"The Italian Letter"

One of the occasional perks of having a moderately popular bloggy blog is that I occasionally get a book to review, while not being more popular which would mean getting several books to review.

But a book I was recently sent was "The Italian Letter" by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce. The subject is all about the forged letter (and badly forged at that) that was used by the Bush Administration to drum up the scare tactics and build support for their war. It was also behind the reason that ultimately led to Joe Wilson being sent to Niger and Scooter Libby looking at jail time. It was also the famed topic on the internets that Josh Marshall said would be shifting the tectonic plates if I remember right, and Marshall did a great deal of work on the subject.

Today, in the Washington Post, Eisner a deputy foreign editor at the paper, puts a front page summary on documentation ready to join the great frauds of history from the Donation of Constantine to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to George Bush's book reading list.

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Though it's a long article, it still suffers from being far too abbreviated.

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.

The entirety of the book tracks the use of the letter and how it was demonstrably and plainly false -- in fact, identified as such with a few easy and basis google searches. Anyone who studied the matter, from French intelligence of matters in their former colony to the CIA official at the U.S. Embassy in Rome to Joe Wilson found that from the dodginess of the document to the near impossible logistics and nature of the obtaining of yellowcake that matter was almost certainly false. Yet, somehow the claims were made.

The book also details other matters that I frankly didn't know beforehand, such as Iraq already having 550 tons of yellowcake uranium within its borders, all under the lock and key of the IDEA so there was little need for another 500 tons. It also details how the British government somehow became the Bush Administration's factotum in holding the same fraudulent documents to say the Uranium claims were true, later sloppily used by the GOP Controlled and uniquely partisan Intelligence Committee which perpetuated the fraud about the fraud -- all with the purpose of attacking Joe Wilson instead of doing its job.

It also shows that Italian intelligence is an unbelievable joke, and known to be so, and raises major questions as to just how the Bush Administration and the Italian government at the time under Berlusconi were enabling each other. Sadly, the question of who actually forged the document remains difficult to ascertain (maybe it was Khalid Sheik Mohammad?), but the chain of possession of the forgery comes out of the bizarre world of third world countries who have small staffs in dumpy locations looking to make a buck and another world where intelligence documents are sold to various agencies or journalists for cash.

Finally, for you folks who like multiple exposures of fraudulent behavior, you'll really enjoy one section of the book that demonstrates the lengths to which Christopher Hitchens will go to lie and make any claim he shits out into the ether seem like truth. Hitchens is truly exposed, in quick work, as a complete and utter charlatan on the issue of Niger, Iraq and related matters.

As stated above, Josh Marshall did a lot of work on this topic, one that I only had a passing familiarity with. I learned quite a bit from the book, but I'm guessing if I had paid more attention to the subject I would have been familiar with much of the information it contains. I cannot imagine that I got the book to preview and Marshall didn't, so it will be interesting to see what he thought of it.