Can the British-Uranium-Africa story finally be over? 

Can the British-Uranium-Africa story finally be over?

So now Robin Cook, former Foreign Minister to Tony Blair who resigned over Iraq, says Britain has no intelligence whatsoever on Africa and uranium. This would at least explain why none has been shared with the IAEA, contrary to a Security Council resolution. But surely the Brits wouldn't lie?

Well, they probably have something.

Wilson speculated that the second source was nothing more than the information that Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican visited Niger in 1999, which isn't exactly secret intelligence at this point.

Wilson says it's very unlikely that the Iraqi ambassador in question would have been charged with a uranium-related mission. For one thing, says Wilson, he didn't know anything about uranium. (NB: The 9-11 Commission Report recounts a story where al-Qaeda sent some operatives who didn't know anything about uranium to buy some in Sudan with the predictable result that they bought some stuff that turned out not to be uranium. On the one hand, this indicates that it's a very bad idea to send non-experts to buy your uranium for you, but it also indicates that it's not out of the question that someone would, in fact, send non-experts even though it's a bad idea.) What's more, for a variety of reasons (notably his Turkoman ethnicity and non-traditional sexual orientation) he wasn't a highly trusted figure in the regime. Wilson thinks that the point of the trip was simply to offer West African officials paid junkets to Baghdad as part of Iraq's long-term effort to undermine the sanctions regime.