THE ITALIAN LETTER: How The Bush Administration Used A Fake Letter To Build The Case For War With Iraq.

white & brown hardbound 8vo. ~ 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding tight, slightly slanted (cocked) . covers clean. edges clean. contents free of all markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc ~ first edition. first printing ( # 1 in # line). deckled foredge (looks "hand cut"). xx+268p. characters. acronyms. chronology. endnotes. index. world history. politics. american history. war with iraq. conspiracy theory. covert operations. CIA. espionage. secret societies. neoconservatism. biography. ~ There are few true stories with as much drama, intrigue, and mystery as that of the so~called Italian letter. A letter that the veteran reporting team of Peter Eisner and Knut Royce show to have been a forgery, the document was nonetheless adopted by the Bush administration as a basis for going to war with Iraq, even though the letter had been widely dismissed by a variety of key players in the US Intelligence Community years before President Bush cited it in his 2003 Slate of the Union speech. With unparalleled reporting skills and harrowing analysis the authors~ Eisner, a Washington Post editor, and Royce, a legendary investigative reporter in Washington~have produced a groundbreaking, riveting work that takes readers from Italy, to Niger, to Iraq, and into the Washington offices of the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and inside the White House itself, demonstrating conclusively that this was not a case of finding out too late that certain intelligence information was faulty, but rather that with calculation and single~minded purpose, the Bush adminisration used information it knew to be fake to convince the Congress and the American public that Saddam Hussein was seeking materials to make a nuclear bomb. While many news accounts and several books have exposed bits and pieces of this effort, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive, detailed account of what happened, relying on lower~ and midlevel sources within the American Intelligence Community, as well as those in the upper ranks, along with documents and human sources from all over the world, many of them seeing the light of day for the first time. Key players in a true~life drama that continues to unfold, including Scooter Libby, Joseph Wilson, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, and even George W. Bush himself, occupy this stage, side by side with such lesser known figures as the heroic Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba and a shadowy intelligence freelancer named Rocco Martino, to name a few. Timely and revealing, the book provides explosive, historic insights for a public hungry for a greater understanding of the Iraq War and how we got there.…