Actual Real News

The American Prospect just published an important piece by Laura Rozen about the so-called "Phase II" report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Phase I" was published last year, and examined the WMD conclusions of the CIA, etc. and how they came to them. Phase II was supposed to investigate whether or not what the Bush administration said was congruent with the intelligence they were given. Last July Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the committee, very explicitly promised Phase II was on its way. "It's a priority," he said. Of course, after the presidential election he decided it could be safely ditched.

Then, with the release of the Downing Street Memo, pressure on Roberts to finish Phase II revived. I'm now working on a secret project to attempt to increase this pressure. But anyway, here's Rozen's article:

Today, committee Republicans view their mission as being not oversight but cover-up. Indeed, one source told the Prospect that Roberts has worked closely behind the scenes with vice president Cheney’s office in crafting the language defining and limiting the investigation’s terms...

And then Justin Raimondo has this explosive-if-true claim about the forged Niger documents:

A parliamentary committee [in Italy] was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

Yikes!