Who forged the Niger yellowcake documents?

Everybody is excited over whether Karl Rove leaked a CIA agent's identity as part of the Administration's efforts to discredit the discovery that the notorious Niger Yellowcake documents that the Bush Administration used to allege that Saddam was building nuclear weapons and thus justify the war. But isn't the more central question the one almost nobody has been talking about? Who forged these documents that helped bring about a war? That's pretty serious, isn't it?

According to Josh Marshall:

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino's hands by a then-serving member of SISMI -- Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

When I posted a rumor pointing in the direction of the best-known SISMI-connected neocon player, Michael Ledeen, who was a big wheel in Iran-contra, Ledeen emailed me to deny that he had any involvement with the forgeries. But when I asked Ledeen if he was going to use his extensive SISMI contacts to search for the Real Forgers, that International Man of Mystery didn't reply.

By the way, remember the anthrax poisonings right after 9/11? Who dunnit?

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