The all-out press campaign to accuse the White House of manipulating WMD intelligence is starring Joseph Wilson, but this Associated Press report just takes a page out of the Wilson playbook — conflate the forged documents indicating that Saddam did buy uranium from Niger, with a British intelligence report indicating that Saddam sought to buy uranium from Niger. As we all know, Bush cited the British reports in the famous sixteen words in the 2003 State of the Union address — and those reports were deemed to be “well-founded” by Britain’s Butler Committee in the summer of 2004, unfortunately after the White House had already made the catastrophic mistake of telling the press that the sixteen words did not merit inclusion in the SOTU address.

The White House made that mistake in a bungled damage-control effort after Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times that claimed to contradict what Bush had said in the SOTU address. But a closer look at Wilson’s op-ed reveals that it didn’t contradict Bush at all. Wilson concluded that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.” By transaction, Wilson meant the sale of uranium indicated by the forged documents.

Bush never said anything about a sale in the SOTU address. He said, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

What Wilson and his accomplices in the press want to do is convince the country that the forged documents played a major role in Bush’s case for war. They did not. This brings us back to that AP report I linked at the top of this post:

Italian lawmaker: U.S. told of WMD forgeries
Senator says Bush administration was warned Iraq documents were fake
ROME – Italian secret services warned the United States months before it invaded Iraq that a dossier about a purported Saddam Hussein effort to buy uranium in Africa was fake, a lawmaker said Thursday after a briefing by the nation