September 11 Commission Report - Gnostic Liberation Front

led the CIA to send a former ambassador to the African nation of Niger to investigate whether
Iraq had sought the materials there. The ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, found little
evidence to support such a claim, and the documents were later deemed to have been forged.
But President Bush referred to the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in making the
case for the invasion. Bush's speech, Wilson's trip and the role Wilson's wife played in
sending him have created a political storm that still envelops the White House. The
documents in question included letters on Niger government letterhead and purported
contracts showing sales of uranium to Iraq. They were provided in 2002 to an Italian
magazine, which turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The FBI's decision to
reopen the investigation reverses the agency's announcement last month that it had finished a
two-year inquiry and concluded that the forgeries were part of a moneymaking scheme — and
not an effort to manipulate U.S. foreign policy. Those findings concerned some members of
the Senate Intelligence Committee after published reports that the FBI had not interviewed a
former Italian spy named Rocco Martino, who was identified as the original source of the
documents. The committee had requested the initial investigation.” [FBI Is Taking Another
Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence, Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Josh Meyer, Los
Angeles Times, December 3, 2005]
− The Bush administration’s actions to prevent the facts around 9/11 from being
exposed have been documented in other parts of this report. This behavior
however, is not isolated, and reflects a broader pattern of lies and deception. Other
examples of falsification of evidence can include the following three stories:
“U.S. congressional leaders who have been touting Iraq's new "free press" as a sign of
progress in the troubled country are upset at the Pentagon's admission last week that it has
been paying for "good news" stories written by the military and placed in Iraqi media by a
Washington-based public relations firm. In a briefing for the powerful chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, Republican John Warner of Virginia, the military acknowledged
that news articles written by U.S. troops had been placed as paid advertisements in the Iraqi
news media, and not always properly identified. Warner told reporters after receiving a
briefing from officials at the Pentagon that senior commanders in Iraq were trying to get to
the bottom of a program that apparently also paid monthly stipends to friendly Iraqi
journalists.” [The Bad News Is That the Good News Is Fake, William Fisher, Inter Press
Service News Agency December 6, 2005]
“When a CIA briefer did not provide him with the answers he desired, Cheney reportedly
demanded that she be replaced. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat and
member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in July 2003 that he knew of at least three
intelligence analysts who felt pressured to warp their findings.” [The Rise and Rise of
Richard B. Cheney, John Nichols, The New Press, 2004, p212.]
“Cheney got on well with the king (Fahd) and his minions, who would not learn until
sometime later that the defense secretary and his aides had deceived them – displaying
doctored satellite photos to suggest that an Iraqi invasion force had moved to the border in
preparation for an invasion of Saudi Arabia.” [The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney, John
Nichols, The New Press, 2004, p114.]
For those who might need evidence that this ‘fabrication’ also happens in the US as well
as outside of it’s borders, this report suggests an Internet search on the Jeff Gannon (aka
Guckert) affair, of a Whitehouse “plant” in the Press Corps, or the discovery that the
Bush administration paid consultants to write favorable news coverage. The falsification
of news is actually quite easy though. The ‘inside’ view of the news media is that in
nearly all cases, the media does little “investigative” analysis any more
THE SEPTEMBER 11 COMMISSION REPORT Page 328