[ClaireSolt]

This is logical, but it does not hang together tightly. The tip off, of coure, is that Wilson mentioned the forgeries in his senate intel committee testimony, even though the US government would not know about them for 8 months.

[ravingnutter]

My theory falls into place when you consider the clairvoyance of several individuals. First, as you mention, Joe Wilson claimed to have seen the documents 8 months before they surfaced. Equally suspicious is the Hersch article, where Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false.

And last, but not least (and actually first if you consider the chain of custody):

JANUARY 2003 : (AL ZAHAWIE, "RETIRED IN JORDAN" - IS RECALLED BACK TO BAGHDAD, IRAQ; HE IS TAKEN TO MEET UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS) But last January, al-Zahawie was summoned back to Baghdad for what he had expected would be a request to help Iraq's Foreign Service plan for deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's planned visit to the Vatican. Instead, upon landing in Baghdad, al-Zahawie was taken to meet with UN weapons inspectors. Five inspectors interviewed him in a 90-minute session, he says.

"They asked why I went [to Niger], why I was chosen, when I left Rome and whether there were any other Iraqi diplomats at the Vatican," he says. "But then they asked who had the seal of the embassy and where I had left it." That's when al-Zahawie got wind of some kind of foul play. Italy had handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his presence in Niger. But the inspectors were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it. "If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* My note: How would he know the 'tell-tale sign' if they refused to show the letters to him? Shades of Joe Wilson's foreknowledge of the docs?]

[Southack]

"The tip off, of coure, is that Wilson mentioned the forgeries in his senate intel committee testimony, even though the US government would not know about them for 8 months."

That's the whole thing...Wilson knew that the documents were forgeries long before the U.S. ever saw them. He was clearly privy to the whole French Intel operation to use the forgeries to discredit the U.S.