DUBYA, BLIX, BARADEI, AND THE ‘NIGER CONNECTION’: Last night we had the scary experience of seeing the Prez floundering, being evasive, and reiterating his intention to go to war regardless of what the U.N. might or might not do.
Today, we had the very professional presentations of Hans Blix and Mohamed el-Baradei to the Security Council. I loved Blix’s exclamation that “these are not toothpicks” that the Iraqis have been destroying, but real and potentially very damaging surface-to-surface missiles.
Blix made an eloquent plea for “some months” to give UNMOVIC a realistic chance to try to get its job done. But I found some of the details of what Baradei said absolutely intriguing. Baradei, of course, as head of the IAEA, deals solely with the nuclear side of things. Of which there is not a lot actively going on in Iraq these days. So what he and his part of the inspectors’ team have been chasing after have been reports that Iraq has been procuring various items that might be antecedent to resumption of their nuclear-weapons program.
He focused on three items in particular: those infamous aluminum tubes that we’ve heard so much about; some magnet-production components and facilities; and the “reports” of Iraqi purchases of potentially weapons-grade uranium from Niger.
Baradei patiently refuted nearly all these allegations. But regarding the so-called “Niger documents” he was scathing. He said his investigators had established that the documents on which the allegations had been based had turned out not to even look like regular Republic of Niger bills of sale at all; and the signatures on them did not relate to those of any Niger officials.
Do I smell a “Zinoviev letter” affair here? That was the infamous forgery that the British spooks had produced back in the mid-1920s, which purported to “prove” that Soviet Comintern head Grigori Zinoviev had been fomenting the labor unrest that was plaguing Britain in those years.
I’m not saying it necessarily the Brits who produced the alleged Niger documentation. But let’s face it, someone did. And whoever did it was knowingly misleading the inspectors, trying to drag the world closer to the brink of war. Or at the very least, sending the inspectors off on a wild goose chase that ate up their attention and resources for many months.
I think that we need to follow the story of the so-called “Niger documents” up aggressively. Who was behind them? Who gave them to Baradei? That’s one good place to start– and an item of info that I think we should require him to disclose. Though it might not be the end of this sinister trail.