Iraq war: who are the forgers?

The Christian Science Monitor– a paper that I’ve worked with since 1976 — has a really important piece today, in which it apologises for having last month run a piece based on documents that, it has now determined, are forgeries.
The docs in question were acquired by reporter Philip Smucker from disaffected Iraqi General Salah Abdel-Rasool, in Baghdad in early May. They alleged that the vociferously anti-war British MP George Galloway had received $10 million of Iraqi government funding over the past few years to help bolster a whitwash campaign for Saddam Hussein.
Forged documents? Why does this ring a bell?
The Niger/yellowcake forgeries, perhaps?
From what the CSM investigation revealed, the Rasool forgeries were of a considerably higher order of sophistication than the Niger/yellowcake ones. But this episode raises some really interesting questions. Who is producing all these forgeries, whose aim seems to have been to discredit leading opponents of the US-UK war effort, and to build public support for it in the west?
My first hunch would be the ever-untrustworthy Ahmed Chalabi. But since I would hate to smear someone’s reputation based on false accusations (unlike, of course, the authors of the Rasool forgeries), I think someone should launch a thorough investigation of this whole question.
Has there in fact been a conspiracy or network of conspiracies that has aimed to jerk the west into this war? Surely, we deserve to know.
I believe that both the Rasool forgery and the Niger/yellowcake forgery could provide leads that might clarify this issue. The leads on the Niger/yellowcake forgery are probably a little older at this point; though I don’t see many signs that they’ve been systematically followed up. Those low-grade so-called “documents” came to the Brits from the Italians? Or from the Germans? It all seems terribly vague.
Is anyone following this story up well?
But now, we have the much warmer trail of the Rasool forgeries to follow up.
According to today’s piece in the CSM, Rasool described himself as a closet anti-Saddamist and claimed he’d found them in the home of Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein.
(The latest CSM investigation, which is described in length in today’s article, reveals that though Smucker did not pay Rasool directly for the docs, he did make a separate payment of $800 to the general’s neighbor for doing some translating. In a pauperized place like Baghdad, that’s a LOT of money– and some of it just may have made its way back over the garden fence to Rasool… )
Where did Rasool actually get those docs from??? From the CSM’s description of them, the level of their sophistication/verisimilitude was such that it seems unlikely that Rasool produced them himself on a printing press in his back yard (though I suppose that, being a general, he could probably have stolen some of the relevant letterhead fairly easily.)
Some other fascinating clues, however, indicate the author of those docs was not very familiar with institutional practices inside the vast Saddam-era security bureaucracy… So maybe Rasool didn’t produce them himself, but merely agreed to pass them on to eager reporter Smucker on behalf of someone else. (It seems much of Baghdad was awash with former regime insiders trying to peddle docs to reporters in those days.)
So where did Rasool actually get them?? Can he identify the party who gave them to him??
No indication that CSM follow-up reporter Ilene Prusher tried to pursue those questions… But some good shoe-leather work on this lead may well lead into the heart of a much bigger pro-war campaign based on misinformation (regarding WMDs, in general), lies, and forgeries.