Two thousand lost for a really big pack of lies; My money's on Michael Ledeen

I would be more amused by all these breaking scandals if not for the essential context. They started a war, and honest American soldiers and Marines have paid the price in blood. Losing them to the Mess was reified into this kind of great sacrifice for freedom and apple pie. But we're going to find that the purposes of our leaders was far more sordid.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

...Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

I've got a lot of stuff stashed on the computer here that I think pulls the case together. Tomorrow will probably be a major day in this country's history - the day we'll come face to face with

The busted server gave me a few days to look at the ups and downs of this media spinstorm, as leaks and counterleaks have been placed in the media, some to paint Libby as the demon, perhaps to help protect the others.

For example, Josh Marshall cited this LA Times story as an example of a demonize-Libby-to-inoculate-the-rest strategy: "Bush Critic Became Target of Libby, Former Aides Say."

Now, I don't doubt that there's a good deal of truth in this story. Indeed, the point in what I'm about to say is not to cast doubt on the accuracy of anything in it. But if you read the LAT story closely you see that the authors were able to interview multiple White House staffers (seemingly all or most former ones) and were apparently provided with a sheaf of documents illustrating Libby's near-obsessive Wilson-monitoring.
If I read the article right it seems they were provided with a copy of this dossier ...

The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."
The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said.

So, a lot of access to former White House staffers in on key meetings and actual documentary evidence of what Scooter was up to, what his efforts produced. That sort of access ain't easy to come by and it's seldom accidental.
This certainly seems like an attempt to pin this whole thing on Libby.
Leaks like that won't affect Fitzgerald; they're not intended to. They're aimed at shaping perceptions of indictments if they come down. If Libby and Rove are indicted, then, yes Rove got caught up in it. And it shouldn't have happened. But the whole unfortunate mess was spawned by the bitter Libby-Wilson antagonsim. It wasn't something that involved the whole White House team, not something characteristic of how it functions.
That would be the argument.
And it's one everyone should have their eyes out for, since the key players in the White House appear to have decided that Libby is already a fatality in this battle.

SO WHAT ABOUT THE FORGERY ITSELF?

Two Josh Marshall tidbits tied to this UPI article about cross-connections between the Plame and AIPAC cases. Marshall and Laura Rozen did an article, "Iran Contra II?" about secret meetings with Michael Ledeen, Iranian arms dealer Ghorbanifar, the chief of Italian military intelligence service SISMI, Rhode and Larry Franklin. Walker's UPI article had a number of interesting bits about the sources of the Niger forgeries. I loved this paragraph:

In July 2003, [Wilson] wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.
But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.
Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.
The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.
There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.
Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.
If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.
The Italian newspaper La Repubblica had a major (Italian only!) article about the activities of the Italians. To put it succinctly, at the very time that war propaganda was heating up, the chief of SISMI was meeting with Stephen Hadley, probably in an effort to persuade him to use the Niger forgeries.

As I have noted in quite a few posts, well-known neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen has been cited by a number of government officials as the key forgery connection. So he might get indicted tomorrow too. More later. I feel a little bad that I haven't given out some more info... It's coming along, oh it's coming.

Looks like tomorrow will likely be Fitzmas. I have my Summit Oktoberfest and microwave popcorn at the ready.