As Fred correctly points out:
"A report in the Financial Times said the newspaper had learnt from two “senior Whitehall sources” that Britain obtained its information on the uranium from two west European countries thought to be France and Italy."
The actual source of the ‘secret evidence’ that Britain is relying on is France. It isn’t British intelligence in any sense. Britain’s official reason why it can’t pass on this ‘evidence’ to the U.S. is, as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has so succinctly explained:
“It just happens to be one of the rules of liaison with foreign intelligence services that they own the intelligence. The second intelligence service does not and therefore we are not able to pass it on to the third party.”
The ‘second intelligence service’ being Britain’s MI6.
Since everyone knows, of course, who the real source of the secret evidence is because that’s not secret, at least at the official level, U.S. intelligence simply went to France and asked them what they were showing the British that the Brits were honor-bound not to show to the U.S.
From a link kindly provided by Comrade Stalin on the subject earlier:
"American intelligence officials were further misled over Saddam’s supposed attempt to buy uranium when France - which effectively controls mining in Niger - told Washington that it had reason to believe that Iraq was trying to do so. “Only later did Paris inform Washington that its belief had been based on the same documents that had tricked the Americans and the British,” an Italian diplomat said.
"This was la grande trappola [the big trap]. The Americans were now convinced by the French that Saddam really was trying to buy uranium. They thought the French must be right, since not even a gram of uranium in Niger could be shifted without their knowledge."
British officials still say that the claim about Iraqi uranium purchases rested on a second source, not just the now-discredited documents. Intelligence officials from some other Western countries now believe, however, that the second source was also France - part of a “sinister trap” for Mr Blair.
French intelligence was asked by The Sunday Telegraph for a public comment on the allegations against it, but has yet to give one."
news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.j … uran05.xml
[color=blue]This is just another example of the echo chamber effect which ‘proved’ before the invasion that Iraq was brimming with weapons of mass destruction and ‘everyone believed it.’ Just saying something and then quoting your own echo makes it true.[/color]