Now isn’t this an interesting twist: according to the United Nations, the evidence that the U.S. and Britain have been citing to show that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program is fabricated. The Washington Post reports:
A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s secret nuclear ambitions.
Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed “not authentic” after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away — including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.
“We fell for it,” said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.
A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents “were shared with us in good faith,” he said.
As the IAEA says, it doesn’t seem as if the Bush administration actually had anything to do with fabricating the documents… but it does beg the question of why the administration didn’t at least verify their authenticity. I fully expect that one of Howard Stern’s moronic listeners will call the White House and offer evidence, which will then be presented to the U.N. with no questions asked.
