With friends like France, who needs friends

You may recall this Oct 26 post, which linked to the following:

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.

The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

These documents were part of the whole sordid Joe Wilson affair. (See this post for more.)

Today, we are reassured that no, the French had nothing to do with ze forgeries. No no, au contraire. In fact, zey were trying to help us.

France's spy service tried for months to warn the CIA that there was no evidence to support a US allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase nuclear weapons material in Africa, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday, quoting a French former intelligence official.

For more than a year before US President George W. Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Niger, France, in previously undisclosed, secret exchanges beginning in 2001, repeatedly warned that the charges were bogus, according to its retired chief of counter-intelligence Alain Chouet.

There you have it. A former French counter-intelligence chief saying they did their best to warn President Bush not to get stuck in that Niger tar baby.

Surely, Choet wouldn't lie, would he?

I suppose it is possible France was trying the old Marseille Reverse Double Screw Trick. One the hand, trying to set up the United States by feeding them bogus documents. And on the other hand, telling the United States in private salons that the documents were forged, knowing that the United States didn't trust France because of France's opposition on Iraq, and so would think the opposite of what France said and accept the documents as real.

I do like the droll comment from the US official at the end of the report.

A US official contacted by the newspaper said that Chouet's revelation was "at odds with our understanding of the issue."

Translation from Diplospeak: "They are lying sacks of dung."

It is not entirely clear what it will take for France to truly realize the threat they are facing.

The enemy is after them, too. There was this report just from today.

Twenty-two mainly Tunisian and Algerian men were arrested early Monday in the Paris region under an investigation into suspected Islamic extremist plans to carry out attacks in France, officials said.

Investigators believe some of the detainees are active in organised crime and have carried out armed robberies to raise money for Islamic extremist groups, the officials said.

Police suspect that the group were planning attacks on "highly symbolic targets", they said.

The suspects were under surveillance for several weeks and were detained after evidence emerged that "violent actions" were being planned, they added.

The MSNBC report on these arrests, put together with AP and al-Reuters reports, not surprisingly, added this:

Despite its strong opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, France remains the target of Islamist militants because of its intelligence links with the United States and Britain.

And here I thought France was a target because radical Islam wants to destroy anyone who doesn't follow its hateful ideology, and France's attempts at appeasement only makes it look weak in the eyes of the terrorists, and brings only contempt from them.