Go, Josh, Go!

If you are not already familiar with it, the Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall is an invaluable blog by a Washington insider who has all the best attributes of a bull terrier (but he doesn't steal tennis balls from kids in the school playground).

Marshall was totally all over the top of Bush's fake Social Security crisis and deserves credit for helping ensure the whole thing was a dismal flop instead of an excuse to channel even more money into the Bush machine.

Now Marshall seems to be taking aim on a new target, the Rove-Plame scandal. In fact, Marshall was on top of this a long time ago:

I've gotten hints or suggestions from several sources over the last month that new information is bubbling to the surface, not about who leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but who was behind the underlying caper that started the whole drama afoot in the first place: those phoney Niger uranium documents.

As longtime readers of this site know, last year colleagues of mine and I were able to trace the documents back to a former Italian intelligence agent named Rocco Martino. Martino was the 'Italian businessman' who tried to sell the documents to Elizabetta Burba, the journalist who eventually brought them to the US Embassy in Rome.

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino's hands by a then-serving member of SISMI -- Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

Mashall thinks Fitzgerald is after Rove for some felony arising out of the case (perjury after the fact? conspiracy?) but not the immediate and original act of leaking the name. Explaining that special prosecutors like Fitzgerald shouldn't legally be pressing for the jailing of journalists unless this is en route to prosecuting a serious crime, Marshall has two more intriguing questions for the Rove case:

Would Fitzgerald have pushed to get Cooper and Miller in the slammer if some other party in the White House weren't in a lot of trouble?

And one last question: Cooper and Miller are very different kinds of journalists, swim in very different waters. Are they really in this jam for the same reasons?

I suggest you bookmark Marshall's site to keep up with the case.