The Helicopter deal a reward for the Niger forgeries??-Has this been debunked?

I saw this a while back...
John McCain decided to question President Obama about it yesterday. And Washington Journal just discussed it...

So-if I had been able to get through & say the deal was a reward for the Niger forgeries-Would I be wrong?
There are no hard sources for this but I would not expect there to be...
If it is true-This is Dynamite & would destroy any shreds of Bush's chances to avoid prosecutions...

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Snip...
"Obama Confronts a Choice on Copters

"http://www.alternet.org/audits/127832/is_the_u.s._paying_off_the_italian_government_for_forging_the_niger_documents/?page=entire

Officials up and down the chain who awarded the contract knew that they were doing something extraordinarily wrong. The rigged bidding process bypassed, for example, Marine One pilots who repeatedly sought to give input. They had many safety concerns. At the time of the bid, the helicopter chosen was not certified to fly in the U.S. It was an old model made of heavy materials; this flew in the face of why the President supposedly needed a new fleet: i.e., so many extra security devices had been added to Marine One after 9/11, it was struggling to lift off. In its losing bid, the Connecticut-based Sikorsky, which had manufactured virtually all presidential helicopters since Eisenhower first ordered one, proposed a new model made of much lighter, composite materials.

But the Marine One pilots' prime objection, which was raised repeatedly by many other officials in private, was national security. Finmeccanica was doing business with Iran, China and Libya. Why outsource so sensitive a project? At the time of the bid, the security clearance necessary to manufacture and maintain Marine One required U.S. citizenship and prohibited Marine One team members from being married to citizens of another country.

After the bid was awarded, John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, told us: "Analyzing the defense industry for nearly 30 years, I try to stay calm and nonpartisan. But the Finmeccanica deal raised every hair on my neck. Apparently no one else sees the irony in a foreign military contractor building Marine One and Ayatollah One."

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Here's a link from 2006
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=e5f90f38b05836fede6d7b5a217b3a40

Just curious N all...
Don't want to sound like a loon on C-span but who could tell the diff...:eyes: