In the last paragraph of Part II of the expose is an interesting note - the forged documents behind the yellowcake story had been "misplaced" for three months. That's right, the documents that took a nation to war were - missing!

To establish a three month timeline you have to assume that a request was originally made that came back stamped "Not Found". Excuse me, these are classified documents. Normally missing classified documents would set off a series of events. We can assume numerous requests followed the first request, requests to multiple agencies.

If you had asked me or Mickey Mouse where one might expect to find those documents we'd have ventured "Langley?" But where? "Well, uh, do they have a WMD Section, perhaps a Counterproliferation Section?" Yeah. "Did you look in the safe in that section?"

Now it's possible that they were mislabeled, or temporarily setting on someone's desk when someone came looking for them in the Counterproliferation Section. But more than once? It's also possible that someone had removed them from Langley to make "safe" copies of the originals. You see, there are multiple, different, "originals". An inconvenient fact that might get lost along the way.

The CIA had the original originals. They were given to Rome CIA Station Chief Jeff Castelli after Panorama reporter Elisabetta Burba had done what an "old-school" journalist does, double-check the source and the contents. Castelli and Burba reached the same conclusion and filed the documents under "Clumsy Forgeries Best Forgotten". 

Those "originals" are the same documents sold to the French the year before in a sleazy scam concerning rumors of employee theft at France's mine in Niger. The mentioned quantity of 500 kilograms is consistent with employee theft but is hardly something to go to war over.

Then there is the second set of originals. The "amended originals" later delivered to Stephen Hadley at the National Security Agency by Italy's top spook specify war mongering quantities of 500 TONS (two years worth of Niger's entire production). People will kill one another over that much uranium.

By the time the documents were "missing" Langley had both sets of "originals" and possibly a third, the "originals" sold to British intelligence - a parking lot transaction curiously captured on film by Italian intelligence (!?!).

Where the forgeries were during those three months may be irrelevant. What is relevant is that a subsequent Inspector-General internal audit finally found them in a safe in Langley's Counterproliferation Section. Score one for Mickey, that's where they should have been all along. What is also relevant is Libby-Hadley-Rove DID NOT KNOW where the forgeries were during the missing three months. But, they DID KNOW that Joe Wilson's wife works in the Counterproliferation Section, and with the rank of Major probably had the combination to that safe. And they knew only too well how embarrassing those crude forgeries would be if they were made public.

Following Wilson's article you'd expect Libby-Hadley-Rove to be worried about what might come next because they knew that the bigger story was an uglier picture than the one Joe had painted. And not knowing where those incriminating documents were for three months surely filled their minds with worst case scenarios that could make Joe's article a mere pin prick. The best defense is an offense. "So what if one of us goes to jail for outing an agent? Big deal, it could be worse. Let's draw straws."

Will we ever see those documents, all of them? The US Senate saw them, even promised us a second investigation targeting that sorry affair. That investigation has since been removed from the calendar. Obviously the wise old men in the Senate do not feel that the likes of Judith Miller are mature enough for sharing such things with. Elisabetta Burba probably has some copies, but she's already disappointed her employer once.  Prime Minister Berlusconi owns Panorama, his fingerprints are all over the fairy tale of the Medusa artillery shell casings (aka "aluminum tubes"), and Burba was expected to print the damn story, not question it and file it under "Clumsy Forgeries Best Forgotten". 

Perhaps, perhaps, one day we (the sovereigns of this nation) will see them. After all, they were SOMEWHERE for those three months. Mickey's anonymous White House source says that Joe Wilson's dog ate them, they're gone forever. But to paraphrase Libby, "I don't even know if Joe Wilson has a dog...."

All this whining that someone might not get paid a union wage while rebuilding New Orleans is disgusting. Where do you think this $200 Billion USD is going to come from? They wont find $20 billion of "unnecessary spending" to cut, and they wont raise taxes.

We're going to borrow it. Today the Fed raised rates another quarter point and didn't even mention "fighting inflation" as the cause. They raised it to swell the bond rate for borrowing for New Orleans.

Well get a clue. We're not borrowing this kind of money from our selves. We can't even buy the bulk of our regular daily debt before we add Katrina to the bill. We're going to borrow it from the "world market".

Now don't get the idea that some wealthy old matron in Rio, Jakarta, Kabul or Nairobi is going to go out back and dig up the mason jars full of old Pound Sterlings to invest in New Orleans. It doesn't work that way. Instead, local investors in those cities will buy bonds in NY instead of investing in local enterprises.

That's right. Instead of money being invested in developing economies where it is desperately needed, the money will get vacuumed into NY to buy our debt.  We've been doing this on an unprecedented scale for 5 years now.  With Katrina added to the scam, we're talking over a trillion dollars that we've sucked out of the poor economies of the world. The "poor of the earth" are paying for our Porsche.

