"He cared so much he risked outing a CIA agent, something he must have known was very dangerous -- to both himself and his cronies."

I love it, even Sullivan understands that Cheney does not care at all for the danger posed to the United States and her citizens by outing a CIA agent, only about himself and his rich buddies.

So who forged the Niger documents and why? We still don't know. We know that Italian intelligence was involved. But as Josh Marshall has reported, the US shows no interest in questioning the courier (former SISMI member) who took the documents to the Italian newspaper.
Could Cheney have been deeply invested in the Wilson matter out of personal involvment in the forgery itself?

Why does the CIA hate freedom so much?
If you don't support lying to bolster your claim about unnecessary war for oil, then you hate our troops and America!
Commie pinkos, move back to France.

Because Cheney knew the Niger documents were forgeries. Cheney and his friends were the ones that created the Niger docs.

Notice how the right wing attack machine has now turned its sights on Fitzgerald?

I heard Fitzgerald attended a Madrasas when he was an embryo, he must be supporting the terrorists.
He also hates America and our freedoms

Maybe the real target wasn't Joe Wilson but Plame and Brewster Jennings.

After all, at that time it looked like Iraq was a cakewalk and the actual intelligence on Iranian nuclear programs would hinder the next step in the neocon plan - attacking Iran.

Just a thought.

I think it's a combination of factors.

First, they needed the nukes - if Hussein wasn't really trying to get them, it's down to biological or chemical weapons, which are an order of magnitude less scary because they're difficult to make and store, and even more difficult to deliver. A single Hiroshima sized bomb detonated on a boat in New York harbor would make 9/11 look like a modest prelude.

To justify an invasion, they needed a lot of fear - Nukular weapons were the only way to go.

They had two things: Uranium and tubes. The tubes had already been debunked, but the debunking wasn't widely reported in the U.S. press. If the uranium went as well, there would be nothing left. They needed it.

So, they had to do something about Wilson. It couldn't be subtle, they didn't have time. So, they went a bit Nuclear themselves.

"He is no fool"

Really?

This whole episode seems to be just another instance where Cheney was wrong. It has always seemed silly to me that they would counter the Wilson piece by attacking his wife. It appears to be Cheney's decision to push that and most folks didn't care doodle about the status of Wilson's wife. If they'd left it alone it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the illumination it did.

I chalk this up to being yet another real bad decision by Cheney.
Does make one wonder though how he could have gotten all the others to buy into the project. He must be one hell of a persuasive dude in person.

Kevin,

Why go through the trouble of linking to Sullivan if you won't include his second, much more damning theory for why Cheney freaked out:

"The most plausible inference is that he knew he had deliberately rigged the WMD evidence to ensure that the war took place. He knew, even if the president was blithely convinced otherwise, that the WMD evidence was weak, and his success in distorting the evidence was threatened by Wilson. Not that Wilson had all the goods - Cheney must have known this was a minor matter. It was the danger that journalists or skeptics pulling on the thread that Wilson represented could get closer to the much bigger truth of WMD deception. This is a huge deal for one single reason: if true, it means that the White House acted in bad faith in making the case for war. There is no graver charge than that. In fact, if true, it's impeachable."

Andrew is cutting to the chase here. Cheney went after Wilson because Cheney knows the WMD were fabricated. Not exagerated. Fabricated. Made up. Faked.

Faked by who? Cheney's office, of course.

"I think the right theory is that it was all about the nukes"

If so, then it means that even CHENEY thought that the chem and bio weapons "threat" they were creating wouldn't likely be enough to rally the country - populations, politicians, media - into war.

But he was wrong - even a lowly "dirty bomb" would have been enough for the ignorant in this country, after the duplicitous, sensationalizing press got through with it. Even Cheney must have understimated how EASY, how COMPLIANT the press would be, how they'd do most of the scaremongering, all on their own. The media's structure, conventions, profit incentives, and tribal loyalties, led to this, IMO.

Cheney learned his paranoid behavior from his time in the Nixon Administration.

Don't you mean "insubstantial" critisism?

"Maybe the real target wasn't Joe Wilson but Plame and Brewster Jennings."

I've always believed that stopping the CIA's covert WMD program, not smearing Wilson with some lame dig about him being beholden to his wife, was the real goal.

