It’s funny how things become news a year or more after they’re first reported.
About that long ago, this site first reported that while the Niger forgeries themselves first appeared in Rome in October 2002 that the foreign intelligence service reports in late 2001 and early 2002 were themselves text transcriptions of those same forged documents.
Today the Times reports the following as news …
The United States government did not receive the papers until October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003 that the papers were forgeries.
But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency in the months before Mr. Wilson’s trip also contained information that was “based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable.”
That early foreign reporting, never endorsed by American intelligence analysts, prompted questions from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which in turn led to Mr. Wilson’s trip, a chain of events spelled out in the reviews of prewar intelligence issued this year and last year.
The LA Times also has a story to do about the now-just-breaking-into-the-open story of the Italian government’s role in the Niger forgeries hoax.
More soon.
