Why was Manucher Ghorbanifar at a meeting about the War on Terror?

"In December 2001 Michael Ledeen organized a three-day meeting in Rome, Italy between Manucher Ghorbanifar and Defense Intelligence Agency officials Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode. Also present were two officials from Italy's SISMI. In addition to a position at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen was working as a consultant to then U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans. The 2001 meeting took place with the approval of then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The meeting concerned a secret offer from reportedly dissident Iranian officials to provide information relevant to the War on Terrorism and Iran's relationship with terrorists in Afghanistan."

But, let's take a look back in time...

"Ghorbanifar's suspected duplicity during the Iran-Contra deal led CIA Director William Casey to order three separate lie-detector tests, all of which he failed. Iranian officials also suspected Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents. The CIA issued a burn notice (or "Fabricator Notice") on Ghorbanifar in 1984, meaning he was regarded as an unreliable source of intelligence. A 1987 congressional report on Iran-Contra cites the CIA warning that Ghorbanifar "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance"."

So, why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manucher_Ghorbanifar

Ghorbanifar's reputation as an intelligence fabricator might have been a real plus with Junior's adminstration which also fabricates intelligence. :)

...just as they were due to be released as historical documents.

Shoulda been our first clue.

planted in Iraq, after the invasion, to then be "found" by the U.S. troops who were hunting for them; thus fulfilling part 2 of the plot, the first part of which (also likely concocted at that meeting) was to fabricate the Niger/Iraq nuke documents that were fed into Bush's State of the Union speech. Manufacture the allegation (that Saddam had nukes), then manufacture and plant the evidence to make the allegation come true.

The obvious purpose was to provide Bush and Blair with a ready-made "justification" for all this violence (tens of thousands of innocent people slaughtered; thousands of U.S. troops killed, and many more thousands wounded; torture, looting, chaos). But there is a theory that the Niger/Iraq nuke forgeries ALSO had a subtler purpose. One bit of evidence for this theory is that the forgeries were quite crude and easily detectable. Why? Couldn't these expert conspirators come up with anything better? Why didn't they create better forgeries--and not ones with such easily discoverable mistakes as having the names and dates wrong? The theory is that this was bait--that the forgeries were intended to be discovered as forgeries--to draw the CIA into a known anti-nukes-in-Iraq position, and then to trump them--discredit them, and make then more purge-able--by the "find" of the phony nukes, after the invasion. It would have been sweet revenge for Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had shunned as unreliable.

But somebody foiled part 2 of this scheme. The WMDs never materialized, or were destroyed in route. And who was in a better position to do this than the covert counter-proliferation network that Valerie Plame was head of (Brewster-Jennings)? It was their JOB to stop just this: illicit WMD movements. Another party who may have got onto the scheme was David Kelly, the Brits insider WMD expert, who had experience in Iraq and friends in Iraq, who had done a turnabout on the war after the invasion, and had begun to whistleblow to the BBC about the "sexed up" pre-war WMD dossier, and who was found dead near his home, under highly suspicious circumstances, four days after Plame was outed. His office and computers were searched, and, four days after that, Novak ADDITIONALLY outed the entire Brewster-Jennings network, putting all of its covert agents/contacts around the world at great risk of getting killed.

There is more to this theory. I'll just say that it holds up pretty well, and helps to explain a lot of puzzles and odd items like the "crudeness" of the Niger forgeries, the reason they kept putting the Niger allegation back into Bush's speeches (even after it was discredited--at that point, they still expected the planted nukes scheme to work), the strange coincidence of the dates of the Plame and Kelly events (and the figure that links them together--Judith Miller), the extraordinary actions that the Bushites took, involving many top people, in response to Wilson's article (outing an entire CIA network), Kelly's motivation for whistleblowing, what else he might have known that could have gotten him killed, and the reason for Ghorbanifar's presence at the Rome meeting (something I have wondered about also).

There could also be an Iran aspect to this plot. Ghorbanifar was involved in trying to convince the CIA that Iraq's nukes had been stolen by the Iranians and moved to Iran. The CIA quickly discovered that this was bogus. But perhaps the plan was for the U.S. military, having secured Baghdad, to move right on into Iran following the trail of the "stolen nukes." The Iranians would have fought back, and hard, and thus the wider war the Bushites have been spoiling for would have been instigated quite early.

(In tandem with other intelligence agencies?)