The Forged Uranium Documents from Italy--Did the White House Know They Were Fake?

This story just keeps growing as our anticipation of the Plamegate indictments swells into discomfort (imagine being a kid and Xmas day starts getting getting shifted out a day on Xmas eve). It's painful, man. In The Washington Monthly on October 24, 2005, Kevin Drum advances a theory that if true could mean war crimes level malfeasance on the part of Chimpie, Cheney, Rice, and the rest of the criminals. First he asks the question that has occurred to many following this affair:

. After all, as Bob Somerby is fond of pointing out, Joe Wilson's famous July 2003 op-ed in the New York Times didn't actually contradict anything the White House had said. In his 2003 State of the Union address, George Bush said that Iraq had "sought...uranium from Africa," while Wilson said only that his trip to Niger convinced him that Iraq had not in fact succeeded in buying uranium. So why the desperate smear campaign against Wilson? Even Karl Rove must have known that leaking his wife's name was fantastically reckless and over the top. Why not just point out the lack of contradiction and leave it at that?

So why? Rove is a smart guy--nobody argues with that--and he is also quite adept at putting in play very complex operations that are several levels of indirection removed from him so that he and whomever he works for are insulated. He does play close to the edge sometimes, as when Chimpie's father fired Rove for leaking to the press during GHW Bush's campaign, but in his whole career he's developed a fine sense of where the line is and he can dance along it with great skill, much to the disgust and frustration of all who have been smeared by him.

Okay, so why take such a risk over such a minor problem? Well, maybe to the White House it wasn't so minor, because they already knew something that hadn't yet come out.

Well, there was something the White House knew at that point that the rest of us didn't. They knew that not only were the Nigerien documents fake, but that they had been proven fake the previous year — though not by Wilson or the IAEA. At that time, everybody thought the timeline went like this: (1) Bush gives SOTU address in January 2003, (2) IAEA proves Nigerien documents are phony in March. That's bad, but not catastrophic. However, the real timeline, known to only a few, was this: (1) State Department determines Nigerien docs are phony in October 2002, (2) Bush mentions African uranium anyway in January SOTU address.

Get it? Bush and his minions KNOW the documents are fake, but proceed to use them anyway, figuring that our collective short memory will prevent their subsequent exposure as bogus as having any effect on their desired goal--invading Iraq.

Mr. Drum makes a final observation that could be comic if the results hadn't turned out so tragic for so many human beings and for the soul of our nation.

And that's what scared them: the possibility that someone was about to expose the story behind the forged documents. That would have blown the pre-war stories about "mushroom clouds" and nuclear programs sky high, and that's what caused them to wildly overreact to Wilson's otherwise innocuous criticisms.

And that's why Fitzgerald wanted to see the Italian report. He figures it might explain the original motivation for the whole affair, and knowing the motivation might help him make his case.

At least, that's my best guess. The irony, of course, is that Wilson didn't know the story behind the forged documents and neither did anyone else. And despite plenty of digging, to this day no one knows the story. But the aftershocks live on.

So the White House, out of fear of exposure of the very dishonest game they were playing with the facts to argue for war, exposes the very depth of its criminality by overreacting to Wilson's revelations. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has requested the Niger documents and I can only hope that it is because he has decided that the crimes committed by this horrid cabal are much, much more serious than outing a CIA agent or lying under oath, although that's enough to cry treason.

Meanwhile, we all wait for Fitzmas.