Did Wilson mislead the Washington Post?
In his letter to Roberts and Rockefeller, Wilson responds (or pretends to respond) to a claim that isn’t trivial. He responds to a claim made by Chairman Roberts and two other Republicans—a charge made in the part of the report given over to “Additional Comments” from Committee members. Here is one of charges by the three senators—a murky charge which they flesh out by citing particular incidents:
ROBERTS/BOND/HATCH (page 443): Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.
In short, the senators charge that Wilson tended to say more than he actually knew. In part, the senators refer to a matter described in the body of the report—the part of the report unanimously accepted by the Committee. According to the Committee report, Wilson misstated to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, in an interview for a 6/12/03 report—an interview conducted at a time when Wilson was still anonymous. According to the report, Wilson told Pincus that he had determined, as part of his trip, that the famous Niger documents were forged. The problem: Wilson had never seen these forged documents. Indeed, the documents weren’t even in US hands when he took his trip to Niger. According to the Committee report, Wilson “told Committee staff that he was the source” of the Pincus article. Here’s the way the Senate report recorded Wilson’s explanation for his apparent misstatement:
SENATE INTELLIGENCE REPORT (page 45): The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken” to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself.
http://tinyurl.com/86usk