Another point on the matter of forgeries.

Since the end of the Iraq war proper, a number of documents have surfaced in Iraq which on their face appear to connect the former Iraqi regime to al Qaida or similar Islamist terrorist groups.

I'm told there's now a growing consensus within the US Intelligence Community that most and probably all of those documents are forgeries.

The documents came into the hands of the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). And they were provided to the DIA by the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

In itself, that doesn't mean that the INC is responsible for these apparent forgeries. They may simply have been the unwitting conduit for them.

Of course, as retired CIA officer Bob Baer told the New Yorker last month, the INC was running its own "forgery shop" in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1994.