More information retrieval

The ex editor of Panorama Carlo Rossella is speaking in public about new information technology and journalism.

I hope to have a chance to ask him why he didn't google "Allele Habibou" before handing the forged Nigerien Uranium dossier over to the US embassy. One proof that the dossier was forged that someone signed a page of it Allele Elhadj Habibou , foreign minister and it was dated October 10, 2000.
Habibou was foreign minister of Niger from 1988 to 1989.
(sad to say this page has a build date of December 17 2003 and so it might not have been available when Mr Rossella was applying new technology to journalism).


If he had googled habibou might have found, as I did some time ago, that Habibou is not to be found in www.cia.gov which publishes the names of all cabinet ministers in the world regularly (the Nigerien Foreign minister as of July 12 2005 is, of course, Aichatou Daoudou) . Sad to say, the CIA does not keep back issues of Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments on its web page.


Just googling Allele Habibou has become much more difficult now, since the web is full of references to the obviously forged dossier which displayed the signature dated October 10.
Searching for habibou niger -October seems to work generating this link as number 10.

Build date November 24 2005, so it has been revised since Panorama got the dossier.
Contemporary Africa Database writes " On July 24th 2001, we uploaded the first version of People." so it should have been there. I can see why they might suddenly add Habibou more recently, but I don't see why they would have added his predicessor and immediate successor.

Poking around the rubbish heap of history for Mr Habibou (who's career is much more successful that mine Mr Habibou sir just kidding about rubbish) I also found that the same forged document referred to "

"Allele Elhadj Habibou" of the Conseil Militaire Supreme.

What Google has to tell us is that the Conseil was abolished eleven years before the date on the document, and that Habibou was Foreign Minister in the eighties."
That is, it identified Niger as a military dictatorship when it is, at the moment, a more or less functioning Democracy (functioning better than the USA anyway).

Also the London News Review gets a probabionary bookmark.