Can't have a nice, profitable war with Iraq and ultimately Iran if your own intelligence agency is refuting all of your wild WMD claims, can you?

What better, quicker, most effective and most immediate way to shut the whole operation down than by outing one of its agents and exposing Brewster Jennings as a CIA front?

Poof! The whole operation goes up in smoke, worldwide.

Damn clever. Damn treason too.

yeah, you know at the time, even tho I knew better than to trust him, when Bush went into his "smoking gun-mushroom cloud" bit in the SOTU address, I got a little chill. And then I remembered who was talking and healthy skepticism kicked back in.

I also wouldn't discount Cheney's office being in on the forgery, tho Kevin and Sullivan's reasoning is still persuasive without that being the case. The biggest reason to doubt that is that, as powerful and well connected as this VP is, wouldn't his office have produced better forgeries? By all accounts these documents were
pretty shoddy looking.

I don't think it was the public they had to scare with the nukes. It was Congress. They hurried the vote just before the election so Congress would not have time to look carefully at the evidence. Remember the difficulty in getting to see the NIE (or whatever they were showing Congress)? They had to be escorted into a secure room by appointment, or something like that?

And even then, it is not clear what exactly they were showing the members of Congress.

Time for Rockefeller to get the investigation humming on the misuse of intelligence prior to the vote.

The biggest reason to doubt that is that, as powerful and well connected as this VP is, wouldn't his office have produced better forgeries? By all accounts these documents were
pretty shoddy looking.

With all that's happened in the last few years, I'd be willing to believe that they could royally screw up even something as minor as a forgery. Never underestimate their incompetance!

So, what does the Repbublican base now feel about the nuclear and WMD claims?

Orange County Republicans and others have access to the same information now that everyone else does and that information clearly is that the claims were patently false.

I take it that Orange Countians and their bretheren elsewhere put the blame, not on the President, not on Cheney, not on Rumsfeld, not on the scores of advisers of one sort or another brought into the Administration after 2000, but somehow exclusively on the CIA. But, is this just a public stance, face-saving so to speak, when privately they know better? And if they know better now, but are reluctant to admit it, the fact of the matter remains that indeed they do know better. And remember, the CIA was not wrong on the nuclear matter. It was the "slam dunk" on WMDs that was the egregious error.

So, knowing what is knows today, what is the status of the Republican base when it comes to the nuclear and WMD claims? Surely the base must be upset, if that is the word for it.

I am hoping that once the Democratic Congress finishes with its 100 Days exercise and its Iraq Resolution, it will start a systematic and lengthy investigation into the run-up to the Iraq War, no holds barred. Among other things, I would like to see George Tenet grilled for a few days, just for starters. And I'd like to see John Warner and others so prominent now in the Iraq debate shunted to the side so that the facts can come out without continual obfuscation. Once the Resolution is dealt with, surely no one need pay any further attention to such people. And while I'm having my wishes, I'd like to see Carl Levin show some spunk; after all, he was among the Golden Few who actually voted against the war authorization. Or is Senator Levin ready to join, along with John McCain, the houseslipper brigade in the Senate, and pad about muttering and shaking his head and wandering off from time to time to nap?

It seems appropriate at this time to conduct a poll in order to determine who is/was the Most Evil Person In the History of Mankind. The nominees are: (in chronological order):

1. Ghengis Khan
2. Judas Iscariot (a sop to the religious right)
3. Tomas de Torquemada
4. Josef Stalin
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Richard B. Cheney

.....and the ballots, please !!

ron, GWB was already found in a poll of USAmericans to be worse than Satan.

I don't think it was the nukes. I think it was about the CIA rising up against the administration, coming forward, and going to the press.

Supposedly what set Cheney off was the Pincus story where he quotes a CIA agent saying there was little or no WMD.

Then you have the facts that Tyler Drumheller came forward with in late 2002, that Saddam had no active WMD program.

Then there was all the intense pressure from Cheney's massive OVP staff, as well as Cheney himself lording over people at Langley.

