I'm still confused about the thrust of the story - does it tend to exonerate or incriminate the Bush admin? What are the implications for France? For Italy? For Joseph Wilson? For the CIA?
The story doesn't really take a position on Bush, Wilson etc. It's one of those "human interest" stories WSJ runs in the middle of their front page every day. It acknowledges the FBI investigation and that they are trying to figure out who forged the documents and whether Martino was trying to aid the case for war or was a pawn etc.
So the lion's share of the story consists of the details about how Martino got embroiled in this in the first place. But the most significant "factoid" I'd never known before (but maybe Ravingnutter's got it somewhere in his compilations) is that Martino was introduced by a SISMI "handler" to an Italian woman working in Niger embassy in FEBRUARY 2000. She began passing intelligence and "eventually" (no date given) provided the forged documents.
In short, the "game was on" even before Bush even got elected President, so unless you are the most fanatical neocon conspiracy theorist, this sequence of events fits far better with Ravingnutter's (I hope this is his theory and not someone else's: sorry I don't have time to check) claim that the French were trying to provide an eventual cover for illicit yellowcake sales by deliberately planting bogus intelligence etc. It also fits the 1999 timeline of a visit to Niger by Iraqi officials etc. But the article itself does not draw any of these dots.