How Bad It's Going to Be for Chimpie

The UPI has published the best thing I've read so far on how deep Patrick Fitzgerald may be going into the Plamegate matter, and it's not good for the Bushits. The leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's name was only a symptom of a much greater cancer on the executive branch of our government, which was the fabrication of a rationale to got to war.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the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President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

Why do these documents matter? Well, they turned out to be rather crude forgeries, which an Italian newspaper figured out right away, although it took the White House much, much longer (wink, wink) to discover that.

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.

And where might those forged documents have come from originally?

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.

If you Google Larry Franklin, it turns up this article from the August 27, 2004 edition of the Washington Post that says

Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year that disclosed he and another Pentagon specialist on the Persian Gulf region had met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

That meeting, according to Pentagon officials, took place in late 2001. It had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. Franklin and the other Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Ghorbanifar attended these meetings. Rumsfeld has said that the information received at the meetings led nowhere.

Now Franklin was attached to Douglas Feith's office in the Pentagon. Feith, you may remember, was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Donald Rumsfeld, and was called by Army General Tommy Franks, according to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

Funny how that all links up, isn't it? And you know that Patrick Fitzgerald is going to be going a whole lot deeper than a simple Google search. I wonder if the indictments to come won't blow this corrupt criminal adminstration into hell for all history to revile.

Cross your fingers.