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Hitchens gets to the bottom of the whole charade, which goes back to Osirak and leaves unsaid Saddam's cash for nukes deal with Chirac, by interviewing Rolf Ekeus, whom Russia and France didn't want to send to Iraq for disarmament---sending empty suit Hans Blix instead. Hitch quotes Ekeus on Iraq's mystery ambassador to the Vatican:
One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq's delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel's destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions). . . . He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq's top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues.
Hitchens is warming to his task, and the outcome for the trucklers and lickspittles on the left never enjoy it when that happens [unless he's talking Trotsky---that they dig:
It may have occurred to you to ask--as the committee resolutely does not ask itself--why it was that such a man was posted to the Holy See, and why Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican was sent to a small West African country in February 1999. Well, in that year every other Iraqi embassy in Western Europe was closed, or downgraded to "interest section" level, and the Holy See was the only
exception. As Ekeus added to me in his letter: "A resident ambassador in Rome was ideally placed to undertake discreet and sensitive missions, especially as he was fully plugged into the intricacies of nuclear weapons diplomacy."
Of course, that incredible truffle-snuffing Great White Snark, the NYT, would be hot on this trail, you would think, wouldn't you?
How does Wissam al-Zahawie himself answer the question: What is a diplomat so senior--with or without nuclear experience--doing on a mission to a country to which he is not accredited? He has given two answers. On the nuclear issue, he stated to Hassan Fattah, then of Time magazine and now of the New York Times, that he did not know that Niger produced for export the only thing that it does produce for export, namely uranium "yellowcake." This claim I think we can safely describe as risibly untrue.
However, risibly untrue garbage on the Middle East is the NYT's meat and drink, it appears. Or Time Magazine, which swallows a lot for the sake of Saddam's reputation. The Financial Times has pulled the rug out from under the entire affair.
According to Mark Huband, the national security correspondent of the Financial Times, in an important front-page article he wrote on June 28, 2004, the consensus among European intelligence services was that Niger was attempting to deal in yellowcake with anyone it could find, from North Korea to Iran. According to documents recovered from Saddam Hussein's office, the president of Niger proposed himself for a visit to Iraq in June 1997 (thus incidentally proving that plans for such trips can be made without sending a Vatican-based ambassador several thousand miles from his base). And according to a new book entitled Shopping For Bombs, by the BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera, another visitor to Niger in that very month of February 1999 was A.Q. Khan, whose black market in nuclear materials was then unknown outside a very small circle in his home country of Pakistan. According to a diary of the journey kept by Khan's associate Abu Bakr Siddiqui and obtained by Corera, "Niger has big uranium deposits." The next year, A.Q. Khan was back in Niger's capital. So we can say with some assurance that Niger's authorities (so briefly and so leniently investigated by Joseph Wilson) seem to have given at least the impression of being open for business. The notion that Niger was eager to pay "cash" for Iraqi oil is thus made even more dubious. Iraq had plenty of cash, as well as plenty of oil. Niger is cash-poor to say the very least. What currency, or medium of exchange, did it really have to offer in return?
Yellowcake, in a word. For cash, in another word. Once again, the NYT is outted trying to undercut US foreign policy by surreptitious and dishonest means, employing a fraud and lightweight impostor like Wilson to lie on its Op-Ed pages. The big lie, Hitchens can tell the NYT better than most, was an invention of Lenin, Trotsky, and the NYT's fave foreign dictator, Joseph Stalin. Hitchens dismisses the Senate Study as a "small disgrace."
The story of Zahawie's visit was known, and had been passed on by London to Washington, well before the bogus document was circulated. And it was never alleged in George W. Bush's famous 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had actually inked a deal, only that it had "sought" to do so. If the forgery was intended as disinformation, it is one of the more successful such efforts on record. If it was done chiefly for money, as the London Sunday Times has reported of two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome, it has had much the same effect.
To summarize: The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie's name without ever once mentioning his significant background. It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip. It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger. It is unaware of the appearance of A.Q. Khan in the narrative. It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekeus. It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions. It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless.
The U.S. Senate is full of small disgraces, both Republican but especially Democrat.
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