Michael Ledeen is whining about reports that supposedly accuse him of forging the fake Niger documents. There’s just one problem, though: no one that I have read on the subject is making any such accusation. The La Repubblica series by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo says that Ledeen was the conduit for the forgeries, “stovepiping” them — or their content — from Rome to Washington via the Office of Special Plans — the Pentagon’s parallel intelligence-gathering operation that did an end-run around the CIA.
As for my own contribution to the story, it explicitly states Ledeen was a “conduit” for the report, and that the forging was done by others.
Ledeen, the master of obfuscation, is confusing the issue: but then that’s not too surprising. He’s eager to deny his own reported role in this shameful affair, but it seems distinctly odd that he’s doing so by overstating it — basically accusing himself of crimes no one has fingered him for. He ought to give himself a break — and give us one, too. No one is fooled by this strenuous smoke-blowing. But I can’t help thinking that where there’s so much smoke, there has to be a certain amount of fire …
UPDATE: Several readers have pointed to this bit of “dialogue” between Ledeen and “James Jesus Angleton,” whose shade Ledeen communes with (via ouija board) to set us mortals straight, to correct my contention that Ledeen is “whining” about being tagged as a forger:
“JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn’t know your French was
good enough…
“ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they
accused me of schlepping them, not forging them.”
If we remember that Angleton is, after all, quite dead, and that Ledeen’s by-now-tiresome literary device is just that — a device — we are confronted with the curious conundrum of Ledeen smearing himself out of one side of his mouth, and correcting himself out of the other.
Burning Tony Blair in effigy for Guy Fawkes – 