Fake document tied to Niger Embassy
By Sam Roe for the Chicago Tribune.

At one point, the Niger letters were seen as key evidence in the U.S. case against Iraq. In December, the State Department said Iraq’s declaration to the United Nations regarding its weapons program omitted numerous items. Among them, the State Department said, were “efforts to procure uranium from Niger.”
On March 7, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, told the Security Council that U.N. experts had determined the letters were forged.

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Interview with Hans Blix, Head UN Disarmament Inspector
Interviewer: Corine Lesnes for Le Monde.

Lesnes: In the interview you gave to the British Daily, The Guardian, on June 11, did you really say there were “bastards” in the American administration?
Blix: No, no, not at all. I never said there were bastards in the administration. I said; in Washington. I was referring to private detractors in the private sector.
L: To whom were you referring?
B: The people who criticized the IAEA-the International Atomic Energy Agency-, for example, all through the nineties.
L: Can you say a little more about it?
B: No, it’s not important enough. These are old stories that were spread about my work in Iraq in 1991-(Note: the IAEA, directed at the time by Mr. Blix was accused of having totally missed Iraq’s nuclear program) There were criticisms by former inspectors who reproached us for not being up to snuff; there were articles published by a former Swedish Prime Minister, one in the Washington Times, another in the Wall Street Journal. All that came from the same group of people; it wasn’t governmental.

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Henry Waxman is stepping up to ask the Shrub Klan about the use of forged documents within their WMD “evidence.”
Page One Of Waxman’s Letter To Condoleeza Rice
Page Two Of Waxman’s Letter To Condoleeza Rice

In addition to denying that senior officials were aware that the President was citing forged evidence, you also claimed (1) “there were also other sources that said that there were, the Iraqis were seeking yellowcake – uranium oxide – from Africa” and (2) “there were other attempts to get yellowcake from Africa.”
This answer does not explain the President’s statement in the State of the Union address. In his State of the Union address, the President referred specifically to the evidence from the British. He stated: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Presumably, the President would use the best available evidence in his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. It would make no sense for him to cite forged evidence obtained from the British if, in fact, the United States had other reliable evidence that he could have cited.
Moreover, contrary to your assertion, there does not appear to be any other specific and credible evidence that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from an African country. The Administration has not provided any such evidence to me or my staff despite our repeated requests. To the contrary, the State Department wrote me that the “other source” of this claim was another Western European ally. But as the State Department acknowledged in its letter, “the second Western European government had based its assessment on the evidence already available to the U.S. that was subsequently discredited.”
…On Sunday, you stated that “there is now a lot of revisionism that says, there was disagreement on this data point, or disagreement on that data point.” I disagree strongly with this characterization. I am not raising questions about the validity of an isolated “data point,” and the issue is not whether the war in Iraq was justified or not.
What I want to know is the answer to a simple question: Why did the President use forged evidence in the State of the Union address? This is a question that bears directly on the credibility of the United States, and it should be answered in a prompt and forthright manner, with full disclosure of all the relevant facts.

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