Just noting Wilson's trip to Niger was in February 2002, 8 months before the fake documents officially surfaced in Italy in October 2002.
But there are some investigative angles that indicate the documents date earlier than that and were passed on to the US through the US embassy in Italy as early as 2000. The US then re-leaked them through Martino. This is where the dems are going with the issue now.
But Martino has apparently confessed to Italian prosecutors recently that he did, indeed, make the fake documents (with French Intelligence help as well.)
None of this is true! jerry Springer said last week that the faked docs were created by Libby and Rove! /sarc opf
"But there are some investigative angles that indicate the documents date earlier than that and were passed on to the US through the US embassy in Italy as early as 2000."
The documents are fakes. They could be dated any time the forger wanted them to be.
Another [letter from the documents referred to as Niger forgeries], dated October 10, 2000, is signed “Alle Elhadj Habibou” —Niger's foreign minister who had not been in office since 1989. [Reuters, 3/26/03; New Yorker, 3/31/03 Sources: Unnamed senior official from the IAEA] ------ "Profile: Wissam al-Zahawie," http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp%3Fentity%3Dwissam_al-zahawie++%22wissam+al+zahawie%22&hl=en
All that aside, I believe the effort to date them to 2000 is nothing more than an effort to put them into the same timeframe as the humint [not docs] sent by Italy to the US and UK and other intel used in the UK dossier - so that the press can continue to try to persuade us that ALL the intel relating to Niger is derived from the forged docs.
That's bogus since there was even humint turned into the US Navy of smuggling through Benin that the CIA never followed up on, but I suspect that's the purpose of pushing the dates back on the forgeries.
As for French intel, they already suspected some fishiness going on in Niger well before the forgeries. Giacomo had, after all, obtained real information prior to this for France, which already suspected there were efforts, not neccessarily Iraqi, to obtain uranium there. Just remember that the French intel agency is not Jacques Chirac. Some of them really are more interested in defending their country than in making a mint off of oil deals.