As Washington Insiders frantically baptize their clubby reputations in their own odd interpretations of the Libby verdict, we find additional amusement in our beloved MSM’s professed bafflement with the Vice President’s panic over the infamous Wilson Op Ed.
The equally infamous Chris Matthews yesterday on an MSNBC blog asked this:

What was all the “hullabaloo” when Joe Wilson wrote...that it was “the vice president’s office” that had raised the question with the CIA of a possible Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium from Niger? Why did Cheney and Libby want everybody to think it wasn’t the vice president?”


Another usual suspect, Howard Fineman, yesterday afternoon, said this:

Why were Cheney and Libby so frantic to discredit the couple? Was there something more than mere political hardball being played in this matter? What land mine had Wilson stepped on? And, as my colleague Chris Matthews keeps asking, what happened to the report Joe Wilson filed? If Cheney is the one who asked for it in the first place, what did he do with it when he got it?

Sadly predictable, the Google-challenged corporate media’s informational Magoo act regarding Cheney’s Niger panic is typical when properly gathered facts have the potential to reveal larger and ever more criminal motivations and activities, such as we’ve recently observed regarding a true tally of Walter Reed and VA misfortunes.
To the web-savvy, as analog media likes to say, the black budget reasons for Cheney’s “frantic” behavior have, over time, become more commonly accepted on the internets than non-open source media’s current puzzlement indicates.
For example, a July 23, 2005 report in the Saturday edition of the London Guardian reports that in the UK:

A parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents…a source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved.

According to the British paper The Independent some major Bush-orbiting personages have maintained a lengthy interest:

At the beginning of 2001, a few weeks before George Bush took office, there was a break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome. Strangely, nothing of value was taken…As George Bush wondered how to get back at the terrorists [after 911], a report from the Italian security service (Sismi) reached the CIA: Iraq was seeking to buy uranium…In December 2001, a few months after the CIA first heard the Niger claims, Ledeen flew to Rome with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian arms dealer, and two officials from OSP [Doug Feith’s infamous Office of Special Plans], one of whom was Larry Franklin…it wasn't Ledeen but someone close to him. So who was it who had been planning since before 9/11 to create a fraudulent casus belli against Saddam?

One rational explanation for Cheney’s panic could be American involvement with or even instigative planning for a black bag job inside the Niger Embassy in Rome, Italy.
Another, more panic inducing possibility could be the involvement of another foreign national in the planning or execution of this ultra secret operation…say, an Iranian.
Remember, material forged onto the stationary taken from the Niger Embassy became the “intelligence” supposedly “gathered” by all those different and respected foreign intelligence services.
The Niger documents are also, though not widely discussed as such, the “intelligence screw-up” that so severely “damaged” the CIA and helped create the Patriot Act “adjustments” to certain domestic freedoms, the giant bureaucracy of Homeland Security and freewheeling wiretappery.
Needless to say, countless Federal laws have, likely, been violated and thus would make perfect rational reasons for Cheney to panic, Scooter to lie and Bush to pardon.

Modified Image: AP, MovieCityNews.com, Panorama
- posted by Sean @ 11:25 AM