And yes, setting Suskind’s material in the context of the Plame/Wilson matter is important. While we know the forged Habbush letter was released in Baghdad in December, 2003, the content of the letter (at least to me) suggests it was written in the immediate wake of the CIA’s referral of the outing of Plame to DoJ, and the beginning of the FBI investigation. There are three elements to the forgery — 1)a counter to Joe Wilson’s material on “what he didn’t learn in Africa.” and 2) an effort to place Atta in Iraq prior to 9/11 getting terrorist training, and 3) an effort to link Syria and Libya to an al-Qaeda project to move the Niger Yellow Cake from Niger to Iraq in 2001.

You have to ask yourself, Who, in the late-summer, early fall of 2003 would have wanted these three elements to have veracity in the wake of the Iraq invasion, and the beginning of the spin down of that to insurgency, and the two investigations then underway — DoJ’s FBI investigation of what became the Plame matter, and the then ongoing work of the 9/11 commission investigation, which ultimately ratified the FBI’s debunking of the claim that Atta had a Czech or an Iraqi link in the summer of 2001, and the blatent attempt to lay cause for war against Syria and Libya?

It is not only the CIA that was being thrown under the bus here, it was also FBI. The forgery clearly attempted to discredit the FBI.

So next questions in historical context — did this have anything to do with Ashcroft’s willingness to step aside from the Plame investigation in the fall of 2003? Did it have anything to do with Comey’s selection of Pat Fitzgerald as special prosecutor at the tail end of 2003, two weeks after the forgery came out in the Telegraph in London — a Pat Fitzgerald who was already smelling around Conrad Black in Chicago, at a time when Black owned the Telegraph — which he later sold to Murdoch.

We have on this blog people who know this stuff pretty cold, and can do the necessary historical layering so as to cross reference all our sources and paint a much more detailed picture.

Bob in HI

Sure, you could constitutionally tell the veep’s man to pound salt, you work for the President. But when the President fails to assert his own authority or priorities in such contests, fails to affirm his own chain of command and simply backs Cheney’s man (in the rare circumstances where he even hears about such conflicts – which he is famous for saying he wants no part of), then Cheney wins and everybody knows it.

Not impeaching him will ring down in history as a horrible mistake.

And the worst may be yet to come!

I agree if you Teddy extend it to the whole Maladministration

In all fairness, Noriega had publicly taunted Bush 41, waving a sword at the cameras and everything. Clearly a threat to world peace.