The Shadow Knows...

A quick weekend drive by; I'll do a fuller piece on this next week.

Things that happen in the seat of power are usually connected. So I'm not terribly surprised that former Rumsfeld adviser Douglas Feith has come out with his "We overemphasized WMD" statement about the same time the Valerie Plame case is blowing wide open.

I've said for some time that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been after something much bigger than a perjury rap on Karl Rove (yeah, yeah, you heard it here first.)

The real connection has to do with Joseph Wilson's analysis of the Niger yellow cake story and the "sixteen words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The sixteen words turned out to not only be false; they turned out to be based on documents that were determined to be forgeries--poorly crafted forgeries at that.

The sixteen words were, of course, the crux of the administration's case for invading Iraq.

Hence, Feith's statement about "overemphasizing" the WMD angle. As in, "We didn't really mean to sell the war that way. President Bush really didn't mean to use the sixteen words to sell the war to America and the world."

Really?

The latest revelation that Powell was circulating a memo with Wilson's findings on Air Force One almost certainly indicates that Mr. Bush was aware of it.

But let's cut to the chase, the issues that (I think) are the key ones.

At the time of the president's SOTU speech, who if anyone in the administration knew that the sixteen words were based on forged documents? And oh, by the way, who forged those documents?

That's what I'd like to know, and I'm guessing that's what Fitzgerald wants to know too.