Here’s a very good piece in Time on the Uranium-Niger question. (It took you guys a while. But welcome on board …)
Some of the key passages …
In what looked like a command performance of political sacrifice, the head of the agency that expressed some of the strongest doubts about the charge took responsibility for the President’s unsubstantiated claim.
…
Greg Thielmann, then a high-ranking official at State’s research unit, told TIME that it was not in Niger’s self-interest to sell the Iraqis the destabilizing ore. “A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus,” Thielmann said later. “This wasn’t highly contested. There weren’t strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down.”
The piece gives a few benefits of doubts I think may be unwarranted. But it draws the whole story together: the more dubious the evidence became, the harder the White House tried to get it in …
