The medical staff take an infant named Bintow from the arms of his mother and place him in a black harness attached to a hand-held scale. He shrieks at the sudden discomfort, thrashing his arms and legs. His stomach bulges, all of his ribs are visible. The child is 10 months old. He weighs 9 pounds.

Bintow is lucky, as far as it goes. He is so badly underweight that he will receive an emergency ration: two weeks' worth of enriched cornmeal and oil. Only a third of the estimated 200 children at the center that day will receive care. There is simply not enough to go around.

"People get upset, but we can only help a few of them," said the head of the feeding center, Ibrahim Chalaré of the British charity Islamic Relief. Like most aid organizations, his center depends on international donors to feed the hungry children waiting outside. They do not have nearly enough. The numbers coming to the center have already doubled from the month before, he said.

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Welcome to Italy's latest scandal, a dizzying tale that catapults the government of Silvio Berlusconi into the midst of the unfolding controversy over the Bush administration's trumped-up evidence for weapons of mass destruction. The faked documents formed the basis of George Bush's now-infamous claim in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material from the African republic of Niger, which was among the administration's most important justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is beginning an investigation this week on how the Bush crowd came to use the bogus evidence, despite repeated warnings by the State Department and the CIA about the dubious nature of the dossier. But don't hold your breath for any dramatic revelations from the Republican-controlled committee. A recently terminated investigation by the FBI turned up nothing. Tellingly, the feds specifically exculpated the Italian secret service over allegations in the Italian press that it had a role in disseminating the forged documents. And just last week an intelligence oversight panel of the Italian Senate held closed-door hearings and found  nothing.

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