More alarmist reporting on the CIA leak investigation from Murray Waas, whose new evidence of a conspiracy is a CIA document supposedly shown to Cheney and Libby in June of 2003. In the document, Waas reports, CIA analysts wrote that they doubted the credibility of reports that Saddam “purchased uranium from abroad.” But like many reporters who have promoted the idea that Bush lied about Saddam’s attempts to buy uranium from Africa, he doesn’t make a distinction between the phony documents alleging an actual sale from Niger and the British intelligence alleging an attempted purchase from Niger, which is what Bush alleged and which the British government continues to stand by. So the fact that CIA wrote a memo to Cheney and Libby debunking the phony documents and some other intelligence on Somalia and Benin doesn’t have anything to do with Libby’s effort to tell reporters that Joseph Wilson was not a credible source. In fact, we later learned that Joseph Wilson was telling reporters that he himself had seen the phony documents and debunked them — a claim that the Senate Committee on Intelligence later found to be untrue.
Scooter Libby’s trial won’t be until January 2007. That means a lot more insubstantial but breathlessly reported articles like this one as the president’s critics try to keep this story in the press.