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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1173835/posts

(snip)
Not so, according to the Senate committee's report on pre-Iraq war intelligence. Not so at all.

The first public mention of Joe Wilson's February 2002 mission to Niger appeared in a May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times. Shortly before, Wilson had met Kristof at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee conference in the capital. As Wilson later recounted to Vanity Fair, he told Kristof about his trip to Niger over breakfast the next morning, and said "Kristof could write about it, but not name him."

Kristof, the first of Wilson's many journalistic victims, accepted Wilson's claims at face value. "I do know from talking to people directly involved in the Niger deal that information did go to the vice president's office and did go to the national security staff in the White House and went to the top of the CIA," he told an NPR interviewer on June 25, 2003.

But read the various claims made in Kristof's May 6 column side by side with the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings, and you find two different stories. Here's Kristof: "In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information [of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal] was unequivocally wrong and that the documents [purporting to show such a deal] had been forged."

Wilson did report back to the CIA after he returned from Niger. And Wilson did say he was skeptical about claims of an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. But according to the committee's findings, Wilson did not report, by any reckoning, that the information was "unequivocally wrong" or that documents "had been forged" to show a deal. Indeed, he couldn't have.

That's because the bogus documents in question were not turned over to CIA personnel until October 16, 2002, about eight months after Wilson had returned from Niger. Also, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Wilson's initial February 19, 2002, meeting in CIA headquarters, "none of the meeting participants recall telling the former ambassador the source of the report."

This is how Pat Roberts, the committee's chairman, put it in his "additional views" section of the report:

At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the Intelligence Community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador's comments to reporters . . . could not have been based on the former ambassador's actual experiences because the Intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador's trip.

The Senate Committee asked Wilson how he could have come to such grandiose conclusions without any information:

On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For example, when asked how he "knew" that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved "a little literary flair."

"A little literary flair" is a good way to describe the following claim, also in the original Kristof column: "The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it [the forgery] anyway."

The Select Committee discovered otherwise:

DIA and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denials that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said [to Wilson] an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger [in 1999] for what [the prime minister] believed was to discuss uranium sales.

Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers. For the same reason, CIA's briefer did not brief the Vice President on the report, despite the Vice President's previous questions about the issue.

The story Wilson told Nicholas Kristof that May morning in Washington? Wilson made it up.

And he got away with it. And he began to talk more frequently with reporters. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, for one. Here is an excerpt from a Pincus article published on June 12, 2003:

During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

During the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, someone asked Wilson how he could have told Pincus the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," as he never saw the forgeries in the first place. Wilson was nonplussed. According to the report, "The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged.'" Also, he 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."