Raimondo on Point

Justin Raimondo does a very good job of gathering together the larger picture around the Plame outing.

The "outing" of Plame was not an end in itself: the outers didn't just one day decide that they were going to go after her and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, her husband, because they were in a vindictive mood. They were out to get them because Wilson drew attention to the provenance of the infamous "16 words" uttered by President Bush in his 2003 state of the union address, in which Bush claimed that Iraq had sought out uranium in "an African country" in order to make a nuclear bomb. Perhaps without knowing it, Wilson - in taking an interest in this subject - was getting too close to the enormous fraud at the center of the War Party's propaganda campaign.

In this (as usual, thoroughly hyperlinked) piece on Antiwar.com he goes straight to the heart of the matter, the "enormous fraud," namely the Nigerian forgeries:

In early October 2002, Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, a writer for Italy's Panorama magazine, delivered some documents to the U.S. embassy in Rome: a cache of letters and other papers purporting to be correspondence between officials of the Niger government and the Iraqis relating to the acquisition of uranium "yellowcake." The documents soon found their way to Washington, D.C., where key administration officials were quick to incorporate them into their "talking points" for war with Iraq - and into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 speech.

When the IAEA asked to see evidence of the administration's contentions, they were put off, until finally the Niger uranium documents were handed over. It took IAEA scientists just a few hours to demonstrate that the documents were not only forgeries, but were particularly crude ones at that - an amateur could have debunked them using Google. As the Washington Post reported, one administration official's response was "We fell for it.[...]"

[...]someone had deliberately set up the American government with false information and badly embarrassed George W. Bush, who had taken the Niger uranium canard and run with \it in a very public way. An investigation was launched just as Robert Novak's column outing Plame appeared - mid-July 2003. Whoever leaked Plame's name and CIA affiliation was trying to scare off any further inquiries into the whole Niger uranium funny business, underscoring the key question in all this: who was behind the Niger uranium forgeries?[...]

[...] According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me.

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

It's a helluva read. Highly recommended.