The Italian Job
The net is buzzing today about the reports in the Italian media that Fitzgerald's inquiry has been working hard to figure out just where those forged Italian documents documenting Iraq's attempt to buy Nigerian uranium came from. The single best place to follow this story is Talking Points Memo; you can follow the sourced links from there.
The narrative is still being pieced together, but this is what it sounds like to me:
The Bush Administration was trying desperately to get the country behind an effort to get into Iraq. Saddam wasn't cooperating by being aggressive in the region, so we cooked up the WMD story via Ahmed Chalabi. But that wasn't going so well either, primarily because we had a lot of people searching for WMDs who were coming up empty, and besides, this country doesn't have the same knee-jerk kind of fear to CBW's that it does with weapons that produce, say, a mushroom cloud. And so, an effort began to find evidence that Saddam was in fact pursuing nukes.
One problem: He wasn't.
The CIA and State Department understood this, but the White House wanted desperately to start the mushroom cloud rhetoric. They tried to get Iraqi nukes statements into a Bush speech in Cincinnati, and failed only after a battle royale with State and CIA. Lo and behold, a few days later these magical documents show up in Italy showing the purported Iraqi attempts to buy Nigerian Uranium. (Actually, the forged documents were being pushed shortly after 9/11, just like everything else about the Iraqi war, but the flagging support for an invasion in mid to late 2002 made their public appearance more critical than ever, their last best chance to get the mushroom cloud first and foremost in everyone's minds.)
A couple short months later, the claim was in the State of the Union Address. The documents were known to be forgeries by the CIA and State at that point, but the White House got what they wanted: The invasion was voted on and approved by the Senate and House mere days after the speech. Sure, there would be fallout for putting in a claim that, gosh darn it, just shouldn't have made it into the speech, but there were plenty of other people to take the fall for being taken in by those forgeries, namely George Tenet.
But where did the forged documents come from in the first place? Nobody seemed to ask that question much, courtesy of Kansas GOP Senator Pat Robertson's blatant railroading of the commission to investigate that and many other issues surrounding how that intelligence was used. The Italians, very much in the back pocket of the Bush Administration, had been pushing the documents from the beginning, but where did the Italians get them from? Motive, anyone?
Ah, but a Special Prosecutor asks questions a partisan Senator and then-compliant press doesn't, and now the lid might just be about to come off of Washington. You want perjury? Outing a CIA officer? Those are crimes that should be duly punished, despite what the GOP apologists might say today, which is very different from what they were saying about perjery seven years ago, mind you. But those crimes would pale in comparison to any proof that our own government planted those forged documents to help justify the invasion.
Scratch that--the documents didn't just help justify the invasion. They pushed it over the top. You think that mushroom cloud language coming out of W and Condi didn't sway a lot of people in this country, and especially in the Senate and House? We all know it did. Hell, it swayed me.
But let's just say my skepticism, healthy and otherwise, has been ratcheted up a few notches since then.
Yes, there are gaps in the above narrative, though it's getting filled in pretty fast these days. But it explains why the White House went so hard after Joe Wilson. And let's be real: Those documents didn't forge themselves, right? Don't you think it's just a weee bit odd that nobody in the government even tried to find out where they came from?
Now the late word is target letters go out on Wednesday, and the press conference is Thursday. I suspect we'll know a lot tomorrow just via leaks, which miraculously enough don't seem to have been chilled all that much by the Judy Miller affair.
It's too late now, even if Fitzgerald doesn't indict on counts related to the forgeries. This story has moved very quickly through the blogosphere today, and too many people will now demand an answer to a question that should have been addressed a long time ago:
Where did those forged documents come from?
5:28:52 PM 
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