Re your #164, outstanding reasoning! Only one other possibility exists: that he began claiming they were forged only after that information became public. I wonder when he first made this assertion, and how it compares with the earliest public report of the forged documents.
Actually Wilson never ever mentioned forged documents until after the fact, in an effort like other dems were doing, to use them in retrospect and deceptively insinuate they related to his trip and "findings", not in advance.
BTW, I believe it was very early March 2003--just on the eve of war, that the IAEA announced they had discovered the documents were forged. (They did not appear on the scene at all until showing up in Italy in October 2002, but still weren't in U.S. hands at that time, contrary to the implication of the article. Wilson went to Niger in February 2002). See the Tenet statement at #129 where he states Wilson never mentioned documents.
Freeper marron posted an intriguing theory on why the forged documents were created (marron, I remembered your post and just hunted it up):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1167230/posts?page=28#28
***"I have always heard this, and this is certainly a common practice. But Niger is apparently wide open for uranium smuggling, with mines supposedly abandoned by the official mining company being operated by ostensibly private actors for sale on the black market (that doesn't sound like anything Wilson told us, does it...).
"Contraband uranium could be simply trucked over the frontier into Libya, or it could be shipped out through the same port with the legal stuff... if it had papers. Those papers would by definition be bogus. My understanding is that the papers in question were dismissed as forged because information that should have been typed was handwritten, and a national seal was hand drawn. That doesn't sound like a proper forgery, that sounds like someone making up some paperwork he considers good enough.
"That kind of bogus paperwork would itself be evidence of precisely the kind of smuggling we're talking about. If it was an intel agency's handiwork, it would be right, and it would even have the right signatures.
"At least theoretically. I just think we've been too quick to dismiss this paperwork just because its bogus. Of course its bogus, they're smugglers."
~snip~
End of marron's theory
The October 2002 date was indeed the US getting them--at the embassy in Italy. I do see this article cites late 2001 which would indeed predate the Wilson trip, as the first time the documents surfaced:
FBI looking into forged Iraq-Niger documents
July 16, 2003
excerpt:
The documents, according to officials, were first provided to Italian intelligence in late 2001. The United States did not gain possession of them until nearly a year later, in October 2002, when a journalist turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, U.S. officials said.
Sources told CNN the embassy passed them on to the CIA station chief in Rome and to officials at the State Department. A senior State Department official and another senior administration official told CNN the department did its own reporting on the documents and offered the documents to all the relevant agencies.
Government officials say CIA headquarters received the documents in February 2003, which was after the January State of the Union address in which President Bush claimed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from Africa.
~snip~
I will again place into consideration that the Wilsons were involved in the forgeries for a nefarious purpose.