Wayne Madsen – Wayne Madsen Report August 18, 2006
On Aug. 6, 2006, Rupert Murdoch's main British mouthpiece,
The Sunday Times, reported that "Iran is seeking to import large consignments of uranium from Africa." It was a similar utterance, contained in a bogus 16-word claim by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that was used, in part, to justify America's and Britain's disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now, the same canard is being used to justify a U.S. attack on Iran.
The Sunday Times chief source for its
story was an unnamed Tanzanian customs official who claimed that Tanzanian customs intercepted in October 2005 an air shipment of uranium from near Lubumbashi in Congo's Katanga to Mwanza in Tanzania. The alleged uranium shipments from Congo to Iran were said to have started in 2002 and consisted of several alleged shipments. The alleged source of the uranium, the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga, was also the source for the uranium used in the U.S, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The only problem with the
Sunday Times story is that the Shinkolobwe mine is no longer in operation. "The Congo mine has been closed for decades," according to a very knowledgeable U.S. government who has dealt extensively with African uranium production. Congo's government claims the ore concentrator for Shinkolobwe has been shut down since 1961 and, therefore, cannot be concentrated into refined yellowcake uranium.
Resource-rich Congo, which is just emerging from a genocidal civil war encouraged by U.S., British, and Israeli elements using their surrogates in Rwanda, Uganda, and eastern Congo, is a lucrative target for the Bush administration and its criminal accomplices. Conveniently for the neo-cons, the story about Congolese uranium shipments to Iran is said to have involved trans-shipment points in Sudan and Syria and middlemen in Lebanon, all three countries targets of the Project for the New American Century operatives in Washington, London, and Jerusalem/Tel Aviv. Currently, the CIA, under the regime of General Michael Hayden, is cooking the intelligence to prove the Congolese-Tanzanian-Sudanese-Syrian-Iranian uranium smuggling connections. Just for good measure, the neo-cons are suggesting that Zimbabwe, a major target of the Bush administration, and Zambia, were also involved in the alleged elaborate uranium smuggling scheme. President George W. Bush is reported to have ordered Hayden and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to do everything possible to prove a uranium connection between Iran and Congo.
Africa, which is rife with false "official looking" documents, such as those Nigerien documents laundered through the Silvio Berlusconi-Italian Fascist-Michael Ledeen network to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, is a favorite pace for the neo-cons to cook up phony intelligence and false flags. Some of the phony intelligence being used to prove a Congolese-Iranian uranium link is originating with political enemies of President Joseph Kabila, who is the reported winner of the recent UN-supervised presidential election. His two major opponents, both U.S. and Israeli-backed guerrilla leaders, are the likely sources of the bogus uranium stories. Belgian intelligence, which has extensive sources in Kinshasa and throughout Congo, have scoffed at the reports of the alleged uranium sales. They have evaluated the uranium reports with a confidence level of "not serious," according to the Belgian magazine Trends. The Belgian magazine also reports that an official of the American embassy in Kinshasa visited the Shinkolobwe mine on August 9 and "found nothing irregular." The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna has also derided the notion of Congolese uranium sales to Iran.
<>Trends<> also discovered some proof that official Congolese Gécamines (the Congolese state mining company) uranium sales records from 1966 to 1968 were tampered with to make it look like there were recent sales of uranium from Katanga to Iran. The magazine states, "The serial numbers of the uranium shipments referred to in the exchange of letters between Wieland GmbH [of Germany] and Saman Cheshemen [mining company] of Iran, could possibly been taken from official uranium sales by the Congolese state-owned company Gécamines of existing reserves from 1966 and 1968 from Shinkolobwe. Have those previous serial numbers been used to give this smuggling operation an appearance of truthfulness? The incredible amount of 2 billion dollars is explained by some as forming part of a money laundering operation." As every user of e-mail is aware, Africa is the source for all kinds of money laundering schemes and frauds. It would seem that the neo-cons are the only people in the world not aware of these schemes but are, nevertheless, trying to convince professional intelligence agencies that the money laundering operations and phony intelligence reports are clues in proving a "Congo sells uranium to Iran" scheme.
A U.S. intelligence source told WMR two months ago that the Kabila government would be implicated by the neo-cons in a false uranium smuggling operation with Iran in an effort to justify both an attack on Iran and a military overthrow of Kabila by pro-U.S./Israeli elements in Congo. Kabila has been the target of several attempted coups staged in neighboring countries by mercenaries in the pay of U.S. and British intelligence. It now appears that the forecast of a phony Congolese link to uranium sales, which also mentioned Tanzanian involvement, was correct. It is also very apparent that the neo-cons are becoming incredibly predictable in their machinations. As with Niger and the bogus yellowcake sales to Iraq, we now have forged Congolese documents, phony news stories emanating from the always-suspect Murdoch News Corp. falsehood factory, and intelligence agencies calling the bluff of the neo-cons.
www.waynemadsenreport.com/
Note
It is worth noting here that we have been informed that one of the journalists behind the Sunday Times story, David Leppard, is an intelligence asset. Ed.
Last updated 18/08/2006
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