came into the possession of the US government, may explain the seemingly hysterical White House overreaction to Wilson's article almost a year later. "

Energy Apocalypse And The Petro-Dollar - 'It's The Money Stupid'

In an article 26 July 1998 entitled "Energy apocalypse looms as the world runs out of oil" the Observer newspaper in London quoted Franco Bernabe, chief executive of the Italian oil company Eni SpA on the issue of global peak oil. Bernabe said "My forecast is that between 2000 and 2005 the world will be reaching peak production from our known fields." Since then new oil discoveries have been trifling.

According to a Dow Jones Newswire 4 July 2003 "The Italian state holds 30% of [oil company] Eni's capital and is by far the company's biggest shareholder. Eni's strategy to reduce exposure to petrochemicals and invest more resources into its lucrative exploration and production business is a key part of Mincato's strategy, which was well-received during a January presentation to institutional investors in London...'The Treasury expresses its deep satisfaction with Eni's results and programs,' ministry spokesman Mario Stella Richter told a shareholders meeting in May."

It may not come as a complete surprise, therefore, to discover that Italy is not a disinterested party when considering the future of oil production in Iraq. According to a Reuters's Italian language report of 9 May 2003 (English translation)"Eni has the aspiration of being in Iraq, even if at the moment the situation in the Middle Eastern country still is confused after the conflict with the USA".

Having apparently provided so much of the casus belli it would be surprising if Italy did not have expectations of being invited by the White House to any subsequent feast at the Mesopotamian oil trough, albeit that so far the outcome in Iraq has worked out rather differently (on 24 October the BBC reported that "Oil exports from Iraq have been completely halted by a combination of attacks and bad weather, reports say. Four sabotage attacks brought exports from Northern Iraq to a halt on Sunday and officials warned the damage may take a month to repair. The problem worsened on Monday when a pipeline carrying crude to the Turkish port of Ceyhan was hit in an attack.")

And just exactly why was British Prime Minister Tony Blair invited to take his summer holiday with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2004? Did they have more to discuss than just tennis, given that the Italian parliamentary investigations into 'Nigergate' had been on-going since 2003?

Certainly the latest developments emerging from the parliamentary inquiry in Rome are likely to provide a certain edge to talks between the Bush administration and Berlusconi as he visits the White House on 31 October, organised "to discuss a range of issues" according to a Reuters report 17 October.

Berlusconi appears to be squirming. According to a Reuters report 29 October "Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on the eve of a trip to Washington, said he repeatedly tried to persuade U.S. President George W. Bush against invading Iraq. The Italian leader voiced his unease with the military operation to remove Saddam Hussein in a television interview to be broadcast on Monday, the day he meets Bush. The Italian leader has been defending himself against accusations at home that the country's intelligence agency, possibly after government pressure, passed off fake documents to Washington used to bolster claims of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The documents purported that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger. His office has sent out statements in the past week categorically denying the accusations, made by left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper. Sismi intelligence agency chief Nicolo Pollari is due to address a closed-door parliamentary panel over the matter on November 3."

Given that Italy's parliament and some of its media apparently now have most of the story behind the Niger uranium forgeries the New York Times is moved to ask whatever happened to the FBI investigation into the matter. The answer answer seems to be 'not much'.

Prompted by the stories breaking from La Repubblica earlier in the week the New York Times reports 28 October that "A two-year inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to uncover the origin of forged documents that formed a basis for sending an envoy on a fact-finding trip to Niger, a mission that eventually exploded into the C.I.A. leak inquiry, law enforcement and intelligence officials say.... The continuing inquiry into the source of the forged documents has been conducted separately from the investigation by the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak case, which has to do with whether Bush administration officials committed crimes related to disclosing the identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, an undercover C.I.A. officer."

That of course begs an important question. If the names of US citizens allegedly implicated in the Niger forgeries have been handed over to Fitzgerald during the 'Plamegate' investigation (as reported by Raimondo), does the FBI inquiry also have them? And if they do, what are they doing with them?

The New York Times adds that "Law enforcement officials say they do not believe that the two issues are related", a suggestion which is, of course, highly improbable.

