Ignoring the Parable of the Talents

As so often these days, Mark Steyn unleashes his vast skills in the service of obfuscation:

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

Uh, Mark, the Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. The UN's IAEA discovered they were fake with about 15 minutes of Googling -- they found that the Niger officials mentioned in the documents had been been out of power for years.

There are a lot of scandals in this whole wretched business of the Iraq Attaq (and I suspect that Karl Rove's involvement is less culpable than that of some others - history may look kindly upon Rove as a voice of reason who kept the U.S. from also invading Syria right after Saddam's statue came down), but one obvious scandal that hasn't been drawing the attention it deserves is who created these forgeries, which surfaced via Italy's military intelligence service. The obvious usual suspect in any dubious activities involving both Italian intelligence and the Middle East, Michael Ledeen, has denied to me having any involvement in the forgeries, but he broke off the email discussion he initiated when I asked him if he would use his Italian contacts to search for the Real Forgers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer