Not Exactly the Breakfast of Champions

For no justifiable reason the first thing I did after I woke up this morning was beeline to William Safire's column. Even at the tender hour of 7 a.m.—an hour at which my brain reaches its prime if all involuntary processes are running on schedule—I recognized a few very significant errors in Safire's Niger analysis. Not just the typical The-Hillary-forged-the-document variety misstep that you've come to expect, either.

Laura Rozen, writing at 6:58 a.m. and showing a morning mental capacity of several times my own, beat me to the punch, so I'll let her take it away. She quotes Safire:

. . .State Department intelligence also was dubious, reports the Senate, more so in October when an Italian journalist brought in a bunch of phony documents somebody was trying to sell him about a Niger uranium transaction. This outweighed the report of a top security official in the French Foreign Ministry, who told U.S. diplomats in November 2002 that "France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger."

Two months later, with no objection from C.I.A., the famous 16 words went into Bush's 2003 State of the Union.

But when word leaked about the fake documents — which were not the basis of the previous reporting by our allies — Wilson launched his publicity campaign, acting as if he had known earlier about the forgeries. [emphasis Rozen's]

-- The Italian journalist was not a "he."

-- The forged Niger docs were indeed the chief basis for Italy's reporting to the US on the Niger uranium claims.

-- The French report was based on the forged Niger uranium docs.

-- Reports from the fake documents were the chief source of the previous reporting to the US by the Italians, and partly by the British as well, on the Niger uranium issue.