Nonetheless, if a report by Newsweek back on 22 September 2004 is anything to go by the FBI hasn't been rushing to find one: "At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger documents in an effort to determine if the United States government had been duped by a deliberate 'disinformation' campaign organized by a foreign intelligence agency or others with a political agenda relating to Iraq. So far, the bureau appears to have made little progress in unraveling the case. 'The senator is frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,' said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Senator Rockefeller, who was recently briefed on the status of the FBI probe. One striking aspect of the FBI’s investigation is that, at least as of this week, (Rocco) Martino has told associates he has never even been interviewed by the bureau—despite the fact that he was publicly identified by the Financial Times of London as the source of the documents more than six weeks ago and was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be interviewed for the '60 Minutes' report."

Moreover CBS cancelled the broadcast of the Martino interview and related material just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of September 8 2004 despite the fact that "A team of '60 Minutes' correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud" according to CBS sources who spoke to Newsweek.

At the heart of the 'Plamegate' affair was, besides retribution against Wilson himself, the attempt by the White House (as the New York Times has since observed following the indictment of Libby) to send an intimidating message to anyone else who might be disposed to leak information about the false evidence presented in relation to Iraq's alleged WMD programmes - particularly anyone within the CIA (once an agent's cover is blown that is likely to be the end of their job).

A day after the Libby indictment Wilson wrote in the Los Angeles Times "The attacks on Valerie and me were upsetting, disruptive and vicious. They amounted to character assassination. Senior administration officials used the power of the White House to make our lives hell for the last 27 months. But more important, they did it as part of a clear effort to cover up the lies and disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That is the ultimate crime. The war in Iraq has claimed more than 17,000 dead and wounded American soldiers, many times more Iraqi casualties and close to $200 billion. It has left our international reputation in tatters and our military broken. It has weakened the United States, increased hatred of us and made terrorist attacks against our interests more likely in the future. It has been, as Gen. William Odom suggested, the greatest strategic blunder in the history of our country. We anticipate no mea culpa from the president for what his senior aides have done to us. But he owes the nation both an explanation and an apology."

Meanwhile the New York Times report of 28 October confirms that "Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, have received classified briefings on the status of the F.B.I. inquiry. The two are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the intelligence committee.... Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, would say only that he and Mr. Roberts had been briefed by the F.B.I. about the Niger inquiry. An aide to Mr. Roberts said only that 'ongoing investigations of that type are the kinds of things they are briefed on.'"

No doubt if the invasion of Iraq had turned out to be a success in terms of creating greater stability in the region, all of this might long have since been forgotten about. But it hasn't and the situation has only been deteriorating.

Damningly for the British government The Sunday Telegraph 23 October reported that "Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed. The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country. It demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation. The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which Tony Blair and George W Bush believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country... . The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces.... The opinion poll, carried out in August, also debunks claims by both the US and British governments that the general well-being of the average Iraqi is improving in post-Saddam Iraq."

Throughout this long saga further pressure of an economic kind has also been building. This is particularly so on the US side of the Anglo-American alliance as additional weapons of mass financial destruction emerge and threaten to proliferate. These have already been serving to exert downward pressure on the dollar, further exacerbating the enormous financial strain incompetently imposed on the US Treasury as a result of the Cheney-Rumsfeld misadventure in the Gulf. Since the original analysis of the Iraq 'problem' provided by the James Baker Policy Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations in April 2001 America's energy and general financial security has only deteriorated further.

According Agence France Presse 8 June 2003 "The inexorable rise in Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves is being accompanied by a steady shift from the dollar to the euro that is likely to continue as Russia draws closer to Europe, Moscow analysts believe.... Russia's reserves have been increasing relentlessly, buoyed by high oil prices.... The decline in the value of the dollar relative to the euro is encouraging the process...."

A China Daily story of 8 May 2004 also reported that "China is looking to diversify its foreign exchange reserves out of US dollars, according to its top foreign exchange manager. China's chief forex regulator, Guo Shuqing, said in a recent Financial Times interview the make-up of the country's US$440-billion forex cash pile was being altered to include more European and Asian bonds, given concerns over a weaker US dollar."

