Hadley and the Forged Niger Documents ---with pix->>>

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_23.php#006827

Nicolo Pollari is the head of Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The Repubblica article claims that over the course of 2002 Pollari -- knowing the documents were fakes -- made repeated attempts to get them into the DC information stream by going around the CIA, which discounted them as fakes. This was to satisfy the expressed needs of Bush administration officials who were searching for some information to validate their claims about an Iraqi nuclear program.

Remember, too, that Pollari attended the secret Rome meetings in late 2001 arranged by Michael Ledeen and attended by Manucher Ghorbanifar, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode.

Pollari's efforts were apparently in concert with the man who is now the Italian ambassador to the United States. And, perhaps most explosively, Pollari apparently arranged a secret meeting with Stephen Hadley -- then deputy National Security Advisor, and now National Security Advisor -- to discuss the documents.

The alleged date was September 9th, 2002.

The context here is important. The source of endless suspicion about when the documents first surfaced has been the timing and how that related to what was then happening in Washington. They surfaced just after the White House and the CIA had had a roundhouse battle over whether the President could make the Niger accusation in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio. The CIA eventually prevailed, at least winning that round. The documents surfaced in Italy a couple days later. And the president eventually succeeded in levelling the claim in his subsequent State of the Union address.

That White House-CIA argument was happening in late September 2002. The speech, if memory serves, was to be given on October 7th.

That puts the alleged Hadley-Pollari meeting only a week or so earlier.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_30.php#006904

On September 9th, 2002, Hadley met with Pollari in Washington. According to the Italian daily La Repubblica Pollari was there to press the details of the Niger-uranium story. The NSC has now confirmed that the meeting took place but claims it was a brief meeting and that no one present remembers the yellowcake story coming up.

In other words, it's a quite hazy denial if it's even a denial at all.

Less than a month later Hadley and others at the NSC tried but failed to get the Niger story into President Bush's October 7th WMD speech in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Days later copies of the forgeries surfaced in Rome.

Three months later Hadley and the same colleagues at the NSC succeeded in getting the Niger story included in the president's 2003 State of the Union address.

In July, Hadley took personal responsibility for allowing the bogus claim to be included in the State of the Union address and apologized publicly to the president.