As this post takes us closer to the French connections in Plamegate/Nigergate,
I have to say quite honestly and fervently:
(1)The CIA division that includes Valerie Plame,
(a)is tasked with tracking all such "uranium transactions" worldwide,
(b)has extensive contacts with current and former IAEA officials,
(c)has extensive contacts with similar divisions in all "foreign services" that have similar concerns about such transactions,
(d)would have known in no less than one week what names and dates on the Niger documents were in error.
(2)And yet, between the date those documents are received at the US embassy in Rome, October 9, 2002 until they are declared forgeries by the IAEA in 2003, no official word from Plame's CIA division goes forth to declare the documents as forgeries.
(3)This cannot be incompetance. Any reasonable investigator would have to accept two possibilities, not mutually exclusive: (a)Plame's division knew all along, with their French sources, that the documents were forgeries planted by the French and/or (b)Plame's division in the CIA was politically motivated to withold from the Whitehouse, for months, that they had already "determined" the forged status of the documents.
We can expect that at least the French wanted the forgeries inserted into the documents that the US would give to the UN, to intentionally embarass the US.
And I do not think we can escape the possibility that so did some person or persons at the CIA.
We need a new special prosecutor, and possible criminal charges that would deal with CIA employees who knowingly work with a foreign country, in that foreign country's attempt to derail, through false evidence, the operations of the US government.
If you read the SSCI, the explanation given is that the set of these documents given to Plame's division was locked in a safe and forgotten for 6 months because the person who was to receive tham had been absent on the date of their distribution.
The Niger Embassy would obviously know who was in office on what date, and so the fact that the wrong names and dates were used tells me that the documents were intended to be discovered as forgeries when they were created.
They were intended as a setup from the moment ink went on paper. I realize this is only obvious, but the article dances around this without saying so directly.
"We need a new special prosecutor, and possible criminal charges that would deal with CIA employees who knowingly work with a foreign country, in that foreign country's attempt to derail, through false evidence, the operations of the US government."
I'm afraid we need far more than that. We need conservative Republicans to start facing up the the fact of how deep the Leftist rot has penetrated our society, and how ruthless these Leftists are. They have infiltrated far and wide (including some penetration into the Republican Party)
and are paralyzing the will of our government and all of us by creating uncertainty about everything.