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This is the article I was searching for.

Here you have the bogus dossier on Saddam’s uranium

It turns out that I was right in my first post...and Hersh's article was misleading. Wilson was sent by the Veep's office to investigate the forgeries, which that office obtained 10 months before the CIA officially got them - probably from SISMI to MI6 to the CIA.

Why the Administration has gone to such pains to conceal this information is difficult for me to understand. My guess is that the Veep is too strongly connected by this to cooking the intelligence and, by extension, to exposing Plame.

Right now, it looks like Rove and Libby are going to be charged with perjury for trying to conceal their role in outing Plame. If that happens I think Rove will refuse to take the fall and will blame Cheney.

I know the last paragraph is wild supposition. But if it turns out to be true it will be very, very bad for our country.

Thanks for the ping. Let me meditate on it for a couple of days.

I'm still curious about Libya's uranium. Surfing the net yields dozens and dozens of stories asserting that it came from Niger, but all of them are merely re-stating almost word for word the Mark Huband story in the Financial Times.

On the other hand, scanning the IAEA report, they avoid the issue, mentioning that this or that material or piece of equipment is of "foreign origin" but never mentioning from where, which to me sets off alarm bells. Since they missed the whole thing, they have no reason to make it obvious just how badly they missed it.

I am frankly suspicious of the IAEA's ability or commitment or interest in catching anyone doing anything.

I did see a couple of competing articles proposing that, maybe, Libya's uranium came from North Korea, but that seems far-fetched when there are several possible sources right there in Africa that would be easier. I saw another article which said that Libya was investing in Central African Republic's uranium mining industry, which the CAF government then duly denied. But mostly everyone seems to have accepted Huband's story.

Other than the odd blogger dismissing his report, I didn't see anyone refute him or even deny it. Obviously, "if" Libya got its uranium from Niger during the nineties (they admit to getting some in the seventies and eighties) then this changes the complexion of everything everyone has written about the subject. But while I intend to continue swearing its true, I frankly haven't found any other source that isn't based on Huband. Let me know if you do.

Thanks again for the ping. Someone else sent me a similar article concerning the forgeries, and between the two of them my head is spinning.

Cheers

I read through the link, and it contains a lot of details I hadn't seen gathered well into one place.

It differs some, or perhaps merely shifts the focus a little, but there are a couple of common elements.

The docs came from the Niger embassy. They were created with some egregious errors that anyone could see, specifically, bearing a signature of an official who hadn't been in office for a decade.

Since a Nigerien diplomat would have access to up-to-date signatures, and would certainly know if someone was out of office for 10 years, I would say that the forgeries were designed to be discovered.

That much is clear.