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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (430946)	7/22/2003 10:17:04 AM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

US had forged documents 'in 2001' From correspondents in Rome July 21, 2003 FORGED documents which are at the centre of a dispute over the quality of Washington's intelligence in the build-up to war with Iraq were passed on to the United States as early as the end of 2001, a US lawmaker said in an interview today. US President George W Bush used the documents, now shown to be clearly false, as evidence that Saddam Hussein's Iraq sought to procure uranium for an alleged nuclear weapons programme from the west African country Niger. The opposition Democrat lawmaker Henry Waxman told the Italian daily La Repubblica he had spoken to a variety of different sources who had shown him that the documents were passed on to Washington at the end of 2001. La Repubblica published last week what it said were photocopies of the original documents passed to Italian agents by an African diplomat in November 2001 - a telex from Niger's ambassador to Rome, two letters and a protocol with Iraq on the purchase of uranium. The US State Department has now admitted its embassy in Rome was given forged documents detailing the Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger, but said they came from a private source in October 2002. Bush referred to the information in his January 28 State of the Union address - a move which the White House now says was a mistake. "We still do not know who lied, but someone has to take responsibility at the White House. "It's not about deciding whether it was right or wrong to intervene in Iraq, the problem today is to understand who deceived America," said Waxman, member of the lower House of Representatives, in comments that were reproduced in Italian. According to Waxman, the UN's nuclear agency asked Washington to hand over the material on December 19, 2002, but the United States failed to initially respond to the request. Waxman said that the International Atomic Energy Agency did not receive the documents until February 4 this year, only one and a half months before the launch of military action against Iraq. "The agency received the dossier only on February 4, 2003: a scandal," said Waxman. In a further twist to the story, a Italian journalist claimed yesterday that she was the source who had supplied US diplomats in Rome with the forged documents.