Oddly, it makes Cheney seem more not-guilty than ‘in up to his neck’.

OTOH, it makes the NeoCons, including Bush, look ‘guilty as sin’.

The Niger forgeries are now a convenient divining tool for determining criminal culpability from trustworthy professionalism.

If the faked Iraq-Niger accord and faked Iraq-Niger dossier are pictured together as a deformed ‘football,’ no self-respecting ball player would run it into the end zone for real –unless he/she was a willing participant in the deceit.

By contrast anyone handling the ball and calling for a time out, would be trustworthy in my book(CIA’s CPD, Amb Wilson, Rome’s CIA Station Chief, and maybe Powell?).

You showed SISMI (or some within SISMI) made attempts to smooth the rough edges of this goofy football in cables and ‘corrected’ verbatim text transmissions. If I understand you, reports of these documents were additionally smoothed over by WINPAC, members involved in writing the US Senate’s SSCI report, persons writing DIA reports, Blair & his British intelligence agents, and of course the WH and Bush’s use of the Niger dossier (via British intelligence) in his ‘03 State of the Union speech.

To help Congress investigate this sham, it time to walk back the football(s). Can you draw up a list of people who came in contact with the Niger forgeries and place them in columns of ‘likely guilty’, ‘likely innocent’, and ‘need more information’?

That last column I created in case you think some government people REASONABLY could have been fooled by the machinations of the forgers and the other Players running with this nuclear football.

eRiposte:

Quite a lot to digest. One question: What motivated the individuals at SISMI to forge the original report?

There are theories discussed here:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/…..mirror.htm

Awesome work, eRiposte. Thanks for all the effort.

Didn’t Judy Miller have a notation after one of her meetings with Libby about WINPAC — that confusion wrt to Plame never made sense, but maybe we should take a second look at that notation; maybe Judy wasn’t confused but was instead writing a note about where the stovepipe info was coming from — part of Libby’s claim that the “real” intelligence would support the Niger claims.

Her note may have been about WINPAC or CPD. I don’t know if we know that for sure. Either way, Libby was blasting the CIA for backpedaling in his conversation with her. Perhaps he pointed out WINPAC approved the WH claim and that Tenet was not supportive of the claim. I don’t know for sure.

eRiposte~ Great Plameology contribution (asusual).

One question that the wingbats have recently raised…The date discrepancy in the SSIC Report between Cheney’s request to his CIA briefer to have the CIA look into the reports of the Niger smuggling transactions, and that of Plame’s listing of Wilsons bona fides that would indicate his experience in going to Niger.

My guess on this is that Cheney’s request to his briefer was actually a request for a FOLLOW UP on a request he made earlier in the week to either Tenet or McLaughlin (perhaps IN PERSON on one of his many “visits” to the CIA).
Cheney had clearly received the DIA analysis of the earlier CIA (First?) report on the Niger documents sometime earlier that week in February 2002. But had he received that CIA Report, too?

The DIA report that allegedly prompted Cheney’s query came out on 2/12/02 (SSCI, p.38). Cheney very likely read that on the same day. It is of course possible he had read earlier CIA or DIA reports and asked Tenet or someone else about it previously.

I’m still fixated on the West African Businessman (WAB). I think he’s the link to solving one of the most enduring mysteries of this fiasco (and one that’s not obvious to the non-obsessed): Every time the CIA drove a stake in to the heart of this story, a new bit of bogus intel would surface to revive it. It’s almost as if the cabal knew what was going on inside the government.

It’s almost certainly why Joe was useful, a public figure who could push back.

IIRC, Joe slipped up once and said he knew about the forgeries before even going to Niger. He took it back, but I’m sure that really was the case.

Plame’s CPD knew it was bullshit but were getting nowhere at the NSC and the WHIG, who were bent on promoting the agenda at any cost -most especially the truth.

Ahhhh…process, details & references. Bravo!

And a light-bulb moment in there for me, too: the differences in the CIA(Aug 02) vs DIA(Sep) reports relative to the NIE. THAT always confusered me.

The DIA under Rumsfuck was considerably more, well, compliant than the CIA when it came to stovepiping horseshit intel (or fabricating it out of whole cloth, for that matter) into the WH & their toadies.

“[…] This, in turn, meant that the uranium claim in the NIE was lifted from a Sep 2002 DIA report, rather than the Aug 2002 CIA report – a rather significant, yet highly under-reported, fact that runs counter to the Bush administration’s narrative that the NIE reflected the CIA’s position.”

*

And while I’m at it…

Having dabbled in a bit of fencing in my day, I’ve always considered your nic to be “teh shit.”

This is as clear and concise a summary of all your work as I have seen, and I have been following your work ever since Josh Marshall linked to it way back when (2003?)

A more important question is:

When is your book coming out?