Uranium that never was

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1009383,00.html

It took the government exactly three weeks, but on Tuesday an envelope arrived at the offices of the Commons foreign affairs committee containing Jack Straw's response to one of the more perplexing episodes in the committee's investigation about the decision to go to war with Iraq. In its critical report, one of the key requests was: "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."

Yesterday we discover that the question was still being ducked - because Straw's response was confined to nine questions put to him by the committee chairman, Donald Anderson, and this specific information was not formally requested. So the mysteries of the Niger connection will continue to cause political embarrassment. At their heart are the questions: were British and US intelligence hoodwinked by a set of documents that were revealed to be crude forgeries? Or was the Niger story - inserted in the UK's September 2002 dossier and repeated by Bush in his state of the union speech in January - just another attempt to egg the intelligence pudding as a casus belli? The British position is that the inclusion of the allegation was based on different information.

In the absence of any clarity from the government, there have been some developments in recent weeks that shed new light on the matter. We now know that for at least five months from October 2002 some senior US and British intelligence analysts examined 17 pages of correspondence, written in French, which appeared to support the allegation. Copies of the documents were handed over to the US embassy in Rome that month by an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba. She said they came from a reliable source, but after investigation she believed they were fakes.