<nettime> "Macbeth" and the Forged Documents of Niger

[ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben)]

The U.S. and world media have been covering the trail of the forged
documents from Niger for the past few weeks. This has been a fruitful
trail as it has led to seeing some of what has gone on behind the 
scenes in the Bush administration.


Here is the introduction to an article I did that was recently published 
in Telepolis.

"Macbeth" and the Forged Documents of Niger
The White House Scandal Grows Ever More Grave
        by Ronda Hauben


A modern opera produced by the German theater company Oper Frankfurt
was performed last week at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York
City.1 The opera "Macbeth: three nameless acts (after Shakespeare)",
was directed by Archim Frey. Juxtaposed to the images depicting the
bloody deeds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were words describing Macbeth:

"Your face shall feign innocence, The eye shall be blind to what the
hand shall do."

George W. Bush delivering his State of the Union Adress on January 28,
2003

These words provide an artful way to describe the current scandal in
the U.S. White House. The President and his advisors continue to feign
their innocence. They didn't know. Their hands did the deeds, but their
eyes, they claim, were blind. They couldn't see what their hands would
do.

In the past few weeks, however, the world has begun to see more and
more clearly what the hands of the U.S. administration have done. On
Wednesday, July 16, 2003, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica
[1] copies of the forged documents the U.S. government had
given to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as proof of
Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons capacity. The Italian newspaper pointed
out the crude nature of the forgeries. Among the discrepancies in the
forged documents were the fact that one letter was addressed to the
President of Niger, but also his signature was included as the author
of the document. Another document was on the stationary of a Niger
Ministry with the signature of a person who had last been in the
Ministry more than 10 years earlier.

The White House claims that they only got these documents in October of
2002 and four months later gave them to the IAEA in February 2003. It
only took the IAEA a few days, in contrast, to recognize these
documents as forgeries. In their Report to the U.N. Security Council on
March 7, 2003, the IAEA identified the fraudulent nature of the
documents. This was still several weeks before the U.S. government went
to war against Iraq (The U.S. Government Case for War in Iraq Based
on Forgery and Lies[2]).

[1]
http://www.repubblica.it/online/esteri/iraqattacotrentacinque/dossi/doss
i.html
[2] http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/15062/1.html

The url for the rest of the article is

http://www.telepolis.de/english/inhalt/co/15268/1.html

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