So tensions between the OVP and neocons on one side and the CIA on the other were intense. Just look at this quote from David Corn while he was leaving a Chalabi speech at AEI:

***As I headed for the elevator, a white-haired woman whom I did not know yelled at me, "You should be paid by the CIA!" She apparently thought my questioning of Chalabi was too rough. Her jeer was a demonstration of how the Iraq war has twisted the ideological lines in Washington.****

http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2005/11/ahmad_chalabi_w.php

Further, you have the fact that the raw intelligence about the aluminum tubes and the uranium cake probably was produced by Cheney's Team B under Doug Feith, the Office of Special Plans, which according to Packer, Ricks, and Kwiatkowski was essentially a disinformation and propaganda shop, running on unvetted intelligence. This SF Times article explains this situation:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL

So if you have the CIA defying the OVP and threatening to blow the lid off the whole shoddy operation by going to the press, and people are worried.

Investigation of Doug Feith's propaganda shop is something that the administration has been fighting tooth and nail:

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/15/phase-ii-stonewall/

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/26/cheney-roberts/

The uranium story is the loose yarn poking out of the sweater that threatens to unravel the whole thing.

owenz >"...Faked by who? Cheney's office, of course."

semper fubar >"...Damn clever. Damn treason too."

Hope you folks are not planning on flying in any small aircraft anytime soon.

Just sayin watch your back...

Almost totally off topic but, for those of you not familiar w/the history of nuclear weapons and the Decades of Terror many of us grew up with, here is a site to check out; it has lots of pretty pictures (of some very nasty dangerous devices that have been played with in our biosphere). Educate yourself.

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." - M. King Hubbert

Cheney is nuts.

More links to support my comment above:

"Supposedly what set Cheney off was the Pincus story where he quotes a CIA agent saying there was little or no WMD."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-c-johnson/pincus-lit-the-fuse-on-th_b_40557.html

"Then you have the facts that Tyler Drumheller came forward with in late 2002, that Saddam had no active WMD program."

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/23/60-minutes-cia-official-reveals-bush-cheney-rice-were-personally-told-iraq-had-no-wmd-in-fall-2002

More on the OVP's activity at Langley. Apparently they were really p.o.'ed.

From The New Republic, Post date 11.20.03:

****In mid-2002, Cheney made at least two visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters to talk with the analysts on the intelligence assembly line, who warned that they had no evidence showing that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. These visits have been chewed over in the press, decried by retired Agency officials, and condemned as attempts to pressure the CIA into producing more damning intel. But they only begin to capture the depth of the vice president's personal involvement in shaping Iraq intelligence. In addition to trekking to Langley, his former aides say, Cheney paid calls to analysts at the DIA, the National Security Agency, and even the National Intelligence Mapping Agency. "He visited every element of the intelligence community," says a former Cheney staffer. When he wasn't visiting these agencies, his staff snowed them with questions. According to one former CIA analyst, "The Agency [would write] something on WMD, and it would come back from the vice president with a thousand questions: 'What's this sentence mean?' 'What's your source for this line?' 'Why are you disregarding sources that are saying the opposite?'"

Among Cheney's aides, resentment of the CIA went far beyond a healthy skepticism of fallible intelligence analysts and an Agency with a decidedly mixed record. Whereas Cheney's questioning of intelligence during the Gulf war had been probing but respectful, now his staff belittled the intelligence community's findings, irrespective of their merits. For years, Libby and Hannah in particular had believed the Agency harbored a politically motivated animus against the INC and irresponsibly discounted intelligence reports from defectors the INC had brought forward. "This had been a fight for such a long period of time, where people were so dug in," reflects a friend of one of Cheney's senior staffers. The OVP had been studying issues like Iraq for so many years that it often simply did not accept that contrary information provided by intelligence analysts-- especially CIA analysts--could be correct. As one former colleague of many OVP officials puts it, "They so believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, 'We want to show these f**kers that they are wrong.'"

Intelligence analysts saw little difference between Cheney and his staffers. The vice president's aides may have made more trips to Langley and signed more memoranda asking for further information, but, as the CIA saw it, the OVP was a coordinated machine working for its engineer. "When I heard complaints from people, it was, 'Man, you wouldn't believe this sh*t that Libby and [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J.] Feith and Wolfowitz do to us.' They were all lumped together," says an ex-analyst close to his former colleagues. "I would hear them say, 'Goddamn, that f**king John Hannah, you wouldn't believe.' And the next day it would be, 'That f**king Bill Luti.' For all these guys, they're interchangeable." Adds another, "They had power. Authority. They had the vice president behind them. ... What Scooter did, Cheney made possible. Feith, Wolfowitz--Cheney made it all possible. He's the fulcrum. He's the one."

