The FT has now learnt that three European intelligence services were aware of possible illicit trade in uranium from Niger between 1999 and 2001. Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq.

The use of the qualifier "possible" here indicates that evidence to support this theory is very weak, or non-existant, a point to keep in mind when considering the subsequent appearance of the fraudulent Niger Yellowcake documents.

In any event...

Iraq did not have a capability in September 2002 to enrich uranium. To be sure, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was dangerously close to achieving such a capacity. He had assembled a rudimentary arrays of centrifuges that had the potential for enriching uranium isotopes. But as a result of that war, the centrifuges and other enrichment facilities were destroyed by the US, the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as the subsequent invasion confirmed. In any case, Iraq never had the gasification plant to convert it into uranium hexafluoride gas, and without it, Iraq could not produce fissile material even if it secretly obtained the centrifuges. Iraq certainly had access to yellowcake. Whatever the provenance of the "African Uranium," Iraq could retrieve yellowcake from its own phosphate deposits at Al Qaim near the Syrian border. But yellowcake, without the ability to convert it fissile material, was not a threat.

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To sum up, there is no hard evidence to support the allegation that Iraq sought yellowcake from Niger. The claim seems particularly ludicrous when one considers that Iraq had its own domestic source of yellowcake, but no way of converting it into anything dangerous.

The Niger Yellowcake caper is a groundless scare story meant to raise the spectre of Saddam as nuclear bogey man to justify the invasion of Iraq.

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