Closer to the Source

Remember way back when on those forged Yellowcake documents that were part of the case for going into Iraq? I wondered a few times why people were just concentrating on why the administration was fooled (or wanted to be fooled). I said the bigger story that nobody was talking much about was where did the docs come from. Well, a bunch of people have been slowly working on that. Here is the latest development.

Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France
(Bruce Johnson, Telegraph)

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.

(via Captain’s Quarters)

Interesting. The speculation is that France planted it in the hopes that the US would use it, so France could then expose it at an appropriate time to make the US look silly and hurt the pro-war argument. Hmm. Maybe. We’ll see what continues to come out. Initially though, my first reaction is that it is the same kind of conspiracy thinking as those who thought Rove was behind the forged Bush national guard docs. In both cases, we’re talking people forging documents that build cases against themselves in the hopes the forgeries will be discovered (but not traced all the way back to them) and then make the people who actually use the forgeries in public look bad. Very high risk plan. Lots of potential for backfire. But which COULD work if it went exactly according to plan.

In the case of the forged Bush documents, it now looks pretty clear that a less convoluted path explains what happened. The originator looks like it was this Bill Burkett guy who has been trying to rile up the National Gaurd issue against for many years and who may have “recreated” these documents, the originals of which were supposedly destoryed years ago. No oddness, no strange loops. Just a guy with an agenda who thought this could help his cause, but who was completely wrong and ended up with the opposite result than he intended. And the people along the chain who wished it was true so much they passed it along without even the slightest bit of doubt or questioning.

Hmmm… that part sounds like the Yellowcake docs again. Maybe they are similar after all. Maybe the “they came from French Intelligence” thing will pan out. I haven’t seen enough to make a judgement yet. But on these sorts of things, Occam’s Razor *usually* wins out in the end. But not always. We will see.