From the OVP's perspective, the CIA--with its caveat-riddled position on Iraqi WMD and its refusal to connect Saddam and Al Qaeda--was an outright obstacle to the invasion of Iraq.****

http://web.archive.org/web/20060212172413/www.howardlabs.com/11-03/WHAT+DICK+CHENEY+REALLY+BELIEVES.htm

From an interview with author James Bamford:

*****One CIA analyst from the Iraq Non-Proliferation section told me that his boss once called his office together (about fifty people) and said, "You know what - if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." The former analyst added, "And I said, ‘All right, it's time, it's time to go . . . And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, they would be outraged."*****

http://democracyrising.us/content/view/226/164/

(Didn't Plame work for WMD non-proliferation?)

Oh yeah. More Bamford:

****Wurmser was put in charge of a secret unit in Feith's office with the cover name Policy Counter-terrorism Evaluation Group. Its function was to gather and feed less-than-credible intelligence -- intelligence discounted by the CIA, such as the supposed Niger uranium deal -- to the White House and Vice President Cheney's office.****

It's the loose yarn hanging from the sweater. If the CIA and journalists pull it--discover not only the falsehood, but the mechanism behind the falsehood--then no more sweater. And the case for war is a shambles...

Andrew Sullivan: "He [Cheney] is no fool."

"Forget about the myths the media has created about the White House. They're really not that bright. Things got out of hand."

- Hal Holbrook playing Deep Throat, to Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men�

Fides and Andrew Sullivan nailed it. Cheney had to use his ace of trumps to sway the people that didn't trust him or Bush. It worked.

Nukes are the true WMD. Bio and chemo weaps are primarily psyweaps. They create fear all out of proportion to their destructive power.

The U.S. calls them WMDs because it claims to have destroyed all its bio and chemo weaps, so if we are attacked with them, we grant ourselves the right to retaliate with nukes.

In the past, before you retaliated, you made sure you were hitting the people that attacked you.

But, as Chief Inspector Jaques Clouseau of the Surete observed, "Not anymore!"

Andrew Sullivan: "He [Cheney] is no fool."

Sullivan is buying into the same mythology that surrounded John Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general and campaign director of CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

Mitchell was a big fat stern-looking grim-faced tight-lipped old man who was good at intimidating people and who looked the part of the tough shrewd elder. Sound familiar?

Because John Mitchell looked and played the part, he fooled a lot of people into thinking he really was a tough shrewd old bastard. He was in fact a fool.

But he fooled plenty of other people right up to the day he was convicted and sent to prison. He served 19 months before being released for medical reasons.

Dick Cheney fools a lot of people like Sullivan by using the same old tough guy act.

daCascadian: "Hope you folks are not planning on flying in any small aircraft anytime soon."

Not planning on it...(laughs nervously)...

Simple ! ! !

Cheney got a Two-Fer ...

Cheney punished Wilson and His Wife

AND ...

Showed All those realists at the CIA there were no lenghts he

wouldn't go to to punish them for disobedience ... even outing

a covert officer ...

mckinl

.

Kevin says "It's always been all about the nukes" and explains that "the base" was very concerned about Saddam having nukes.

First, this seems to mean that "it's always been about the nukes" means "it's always been about the concern of the base about the nukes". Which is not the same as the administration's concern about the nukes.

Second, what does Kevin mean when he says "the base"? Did the average American worry about Saddam having nukes before the war? Or is he talking about a specific interest group?

mckinl: "Cheney got a Two-Fer"

That would be the short version... I just wanted to show some facts that back that up.

It's a big mess. And the MSM has done an absolutely horrible job covering it as far as I can see...

But very important--a third thing: Cheney wanted to make sure the real story didn't get out. I think he was very afraid of that for obvious reasons.

Just out a few minutes ago:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070208/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_pentagon_intelligence

It says, "inappropriate, but not illegal." I'll be curious what comes out of this...

