While everyone is focusing on Scooter, Judy, Big Time and the other players in the immaculate birth of Mess O'Potamia, there's this intersting little bit of information about how some of this all got started. And trust me, it's a real three-penny opera, complete with bad Italian actors, forgeries and low-lifes run rampant.

As Washington braces for the possible indictment of some of its most powerful officials, Italy is reliving its own small but significant role in "Niger-Gate," the scandal that surfaced as the Bush administration made its case for war in Iraq.

If all roads lead to Rome, so do the rumors: Washington's problem with the leak of a CIA officer's identity has tentacles here.

Former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife was the covert CIA operative whose identity might have been leaked by White House officials, was dispatched in February 2002 to investigate a claim that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger after documents asserting exactly that surfaced in Rome.

The documents were determined to be forgeries, and Wilson said he found little evidence to back the claim.

Yet the claim was used in late 2002 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and in early 2003 by President Bush to illustrate the threat posed by the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.

Who forged the documents, which included letters and purported contracts, remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the affair.

Speculation about how the papers were produced in Rome, and complaints that the Italian government has done little to find out or to come clean, dominated political debate here this week, especially in the left-leaning newspaper La Repubblica, which has dedicated page after page of breathless prose to the matter.

Among its claims, La Repubblica has suggested that the head of Italy's military secret service, Nicolo Pollari, disseminated the false information to the Bush administration on orders from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a loyal ally eager to give Bush a helping hand.
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The murky saga involves one Rocco Martino, an occasional Italian spy and businessman who initially peddled the documents. He has told reporters over the last few years that he obtained the papers through a contact at the Niger Embassy in Rome (which, incidentally, was burglarized in 2001) with the help of another officer from Italian military intelligence, and that he sold them to a French intelligence agency with which he occasionally traded.
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Martino is a problematic figure. La Repubblica described him as a "failed carabiniere [policeman] and dishonest spy" and a "double-dealer" who plays many sides of every fence and was fired from his job in the Italian secret service.

In 2002, the documents came into the hands of an Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, working for the magazine Panorama, which is owned by Berlusconi, the prime minister.

Burba has not publicly identified her source, except to say he was a usually reliable "security consultant," and she declined to do so again Thursday in an interview. But news reports have said Martino was her source. On orders from her editor, she handed copies of the documents over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Separately, she traveled to Niger to check out the claims herself, notably that Iraq was attempting to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from the African country, and concluded the report was not reliable.
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"I am very mad," Burba said. "I was used. And the documents have been used to justify a war where people are being killed. This makes me very uneasy."

So if the papers that were sent through the intelligence channels resembled something closer to a Ludlum first-draft than actual intelligence, who's going to be surprised?

Remember, Secret Intelligence without real Oversight means Never Having to Say "I'm Sorry". The proof is in Mess O'Potamia tonight.

ps...where is Osama?