Choose Your Own Conspiracy

These facts are confusing; make of them what you will.

-On June 12, 2003, according to the New York Times, Dick Cheney told his deputy, Scooter Libby, that former diplomat Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. Cheney had learned this from CIA director George Tenet, and he was presumably interested because Wilson was telling reporters that he had gone to Niger to investigate claims made by the administration in early 2003 that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake from that nation.

-That claim was based on documents that were crude forgeries, as the CIA told executive branch officials in fall 2002.

-The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported Tuesday that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italian military intelligence, who had been peddling the forgeries around Washington all through 2002, met with then-deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, on September 9, 2002, to discuss the forged documents, which ended up in the hands of an Italian journalist in October, from where they found their way to Washington.

-The Washington Monthly reported last year that Pollari had sat in on a December 2001 meeting in Rome with National Review writer Michael Ledeen, Defense Intelligence Agency (and since-convicted spy for Israel) Larry Franklin, Pentagon Islam specialist Harold Rhode, Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, former members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, among others.

-NBC News has confirmed a scoop by (of all people) Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has obtained a report from the Italian government that names Ledeen and two former CIA officers (all of whom are said to be close to Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi) as forgers of the Niger documents. NBC News has yet to confirm the names of the forgers.

-Last June, the Times reported that Chalabi, the source for much of Judith Miller's fraudulent WMD reporting, gave Iran U.S. communications codes; there was speculation that he had, all along, been an Iranian double agent.

I doubt the indictments Fitzgerald is about to lay down (Thursday, supposedly) are going to illuminate all of this, but anyone who has a good idea on how Israeli spies, Italian military intelligence, Niger, forged documents, Iraq and Valerie Plame all fit together is smarter than me. I have a feeling that by the time everything is all about in the open, all of this is going to seem a lot more important than whether Karl Rove or "Scooter" Libby told some fairly inconsequential lies under oath.