Real History and The Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) Toronto, Canada, Who forged the Niger uranium papers? By Don Sellar “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” – U.S. President George W Bush , State of the Union address, Jan. 28, 2003. OF all the news stories the Star published in 2003, the disputed tale of an Iraqi quest for nuclear weapons ranks as the most perplexing. David Irving comments: COME off it!

Not just the spurious document about uranium purchases in the N-country, but other items used by Colin Powell are equally suspect.

At the Security Council meeting in Februar 2003, Powell also showed the council members — and the world — by projecting a facsimile of it into a screen in the council chanber, a National Security Agency transcript of a translated telephone conversation allegedly overheard between two Iraqi officers, one asking the other if he had managed to hide the Weapons of Mass Destruction in time before that awful Hans Blix got there, and the other assuring him that he had hidden them where the

coalition would never find them. The weapons never existed. The conversation therefore can’t have taken place either. What does that tell us about George W Bush, Colin Powell , and their ” NSA transcript”? Why hasn’t the world’s press mentioned this? Or are their brains so addled with alcohol, and their pockets so heavy with bribes, that they have forgotten their duty as guardians of the people?

True, the provocative allegation Bush levelled against Saddam last January on the brink of war lies in tatters. But the whole story hasn’t been told. There are big gaps for good journalists to fill. Let’s start at the beginning.

On Dec. 20, 2002, the Star ran an Associated Press item in which the U.S. State Department declared Iraq had failed to say in a weapons declaration that it tried to buy uranium in Niger. Earlier, British intelligence had accused Saddam of trying to buy “significant’ amounts of uranium in Africa, but the U.S. State Department was first to name Niger, a largely Muslim nation whose leading export is uranium.

Soon, other news reports said authorities in Niger had confirmed they’d rebuffed an attempt twenty years earlier. Then, on Jan. 28, Bush repeated the allegation in his State of the Union speech. It would come