Peter Eisner

The Italian Letter: Aggressive war based on forgeries

Peter Eisner discusses his new book The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, how the forgeries came to be a major basis for America’s war of aggression in Iraq, how incredibly crude they were, how the already discredited documents “turned up” on Oct. 7, 2002, two day before the Congressional vote for Bush’s war “authorization,” how the CIA debunked the information prior to Bush’s Oct. 7, 2002, how Cheney’s neocon cabal kept bringing it up, leading to the Joe Wilson trip to Niger to debunk it once more, how the White House cut the CIA out of the speech-vetting process, how the Brits never had any more evidence than the same forgeries, his conclusion thus-far that the forgeries originated with a “rouge faction” at SISMI and the background of that organization.

MP3 here. (18: 50)

Peter Eisner is a deputy foreign editor at the Washington Post. He served as a foreign editor at Newsday from 1985 through 1989 and as the paper’s Latin America correspondent from 1989 through 1994. He was also a reporter, editor and bureau chief with the Associated Press. Eisner won the InterAmerican Press Association Award in 1991 for his investigations of drug trafficking in the Americas. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.