The Libby trial has been good for bringing about a little more transparency in government -- however reluctant -- through testimony and also through documents.

Following up on the recent post in bradblog: it is intriguing that a small office in an outpost of empire could so deftly turn up exactly the ‘raw intelligence’ our neocon PNAC movers and shakers in Washington desired. Our man in Marseilles . . .

This would be the office that turned in a convenient report dated November 25, 2002, that “a large quantity of uranium was currently stored in barrels” in the Benin port of Cotonou, “and that Niger’s President had sold this material to Iraq.” (DX64.7)

(Note 1: those barrels of uranium turned out to be cotton.) (Same link, DX64.9)

(Note 2: a week earlier, someone – either Cheney or Rumsfeld or, more probably, both – had received a report dated November 19, 2002, naming the port of Cotonou as the place from which Niger’s was shipped.) (DX71.9) (My working hypothesis is that this prior Benin report was the gleam in Rummy-Cheney’s eye that generated the next one. Questions emailed to the Office of the Vice President have not yet been answered.)

According to the web page of the US Consulate in Marseille, in the web site of the U.S. Embassy in Paris, under “Supporting the U.S. Navy”:

“The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has an office in Marseille which is staffed by one special agent and a fully-cleared American assistant. This offices handles security arrangements for all U.S. Navy ship visits to France's Mediterranean coast and Monaco (30 in 2000) and for all of French-speaking Africa. The Consulate General also has an employee who handles protocol and morale aspects of ship visits, including liaison with officials.”

So we’re looking at a two-man, or two-person, office?

The Europe Field Office of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service lists the NCIS Marseille office among 15 or so “subordinate offices” in outposts from Iceland to Greece.

Somehow an office that is subordinate as well as tiny, whose existence depends totally on – picking a name at random, here – Donald Rumsfeld when he was SecDef, looks like a good candidate for leaning on, that is leaning the bureaucratic elbow to get the desired “intelligence.” This conjecture is not much of a stretch given that they did the same to CIA, an agency not known for lacking support on Capitol Hill.

According to an aviation security expert who for obvious reasons cannot be named but whose initials stand for ‘Steve Elson,’ retired FAA Red Team Leader (paraphrasing here),

The organization NCIS, formerly NIS, has problems relating to professionalism and competence. Although recently it has been tasked with investigating cases including the killings of civilian Iraqis by U.S. military, Elson comments that NIS “has, or at least, had a poor reputation. I certainly hope that it has improved.”

Elson mentions that at the time he was leaving the Navy, the head of NIS was Cathal Flynn, who subsequently went on to head security at the FAA and on whose watch 9/11 happened. (Elson, like other aviation security experts, is a severe but accurate critic of security shortcomings in the FAA leading up to 9/11 – and since.)

He continues,

“. . .  AT ANY RATE, I HAD SOME POOR EXPERIENCES WITH NIS IN SAN DIEGO.  I WAS THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF A SPECIAL BOAT UNIT. RIGHT OFF THE BAT I LET THE PEOPLE KNOW MY FEELINGS AND ONE OF THEM WAS "DEATH TO DRUGGIES."  APPARENTLY A COUPLE OF THEM THOUGHT SELLING DRUGS WAS OK.  ONCE THEY WERE CAUGHT I DID EVERYTHING I COULD . . . I HAD TO WORK WITH NIS WHICH FIRST LOST, THEN DESTROYED THE EVIDENCE.  NOTHING UNEXPECTED.”

Like all the other experts, Elson debunks any probability of uranium sitting at the Benin port, in 2002, awaiting shipment to Iraq:

”WITH REGARDS TO THIS URANIUM STORY, MY OPINONS WOULD BE THAT IT PROBABLY WAS NOT URANIUM.  IF SO, THESE CLOWNS WOULD HAVE DONE EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO GET THE WORD TO . . . bush SO HE COULD JUSTIFY HIS WORLD DOMINATION DESIRES.  SO MY EXPERIENCE AND LOGIC TELLS ME THAT THERE WAS NO URANIUM.”