Carlo Bonini          

STATE OF THE UNION 2003:

” Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa.”
Or not …

Well, as Bill Moyers reminds us, it wasn’t true. It was all a forgery, perpetrated in Rome. And Carlo Bonini, the Italian journalist who blew the story, co-author of Collusion — the story about the junk intelligence that led us all to war — is interviewed on Bill’s latest show.

The video and transcript are available here.

Here are some excerpts:

“   MOYERS: Collusion, by Italian journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo, takes you to the streets of Rome where the fake documents were cooked up by a motley band of conspirators whose scheme revolved around SISMI, the Italian equivalent of the CIA.

 

[….]

 

BONINI: You put a piece of raw intelligence in the circuit of the intelligence – allied intelligence agencies. And what happens is in the morning what is false in the morning turns into true facts at night. This information is given to the US intelligence. In the meantime, the same information is given to the British intelligence. The US intelligence checks the informations with the British intelligence. And the British intelligence says, “Yeah, we have the same information.” The point is that the two intelligence agencies, they don’t have to share their sources. So nor the Americans nor the Brits are going to say from whom they got the informations. But they got a confirmation…

 

Then they talk to the Italians. And the Italians say, “Oh, you had a confirmation from the British?” Rome talks to London, “Hey, you got a confirmation from Washington?” So the same piece of junk obtained in 48 hours, two different confirmations. It’s a mirror game. I can say briefly when US intelligence received the informations from the Italians, they – I mean, the CIA urged the DGSE – the French intelligence, the French CIA – to check the informations because Niger is a former French colony. There’s no better intelligence agency than the French one to double check a story like this. They worked hard on the information, and they came back saying, “There is nothing. This intelligence you received is simply junk intelligence. There is no evidence of such a deal between the Niger government and the Iraqi government.”

 

[….]

 

And the lesson is journalism matters. In wartime your enemy is the lies, is the propaganda. No matter if it’s the propaganda of your enemies, or if it’s the propaganda of your government. I mean, propaganda never gets good to the people, to the army, to anybody. And, if you want, and the lesson is this one: we have to protect the public opinion, and in last instance, the democracy from propaganda.”

So the Americans had it from both the French and from Joseph C. Wilson, the American diplomat who went to Niger to investigate the claim and found nothing. (Wilson was punished for telling the inconvenient truth by the leaking of the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, an active CIA operative.)

And where was the American press? Where was the Australian press? Well, basically jostling each other for the honour of holding the dicks of their respective Presidents and Prime Ministers. Can it really be true that the only journalists interested in holding propaganda up to scrutiny are Italian?