A CIA report on the background to 9/11 said, "they don't hate us for who we are, they hate us for what we do".  How many terrorists do you think we'll get from New Orleans folks? Don't get me wrong, New Orleans was a great city and should be rebuilt.

But if we can't convince ourselves that a Chevy would do, or afford to tax ourselves a wee bit, or afford to borrow from our own children, then who the hell do we think we are to be borrowing it from the families of the earth who can least afford it? If you haven't a clue what the answer is, try wearing the label "Ugly American" for just one day. And if that offends any of your arrogant self-righteous liberal sensibilities, remember, the families in Rio, Jakarta, Kabul and Nairobi have other labels that would just make you scream "Unfair!".

We've been telling Moslem clerics that they need to clean house to stop terrorism. They need to take the religious perverts in their mosques out behind the woodshed and make sure they don't come back. The global village is just to small for freaky religious leaders to be preaching hate, death and destruction and those leaders need to be purged.

Yup, that's what we've been telling them. We've wrapped ourselves in a cloak of moral superiority as victims of 9/11 and went off preaching democracy and religious reform though out the world. And now one of our own religious perverts proposes murdering a democratically elected leader because he doesn't see the world though Pat Robertson's twisted vision of righteousness.

If we do not cleans our own churches where the hell do we get the moral standing to demand it of others? American clerics from sea to shining sea need to denounce Robertson as strongly as we expect Moslem clerics to denounce the preachers of hate in their own culture.  Many will say, "Oh, that's just Pat, don't pay any attention to him."  That's what the binLaden family used to say about Osama too. Pat Roberts needs to be taken out behind the woodshed.

In the casino there are two poker tables, one with a hundred dollar pot, another with a ten thousand dollar pot. What's the difference. They play with the same deck of 52, they play by the same rules, and each player thinks he's good enough to be at the table. The difference - the people at the ten thousand dollar table sat down with more money in their pockets than the ones who joined into the hundred dollar table. The same thing happens on the stock market.

During the 90s 401K investments had the same effect on the market. Truck loads of tax sheltered money from the hinterland just kept showing up on Wall Street. Every morning a new line of trucks were waiting outside, full of money. It wasn't like the businesses inside had attracted this money the old fashioned way by improving performance.  Investing hard earned cash on Wall Street was not really that attractive on the merits, which is why it had been sweetened with a tax shelter. 

A bad consequence of tax shelter motivated investing is that people hate to pull their money back out of the market because then they'll have to pay those deferred taxes.  Once the money gets to the market it becomes a captive, a desperate captive looking for some place, any place, to hide from the tax collector.  Re-directing Social Security contributions to Wall Street would turbo-charge that effect.  No one is proposing that you could just take your money back and spend it on ice cream or even put it into the Social Security Trust Fund and pretend that it had been there all along.

Only one thing causes a stock market bubble - too much money chasing too few opportunities.  As the supply-side of the economy became glutted in the 90s, the value of stocks rose obscenely beyond the value of the companies behind them, companies didn't even bother to claim that they had earned the new investment. One of the popular theories of the day - more investments gave companies the money to make the changes that would make the investments worthy. We all participated - we heard analysts say things like that and didn't call the cops. So why do we want to do this again? More precisely, who wants to do this again?

No one ever saw people shoveling greenbacks into incinerators down on Wall Street. There were no truck loads of money running down to the docks, unloading onto barges to be scuttled at sea. Not a penny was lost on the market. For every dime lost by Peter, Paul found a dime.

When Peter bought that last golden opportunity he bought it from Paul. Paul is no fool, he plays with the big boys over at the ten thousand dollar table, he knows that you can not just play your own hand, you have to play everybody else's hand too. As Kenny Roger's gambler put it, Paul knows "when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em". Paul wants to do this again!

80% of stocks are owned by 3% of the population. You don't get to be a member of that club by being a fool, they don't play the game the way we play it over here on the hundred dollar table. When Peter bought that last golden opportunity from Paul, Paul didn't re-invest the money in the kind of companies he'd been jacking the price up on last week. He put his "bubbled wealth" into rail, real estate or some other safe cookie jar, then set back to watch the bleeding begin.

We're all aware that the boys on Wall Street plan to skim their fees out of our retirement. Some have realized that corporate executives will skim billions more in bonuses when the company's stock bubbles even though they've done nothing to make the company more valuable. But few realize what will automatically happen to Paul's stock as the Dow magically rolls from 10K to 20K, fed by truck loads of new money from the countryside.

Without lifting a finger, without a single new product, without any improvement in efficiency or gain in market share, the value of Paul's stock will double it's current value. Paul's wealth will double. All he's got to do is find a Peter from Omaha to sell those stocks to. And George is out giving away bus tickets in 60 cities for rides to Wall Street, where the Peters will desperately search out the Pauls, begging for a piece of the action. Paul's been here before, he's a survivor of the last round of robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul. He knows it's a scam. He knows it's a fraud. George knows it too. George knows this could be the biggest transfer of wealth in history - that's the whole idea!