More cooks in the kitchen: eriposte at The Left Coaster is meticulously, painstakingly comparing the forged Niger Yellowcake docs to the CIA reports about them. This is some Nouvelle Cuisine: small plates, carefully garnished and bursting with flava. If you don't trust my review, Amb. Joe Wilson recommended Chez Left Coaster the other night on Larry King.

A taste from today's installment:

Considering that Doc 2 likely played an important role in the CIA's (and the British Government's) linking the Al-Zahawi trip to uranium, how is it possible that the CIA (or INR) would have missed the litany of fake stuff in this document? It suggests, again, that the CIA (and INR) probably did not receive the full verbatim text of this alleged letter (Doc 2) or the corresponding forged document from SISMI (or any other sources) until sometime in Fall 2002. Prior to Fall 2002, they likely received select extracts from the Niger forgeries (from SISMI) passed off as "reliable" intel. But in this process, clearly someone was excluding information in Doc 2 that would have revealed it was a forgery. Obviously, the forgers of the documents would not have taken the trouble to do this (why include the fake information in the first place and then try to change it?). So, who did? The road, once again, would seem to lead to SISMI.

Basically, first the Italians and then the Neocons in the US played keep-away with the Yellowcake docs so that nobody with the knowledge or inclination to identify them as crude forgeries would see them until it was too late.

At the same time, the Italians and the Neocons disseminated reports about the Yellowcake docs which corrected some of the obvious inconsistencies contained in the actual Yellowcake docs themselves. This would help them use the Niger-Iraq-Uranium claims to push the war on Iraq even though the claims were based on complete baloney.

Buon appetito!

More Italian Job from Chef Shystee here. From Chef al-Cubicle here.