And just like Saddam Hussein it now appears President Chavez of Venezuela is trying to do his financial bit to weaken the US by taking Venezuelan capital out of the US financial system and moving it to Europe. This follows a recent call by Bush supporter and Christian TV evangelist, the Rev Pat Robertson, for Chavez to be assassinated.

Associated Press reported 30 September that "Venezuela has moved its central bank foreign reserves out of U.S. banks, liquidated its investments in U.S. Treasury securities and placed the funds in Europe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday. 'We've had to move the international reserves from U.S. banks because of the threats,' from the U.S., Chavez said during televised remarks from a South American summit in Brazil. 'The reserves we had (invested) in U.S. Treasury bonds, we've sold them and we moved them to Europe and other countries,' he said."

Whether motivated by power politics or prudent financial management, Chavez would seem to be in good company.

On 29 January the financial news service Bloomberg ran the following surprise story: "Bill Gates, whose net worth of $46.6 billion makes him the world's richest person, is betting against the U.S. dollar. 'I'm short the dollar,' Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told Charlie Rose in an interview late yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 'The ol' dollar, it's gonna go down.' Gates's concern that widening U.S. budget and trade deficits are undermining the dollar was echoed in Davos by policymakers including European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The dollar fell 21 percent against a basket of six major currencies from the start of 2002 to the end of last year. The trade deficit swelled to a record $609.3 billion last year and total U.S. government debt rose 8.7 percent to $7.62 trillion in the past 12 months. 'It is a bit scary,' Gates said. 'We're in uncharted territory when the world's reserve currency has so much outstanding debt. A week before Group of Seven officials meet to discuss currency policy, Trichet repeated the ECB's concern over the dollar's drop to record lows against the 12-nation euro currency.... Gates reflected the views of his friend Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has bet against the dollar since 2002. Buffett said last week that the U.S. trade gap will probably further weaken the currency.'''

So in the end it seems money can speak louder than patriotism.

But then this is nothing new. Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W, was only too happy to continue his business dealings with Nazi Germany during the second world war until such time as the assets of the New York bank of which he was director were seized under the 'Trading With The Enemy Act' in 1942 (Newsweek; Associated Press; Guardian).

Whether in Washington, London, Baku, Almaty, Lagos or Riyadh there are few things in life which are a bigger motivator of human behaviour in circles of real power. So in the end, the stark reality has to be faced up to. Forget 'freedom and democracy'. Because beneath it all much boils down to something far simpler.

Yes, 'it's the money stupid'.

The Iraq war episode was no exception.

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
 nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

"The relationship with Berlusconi is one of three friendships which are crucial to Blair and say something significant about him - the others being with George Bush and Rupert Murdoch.... Berlusconi is perhaps the most unexpected of these pivotal friendships, and thereby the most definitive of Blair. It is an apparently curious closeness, between the billionaire mass-media mogul, member of the terrifying P2 masonic lodge, forever skirting the law and changing it to suit his ends ... and the Labour leader elected in 1997 not least for his untaintedness. Between the man who made his fortune by building an empire based on trash television and dancing girls, and the devout Christian installed in Downing Street. When Berlusconi first came to power in 1994, we suspected, but could not prove, that the 'special secretary' managing his Forza Italia campaign, Marcello Dell'Utri, was mobilising the blood-stained voting clout of the Mafia - for which he was jailed last December. And Dell'Utri's patron was the man Blair this summer called his closest friend in Europe. The construction of Berlusconi's palatial villa in which the Blairs stayed (built specially for their visit), was under criminal investigation at the time, for allegedly having been built illegally, but why should Blair or Berlusconi care? The latter simply passed an amnesty law exempting all hitherto 'abusively' constructed buildings. Presumably, Blair courts these captains of the political right not just because he needs their power or is enamoured by their wealth, but because they stand for something within him."
By their friends shall we know the Sultans of Bling
Guardian, 26 October 2005



Read The Rest Of This Bulletin On The Web
Who Is Michael Ledeen
And Why Is He Under The Iraq Forgeries Microscope?
End Game In Iraq
James Woolsey On Oil And War In The Gulf
Margaret Thatcher On Oil And War In The Gulf
Iraq As Key Swing Oil Producer
The Book
Petrodollar Warfare - Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar
'PEAK OIL'
GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING
Transforming America
'PEAK OIL'
GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING
Click Here For More Information
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/energycrisis.htm

