Vanity Fair has published a new article, by Craig Unger, that brings the buried Niger yellowcake story back into the limelight. And the light seems to be shining, once again, on Michael Ledeen, although there still is no proof of his involvement. Unger pulls no punches, commenting that the "consequences of the robbery were so great that the Watergate break-in pales by comparison."

The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed

The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House.

More from the article (note that our own Josh Marshall is credited for his efforts in covering the story):

Cui Bono?

Unraveling a disinformation campaign is no easy task. It means entering a kingdom of shadows peopled by would-be Machiavellis who are practiced in the art of deception. "In the world of fabrication, you don't just drop something and let someone pick it up," says Bearden. "Your first goal is to make sure it doesn't find its way back to you, so you do several things. You may start out with a document that is a forgery, that is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, which makes it hard to track down. You go through cutouts so that the person who puts it out doesn't know where it came from. And you build in subtle, nuanced errors so you can say, 'We would never misspell that.' If it's very cleverly done, it's a chess game, not checkers."

Reporters who have entered this labyrinth often emerge so perplexed that they choose not to write about it. "The chances of being manipulated are very high," says Claudio Gatti, a New York–based investigative reporter at Il Sole, the Italian business daily. "That's why I decided to stay out of it."

Despite such obstacles, a handful of independent journalists and bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic have been pursuing the story. "Most of the people you are dealing with are professional liars, which really leaves you with your work cut out for you as a reporter," says Joshua Micah Marshall, who has written about the documents on his blog, Talking Points Memo.

So far, no one has figured out all the answers. There is even disagreement about why the documents were fabricated. In a story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, a source suggested that retired and embittered C.I.A. operatives had intentionally put together a lousy forgery in hopes of embarrassing Cheney's hawkish followers. But no evidence has emerged to support this theory, and many intelligence officers embrace a simpler explanation. "They needed this for the case to go to war," says Melvin Goodman, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. "It serves no other purpose."

As most everyone probably knows, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued an initial report blaming the CIA and clearing the White House of any responsibility for the infamous words in the SOTU, in which Bush claimed that Saddam had sought Niger uranium. All efforts by Sen. Harry Reid and other democratic Senators to investigate the forged Niger documents have been thwarted by the Republicans.

But this is a story that just isn't going to go away. Will the Republicans' stonewalling come back to bite them in November?

It's a very long article, but well worth the time to read it; it makes sense of a very complicated story. Although there isn't much new detail about the forgeries themselves, which have been discussed extensively in the blogosphere, it does provide an interesting glimpse into the opinions of several senior members of the intelligence community, many of whom are convinced there's something very fishy going on.