[Plame Affair]

The Italian Connection

The story of the Italian Connection, to which I earlier alluded, is really starting to explode. My co-worker has been whispering about it for weeks, but, like the Plame affair it spawned, the whole thing has seemed murky and obscure. Well, the upshot is this: in the run-up to war, the White House had a series of ongoing, secret meetings with Italian intelligence over what later turned out to be forged documents claiming Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger. The CIA knew the documents were fake, and so the WH was working directly with the Italians. This led to the famous 16-word claim in the State of the Union address citing the Niger uranium, which then led to Joe Wilson's trip to Africa to find out the truth of the forgeries, which finally led to the WH leak campaign to smear Wilson by outing his wife, Valerie Plame.

The question, then, is why the WH has been so keen to destroy any fingerprints on those Niger forgeries. Why was this effort, as Laura Rozen puts it, of "an excessive and almost hysterical quality?" What do they know that they don't want anyone else--Patrick Fitzgerald, in particular--to find out about? These are exactly the questions cruising the blogosphere this afternoon.

Fitzgerald is supposed to hand out indictments tomorrow. Until then, expect speculation to run high.