".... a series of crises in oil supply is likely over the coming decades. The first, related to the peak and decline of non-OPEC production, is practically upon us and underpins the currently high oil prices...... The imminent inability of non-OPEC production to meet incremental demand and its decline after 2010 precipitates the second crisis as OPEC’s diminishing spare capacity (even with Iraq’s production back to preinvasion levels) becomes less and less able to accommodate short-term fluctuations.....The third crisis, due to OPEC’s incremental supply being unable to meet incremental demand, follows in the first half of the next decade. This assumes that OPEC’s reserves are as published. .....These crises will have global economic and geopolitical significance: The oil price will be high and volatile, and demand growth will have to be curtailed..."
Oil Supply Challenges - 2: What Can OPEC Deliver?
Oil and Gas Journal, 7 March 2005

Oil And Gas Journal Predicts Emerging Oil Supply Crisis - Click Here

"Russian oil output could peak .... in 2010..... Russian Industry and Energy Minister Victor Khristenko said on Monday, Oct. 24. 'It will reach a certain plateau of production within the time frame of 2010,' Khristenko, quoted by the Reuters agency, told reporters.... On his first U.S. trip as industry and energy minister, Khristenko met with President George W. Bush and senior administration officials including U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.... Russia’s oil production has stagnated since growing 9 percent in 2004 and a record 11 percent in 2003."
Russia Aims to Produce 510M Tons of Oil Annually by 2010 — Energy Minister
Moscow News, 25 October 2005

TRANSFORMING AMERICA - BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE
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NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
 nlpwessex@btinternet.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

The time to strike would be in about 8 years, just before they reach full nuclear capability. This will allow maximum damage to their world peace threatening program and will allow more time to gather greater intel.

It is such a wonderful country, where women, homosexuals and people who are not Muslim are given freedoms unheard of in the West; where criminals only suffer for a few minutes while they are publically hung from cranes; where open political discussion is encouraged by a secret police who will only torture you a little bit if you criticise the authorities.

Yes, I love Iran. It's so much better there than in terrible evil Britain, which is no better than Nazi police state.

PS: This enemy of my enemy bollocks is getting a bit tedious now...

you are suggesting that because we don't want to see IranPLC bombed
then we automatically become friends of their regime

same thing
friends of my friends
enemies of enemies ...
very tiring




let's see:

IranPLC bombed
IranPLC backed by RussiaPLC
RussiaPLC backed by ChinaPLC
RussiaPLC have energy hold over UKPLC
ChinaPLC have textiles...
slave labor = economic boom
& a hold over UKPLC's greedy empirical aims
[read some Robert Cooper]

UKPLC head of EURO union

UKPLC alliance with USA PLC
joint shareholders in a huge ever-constantly developing
Military industrial complex with a global reach

EURO / DOLLAR index linked to war / terror / OIL / gold price

when ChinaPLC visited UKPLC

before a major anti terror vote and President HU [ChinaPLC]
greeted by red carpoet and Queen Elizebath II [director general UK PLC]
President HU [ChinaPLC] then addresses the lower House [UK PLC]

then the MP's / media circus do the theatre of a 'Blair failure' only to
vote in 28 days anyway...

what a victory for civil liberties! what a defeat for Blair!

Millions marching, waking up slowly, worldwide

it all gets a bit worrying

GLOBAL-PLC [CARTEL]
might need a population controlling
cataclysmic event

this time not like a 'Pearl Harbour'

but like a 'world war'

yeah mister ... (three dots) is a real MF shite and it's pro Israel comments are now well reknown
it's on the winning side the boys with the nukes and all the power.
But if there are any good aliens out there that have a kind heart I hope they will zap Israel off the map
because the Israelis along with their yankkkee scum allies are the real threat to world peace .
no need to tell you where to stick yer three dots eh matey

Western countries have unprecedented levels of sexual freedoms, this is true by far. Does that give us the right to control all of the world's resources?