Book review - The Italian Letter

Originally published in FAST FORWARD, July 5, 2007

By: Drew Anderson

It is shocking when a known truth is revealed to be a great deal more sinister than originally believed, or when an assumption is turned to fact and presented with mountains of evidence. That is precisely what investigative journalists Peter Eisner and Knut Royce have accomplished.
We now know that the war in Iraq was based on faulty intelligence and hinged on the intentions of the executive administration in the U.S. What Eisner and Royce have done is collect all the strands of that shady endeavour and woven them into a compelling, though often repetitive, retelling of the facts.
As though out of a movie, the book begins and continuously returns to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba-portrayed as earnest, hard working and misled-and her dealings with a shadowy trafficker of information. This relationship brings forth the Italian Letter, a forged document that would ultimately send Iraq into chaos.
In the letter, purportedly sent from the former president of Niger to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, is confirmation of a deal to sell 500 tonnes of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. The problem with the letter, and the rest of the information included in a package of documents, is that it was a clear fraud, easily discovered with a simple Google search.
It is this package of information that Burba brings to the Americans for vetting. It is this information that finally ends in the lap of George W. Bush and his cadre of neo-conservative believers.
From this beginning, the authors expose the politicization of intelligence, the failure of the storied American system of political checks and balances and the astonishing delusion of those in the administration. They expose the links between actors, interview countless participants in the system and lay bare devastating institutional failures in the intelligence community, governments and journalism.
Readers are left to wonder at the conspiracy theory feel to it all, and no doubt fans of that particular genre of thinking will take this information and run. What is startling is that it doesn’t need any more information or intrigue to make it terrifying.
Plato once proposed the need for a noble lie, a secret vested in the ruling class that would benefit society. In this book we are presented with the rise of public relations in manipulating the opinions of the citizenry, the presentation of untenable facts spun into a cohesive deception; the ignoble lie and its devastating consequences for a democracy. The U.S. administration used fear, based on cooked information, to entice a nation into war.
Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, illustrated the attitude of the administration when discussing the PR campaign that was launched to build support for the war in September of 2002 (three days before the first anniversary of 9/11). He told the New York Times: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
This book reveals the slow decline of American and British democracy and the important role that journalism plays in the dialogue of a society. It also makes it frustratingly clear that institutions can take on a life of their own and that information sometimes isn’t exposed in time.
As the book progresses through the entanglements of nations, administrations, editors and spooks, the truth becomes overwhelming and clear. Though decidedly on the side of overkill, the information proves too important to lay out in a few pages and move along. It requires the affirmation and double confirmation from many sources, and the authors expertly track the links and the movements of documents and failures as they snake their way across the globe.
For anyone opposed to the war in Iraq, this is essential reading. To understand just why this war is wrong requires a lesson in its original failings. For anyone that still supports the war, the information is driven home so often and so well in this book, it might just lift that veil from your eyes.