corrente

Read the whole thing in The New Yorker (No, I don't miss Tina a bit).

No nukes, lying exiles, neo-cons hearing what they want to hear, Cheney's closed mind, OBL taking a backseat to the Iraqi obsession ...

But here's one very interesting tidbit. Of the forged yellowcake papers from the Italian services that gave rise to the 16 words fiasco:

Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for.

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community.

[A former senior C.I.A. officer] had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI[Italian] intelligence.

The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush ...

Funny how the retired operatives assumed that (a) there was any intelligence analysis going on at all on the road to war, and (b) that anyone from the Bush regime is capable of appearing or even experiencing a sense of shame or embarassment.