A row has broken out between France and Italy over whose intelligence service is to blame for the Niger uranium controversy, which led to Britain and America claiming wrongly that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy material for nuclear bombs.
Italian diplomats say that France was behind forged documents which at first appeared to prove that Iraq was seeking "yellow-cake" uranium in Niger - evidence used by Britain and America to promote the case for last year's Gulf war.
They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims.
Matt's Chat
Very, very interesting. So, let me see if I got this straight. France knows we want to invade Iraq, which would muck up their sweet oil deals, so they fabricate documents that they later can denounce as forgeries in order to discredit the US and British effort. Very clever.Note to John Kerry and all Michael Moore Democrats: France is not our "ally." They are, in fact, an enemy. One who has been playing you for a fool.
Mark's Remarks
The French doing this is not surprising...De Gaulle was willing to risk blowing the DDay invasion because he felt 'slighted' by Eisenhower....The hubris of these people!
If proven or shown to be true, the French need to be counted as among the enemies of the US (as I believe they really are already). Why are they so angry? It is because of the ego of the French leaders. They think they need to be a superpower, even though they haven't been a factor (unless you track surrender rates) since Napoleon.
