"The question is why SISMI didn't ring the bell for U.S. that the documents were faked," Bonini told Salon. He noted that the unreliable Martino only played a small part in sourcing their story, and the majority of it came from contacts in Italian, U.S. and other foreign intelligence and diplomatic services.

SISMI and the Italian parliament, for their part, maintain that Martino cooked up the whole scam to make money. Martino, who by all accounts is as unreliable as they come, claims he was nothing more than a "postman" and didn't know the documents were faked.

What Martino knew about the Niger dossier, which apparently also included outdated 10-year-old Italian intelligence, is still far less important than what the Italian and the American governments knew. According to Knight-Ridder, a U.S. State Department WMD analyst cast doubts on the documents immediately upon seeing them. In the weeks before Bush's infamous Jan. 28 State of the Union speech, the analyst concluded the documents were crude forgeries, writing, "documents bear a funky Emb. Of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess)."

Both the Berlusconi and Bush administrations deny the allegations. But their denials raise more questions than they answer.

Testifying before the Senate intelligence oversight panel on Thursday, Gen. Nicolo Pollari, the SISMI chief, denied any Italian government involvement in the forged dossier.

Berlusconi says neither his government nor the Italian intelligence agency had any part in the alleged scam. The La Repubblica stories threatened to damage the reputation of Italy, Berlusconi told the conservative newspaper Libero, saying, "If they were believed, we would be considered the instigator" of the war in Iraq.

Berlusconi's and SISMI's claims of innocence were recently bolstered by a clean bill of health from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced on Friday, Nov. 4, that it had closed its two-year investigation into the fraudulent dossier. According to the New York Times, an FBI official confirmed reports that the agency had sent a letter to the Italian government on July 20 thanking it for its help and clearing the Italian secret service of disseminating the false documents.

But that is a bit strange, since, according to Newsweek, as of September 2004 the Italians had still not given the FBI permission to interview Martino. Moreover, the thoroughness of the FBI inquiry is itself questionable: Although Martino had visited the U.S. twice in the summer of 2004 to appear on television, and by the time of his second visit had been the subject of international press coverage because of his role in the scandal, the FBI reportedly never even attempted to interview him. In fact, to this date the FBI has never interviewed Martino.

The FBI did not return three calls by Salon asking for comment.

The Senate hearings also disclosed that the Italian intelligence agency first warned the U.S. and Britain about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium on Oct. 15, 2001, about a month after the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. SISMI acknowledged that on that date it confirmed to the CIA that it had "intelligence data" provided by "a creditable source." (The "creditable source" was a female SISMI asset known as "La Signora," who according to the La Repubblica series took part in the forgery scheme.)

Italian officials have seemed quite confused about whether SISMI ever had the documents or not. In the wake of the hearings last week, Sen. Massimo Brutti told reporters that SISMI had warned the U.S about the fake dossier around the time of Bush's infamous State of the Union speech in January 2003. (The French, to whom Martino also peddled the bogus papers, and whom both Italian officials and neocon strategist Ledeen have accused of being responsible for peddling the fraud, alerted the U.S. to the fraud on Feb. 4, 2003.) But later that day he backtracked, calling Reuters and the Associated Press and saying that he had been mistaken, that SISMI never had the documents and therefore could not have warned about them.

After President Bush made his State of the Union claim that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, the International Atomic Energy Agency investigated the Niger dossier. They proved them to be "a crude forgery" within two hours, according to Newsweek. What did the IAEA do that the American and British governments apparently hadn't? They Googled them.

The FBI may have closed its investigation of the Niger yellowcake forgery, but many questions about the role played by both Italy and by Bush administration hawks remain.

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