Unfortunately, I don't think there are investigators who are willing or able to trace exactly how information from forged documents made its way into the President's state of the union speech. The Italians, Michael Ledeen, and other neocons involved have made it very difficult.

However, I wonder about violations of the National Security Act's Section 502 requirements that may apply with respect to the Rome meetings Ledeen arranged for his DOD OSP colleagues Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin. This would seem to be a much simpler matter. Legally, I believe you need to answer just a couple questions:

1. Did the Rome meetings arranged by Ledeen constitute intelligence activities? I would say yes -- based on the cast of characters present and Ledeen's own admission/brag in one of his episodes with Janmes Angleton. In this one, he seems to be saying to himself (since, Angleton is quite dead) that he should have been awarded a medal for the life-saving intelligence he obtained from the Iranians:

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200508120817.asp

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee also reportedly has Franklin�s report about the Rome meetings that says the meeting included discussions of possible engagement of a network of Ghorbanifar associates to pursue action against Tehran.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10446

2. Were the Section 502 requirements met? This is either yes or no and should be easy to determine. Was the oversight committee given advance or contemporaneous notice of the intelligence work carried out at the Rome meetings? Reading Laura Rosen's articles, the answer would appear to be no. From her articles, it would appear these activities continued even after George Tenet explicitly communicated his concern about the activities to Hadley.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10446

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html

Perhaps the question isn't what the facts are, but whether anyone on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (Republican or Democrat) has the courage to pursue this. The last group that tried to hold Ledeen accountable apparently was the history department at Washington University that denied him tenure based on plaguarism charges. Since then, no one has had the guts.

Josh Marshall has been chronicling developments in this story for the longest time, and I've had a hard time getting a grasp on it. There are so many shadowy players with obscure connections to each other, determined to cover their tracks and sow confusion about what other players have done.

So if I could just understand motive, it would help. If SISMI agents or ex-agents created and spread the bogus document, why did they think that was a good idea? The motivation of Ledeen and the Pentagon neocon hawks seems obvious. I can see why the FBI, as a result of pressure from above or just their own inherent penchant for secrecy, might decide that a thorough investigation would be undesirable. But what were the motives of SISMI spooks in the first place? Maybe Berlusconi hoped to curry favor with Bush by giving him a casus belli, maybe not. To accept that hypothesis, I'd have to believe that (1) Berlusconi caused the forgeries to be created and spread; (2) The job of forgery was assigned to an incompetent; (3) Berlusconi had reason to believe that Bush would know what had been done and who had done it. That's a lot of dots to connect.

Trying to trace how the information from the Niger forgies ended up in the President's state of the union address is a waste of time. No one will be able to hold anyone directly accountable. However, there were crimes with some closely associated activities that should be prosecuted.

If you look at the greatest intelligence mistakes and misjudgements over the past several decades, you'd find that many of them are related to "Team B" tactics and working around the official intelligence bureaucracies. While there have been many "end-around" intelligence operations in the past, these have been substantially ignored since the cost of those schemes weren't anything approaching what we face today in Iraq (considering human and economic costs and opportunity costs now and in the future).

Investigate and prosecute anyone under U.S. DOD Undersecretary Doug Feith who violated intelligence notification and oversight requirements under the National Security Act! Investigate and prosecute those involved in the Rome meetings!