Andrew Sullivan: "[Dick Cheney] is no fool and has been around Washington for a long time. He knew the risks, and he took them anyway. ... Why?"

According to the evidence offered at the Libby trial, I'd say because the vice president is a paranoid John Birch Society-worthy nutball whose ideological and megalomaniacal delusions led him to fill the resultant power vacuum from the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's ill-advised installation in the White House by judicial fiat of a pampered, emotionally stunted trust fund baby, whose now-obvious sociopathy can probably be traced to his self-absorbed mother's refusal to breast-feed him as an infant.

There, I think that about covers all the bases.

Kevin says "It's always been all about the nukes"

The nukes were a means to an end.

What it's really always been about is the oil.

Donald:

You win the Gold Cookie! That was a good one.

...which one wasn't breast-fed?

Donald from Hawaii >"...There, I think that about covers all the bases."

Yep, I agree

Mahalo brah !

"...The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power..." - Henry Wallace

Good points, Kevin. And perhaps it also reflected their spastic desire for empire by means of one political party. Recall the veep said he went after Joe Wilson because he was a democrat.
In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson writes: "since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible.
As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America's democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values. I fear we will lose our country."
Imperial hubris, deception, desperation at any cost to make legitimate their "pre-emptive war."

More on Feith's Office of Special Plans:

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Pentagon_Inspector_General_to_release_investigation_0207.html

Dick Cheney fools a lot of people like Sullivan by using the same old tough guy act.

Sullivan can never resist a top.

Jury has not decided this case yet, but I remember when Britt Hume dismissed the affair as a "dog days of August slow news event". When the guilty verdict comes in, Hume's reaction will be very interesting.

Here's a fun theory for why Cheney was so obsessed with Wilson - he always had the hots for Valerie Plame, and hated her for marrying Wilson. When Wilson started speaking out against the war, Cheney snapped; now not only had Valerie dashed his romantic hopes, but now her husband was rubbing salt in by showing him up over the war.

This also explains why he leaked her name as Valerie Plame, not Valerie Wilson; because that was her name when Cheney fell in love with her, and it's how he always thinks of her.

Cheney's obsession, if stupidity is discounted, must be associated with his (or his stovepipe intelligence shop's) involvment in the forged Niger documents.

As for Wilson himself, I am constantly enraged about this story. If the CIA wanted to send someone to investigate this story, they could not have done better than a career diplomat with experience in Iraq and Niger, who knew the language and had contacts in the Niger government. Thus Wilson. And if you wanted to invent another human who would be more qualified to investigate the story, Wilson still trumps, since his wife was an experienced CIA operative in the field of weapons proliferation (the field central to the yellowcake claim).

And yet, despite the central fact that none in the US were more qualified to investigate than Wilson (indeed one none could be imagined who could be more qualified), we get the "Plame's husband's boondoggle" story.

The mind reels.

Kevin, your theory is a bit too clever. You're trying to explain Cheney's motives by citing Rove's calculations. One thing the Libby trial has shown us is that that's not exactly how this White House works.

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/39950
This is an interesting article on why Cheney will likely not be testifying in the trial of Scooter Libby. By a Baltimore attorney.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200701190001
Brit Hume, scary big liar apologist, says Scooter Libby is not responsible for the leak. Fox Snooze.

It was jealousy. Cheney was jealous of Joe Wilson being a hunk. Just look at a picture of Wilson and one of Cheney. Also, he forgot that Joe Wilson is smarter than he is. Of course, having the truth on your side helps, too. Joe Wilson can eat crackers in my bed anytime.

My only problem with Cheney being involved with the forgery is why Cheney would ask the CIA to send someone to 'check out' the Niger documents. One possible reason could be his 'confidence' that the forger did a good job and thus expect the veracity of the claim to be confirmed. But wouldn't it have been safer to let the issue stay 'clouded?' Or else specifically request a CIA agent in the Cheney/OSP cabal to make the trip? Eh, there are lots of people (read neocons in and out of government) who could have had a hand in the matter besides Cheney.

Cheney didn't ask directly that Wilson go. He generically made a request to the CIA for more information to bolster the thin evidence for the yellowcake.

I betcha Cheney had a rancorous relationship with counter-proliferation at CIA, namely Plame. And yellowcake goes straight back to OSP which Jay Rockefeller will be looking into, per Rozen this evening.

