Today’s Must Read

The Washington Post goes front page today with a piece headlined, “How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War.”

The subject, of course, is the Niger yellow cake forgeries, the letter that led to Bush’s 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address, and eventually, in part, to the invasion of Iraq.

But there’s a funny thing about the piece — something symptomatic of most of the reporting on the Niger forgeries. It doesn’t really tell how a bogus letter became a case for war. In that story, the beginning and the end would be of utmost importance — the beginning being the origin of the documents, the end the Bush administration’s suppression of their fraudulence.

But the Post story doesn’t cast light on either of those parts of the story. Instead, the piece is mostly about an almost irrelevant aspect of the story, the sale of the documents by Rocco Martino, a former Sismi (Italy’s intelligence service) agent, to an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba. The sale occurred in October, 2002 — long after they were acquired by the U.S. from Sismi, and almost six months after Joseph Wilson’s fated trip to Niger to investigate whether such a sale was even possible.

About the Bush administration’s use of the documents, the Post reports, “dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.” Nothing new there.

And about the documents’ origins — the only unanswered question from the whole farce? It’s addressed in two sentences at the very end of the piece:

It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say most likely it was rogue elements in Sismi who wanted to make money selling them.

It’s actually not so much of a mystery. It’s just that the Italians, for some reason, don’t want to get to the bottom of it.