The fish rots from the head first

The net needs to be cast far and wide on this Plame thing. Every day seems to peel back another layer of the onion, and today has been an especially juicy layer. To wit: The NYT reveals that Cheney and Libby had spoken about Plame long before Libby testified that he found out about her from a reporter and Cheney claimed he didn't know who Joe Wilson was.

Now comes this morsel out of La Repubblica in Italy...home of the original Niger yellowcake forgery. Pollari is Italy's chief of intelligence:

Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday

So our new National Security Advisor is potentially complicit, then:

The forged documents were cabled from the U.S. embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the U.S. embassy.

So it now appears that not only was Cheney controlling what was getting into the US press by manipulating Judy Miller, his noted "coalition ally," Italian President, and Media Tycoon Silvio Berlusconi was manipulating his own media to build the case for the Iraq invasion.

Never mind that it was all based on a forgery. From the same article as quoted above:

Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

This is starting to smell really, really suspicious (and conspiratorial). Remember, the fish rots from the head down.