Hey, let's remember something. Wilson wasn't the first person to debunk the Niger uranium story - he was the THIRD. The ambassador to Niger and a retired Marine general had already looked into the same story and came back with the same answer - that it was bogus. No wonder Cheney was worried. I wish the media would focus a bit on those others who looked into Niger before Cheney even asked the question at the CIA. One of those three reports HAD to have gotten to his desk. The idea that the CIA would send someone to Africa to answer a question that the vice president asked them and then not get back to the VP with the answer is just ridiculous.

Cal Gal: I don't think it was the public they had to scare with the nukes. It was Congress. They hurried the vote just before the election so Congress would not have time to look carefully at the evidence.

Bingo, Cal Gal. The people have been ignored every step of the way in this war -- there were hundreds of thousands of them on the streets all over the globe protesting in March 2003. Everything was coming back wrong for Cheney and the neofreaks and their only chance was Congress. The Blix reports were already destroying/had destroyed the credibility of all of the weapons arguments -- at least for anyone giving the UN inspectors any credence or paying any attention to what they were saying. The administration and their media lackeys savaged Blix every chance they got. The reason those 16 words slipped back into the SOTU after Tenet had successfully disconnected them from previous speeches was because Cheney-Feith-Wolfowitz knew the game was over unless they resorted to the Biggest Lie they had at their disposal. This is what authoritarians do.
They steamrolled whatever feeble resistance there might be from the Democratic minority with the SOTU and without a shred -- not even a whisper of a shred -- of evidence of provocation, they started bombing Baghdad.
Feith's ass is in a sling now, marked by the Pentagon itself. Let's hope he's the first of many to go to prison.

JJ: "Cheney didn't ask directly that Wilson go"

I know he didn't ask that Wilson go. I just meant that if Cheney had indeed planned the forgery then it would have been better for him to just let things coast rather than urging the CIA to get more info. The CIA already had reason to believe that the report was nonsense.

Joyce: "The ambassador to Niger and a retired Marine general had already looked into the same story and came back with the same answer"

I'm pretty sure that the general was present in Niger at the same time as Wilson. All three, the ambassador, the general and Wilson came to the same conclusion 'together,' in the sense of discussing it and agreeing about no yellowcake being sold to Iraq. So it was a contemporaneous conclusion rather than three separate reports.

Wilson is a red herring. When you out a CIA agent, you are not sending a message to her husband. You are sending a message to the CIA.

I think your analysis is accurate, Kevin. It was the possibility of Iraq having a nuke that caused the Congress to go along with the Iraq war resolution. Iraq had poison gas since the mid-1980's (after all, Bush Sr. sold Saddam the precursor chemicals to make it) and no one was too worried about that. Ditto for biological weapons, as people are fairly ignorant about what that would mean. However, the imagery of a mushroom cloud over Manhattan scared the bejeebers out of everyone. Thats why so much hung on the Niger yellowcake story, as tenuous as that was. The aluminum tubes story just didn't invoke the same response, as they could be used for conventional missiles.

Vanity Fair carried a very detailed story about the Italian intelligence connection to the Niger forgeries but I can't find it on-line and I am also traveling and can't do links anyway. It is worth a read for anyone wanting to learn more about this scam.

nepeta >"...I'm pretty sure that the general was present in Niger at the same time as Wilson. All three, the ambassador, the general and Wilson came to the same conclusion 'together,' in the sense of discussing it and agreeing..."

You are incorrect.

The Marine general (Carlton Fulford) was there w/the Ambassador (Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick) in a meeting w/the president of Niger while Mr. Wilson was there at a different moment in time (and took a different tack in looking into the matter).

Apparently all this occurred in February 2002 though so maybe that is why you thought that.

This is one tangled mess (but then intelligence "matters" usually are)

The Conservative Deflator >"...Vanity Fair carried a very detailed story about the Italian intelligence connection to the Niger forgeries but I can't find it on-line..."

It isn`t the Vanity Fair story but here is one set of references on the possible forgery translated from the Italian; Part One, Part Two & Part Three

"Proof depends on who you are. We're looking for a preponderance of evidence, and some people need more of a preponderance than other people." - John Kantner