Whitehall and the White House were in a complete panic after having invaded Iraq without Saddam having used WMD against their forces or finding any substantial evidence of WMD.
Which is why the spin-machines were sent into overdrive, to create doubt (powder found, artillery shells found, chemicals found - none of which panned out.Abu Ghraib was also a direct result of the failure to find WMD-evidence. In the months immediately following the invasion, Blair repeatedly claimed he was completely convinced WMD would be found - meanwhile, the Coalition was picking up Iraqis left and right, and subjecting them to torture, hoping someone, somewhere, would show them to a storehouse containing WMD.
When that failed, in order to contain the impending trouble on the horizon, two inquiries were initiated, the Butler inquiry and the SSCI. Both were used as cover, in McClellan style, allowing admin officials on both sides of the Atlantic to state that they would not express any opinion while inquiries were going on - both reports are heavily compromised by the political agenda behind them. Billmon derisively calls the SSCi the Whitewash report, whenever he refers to it, and with good cause.

Threre seems to be an awful lot of politics swirling around these reports of uranium from Niger.  Which makes me wonder how it is possible that none of the three different reports on these claims within the U.S. government made it to the White House.  As I understand it, these claims were looked into and rebutted by (1) Wilson, (2) the U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, and (3) the Deputy Commander of the United States European Command, a four-star Marine general named Carlton Fulford.  All came to the same basic conclusion:  Iraq could not have obtained uranium from Niger, as claimed.  And yet somehow none of these reports were forwarded on to the White House, resulting in the embarrassing presidential "16 words" gaffe in the 2003 SOTU message? 
     I understand that Deputy NSA Stephen Hadley offered to resign for his role in this almost-unbelievable screw-up.  (Instead of accepting his resignation and demanding his boss's, the President promoted them both).  Has Hadley received from Fitzgerald a subpoena to tesify before the grand jury? 

An outstanding point.  How different things might have been had any one of the numerous reporters to whom Rove & Co. were furiously leaking written about it honestly at the time.  Perhaps Bill Keller and his bosses at the New York Times should try thinking about that.

Your "what if" news item is echoed by Greg Palast's imagination:

The Times SHOULD have run the story with the headline: BUSH OPERATIVE COMMITS FELONY TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWER. The lead paragraph should have been, "Today, Mr. K--- R--- [or other slime ball as appropriate] attempted to plant sensitive intelligence information on The New York Times, a felony offense, in an attempt to harm former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who challenged the President's claim regarding Iraq's nuclear program."

Palast's entire piece is here

I agree.

Even in the case the CIA failed to pass Wilson's report on to the White House (because they knew exactly what the WH wanted to hear and what not), it would be too much of a coincidence that the State Department and the Pentagon also failed to pass the info from their respective reports.

The only possibility I see is that the White House had given all three (CIA, State Dept. and Pentagon), and possibly more, instructions to find anything at all to nail Saddam (isn't that what Woodward claimed Cheney had said right after 9/11?).

On another issue, when is the SSCI's Phase II report due, the one that is supposed to focuss on the use of prewar Iraq intel by senior policy-makers?

A couple of points:

1. If I recall correctly, it was reported, even before the Butler report, that the CIA tried to discourage the Brits from including the Africa uranium claim in the Sept. 2002 dossier. So if some US intel entities were blocking Wilson's findings from making it into the record, others clearly were trying to circumvent those efforts as early as summer 2002.

2. If the Butler and SSCI reports were white-washes, as I believe they were, then mustn't some folks connected to those endeavors have been active parts of a cover up? Such glosses cannot have occurred serendipitously, it seems to me.

And a couple of questions:

1. Somewhere (again, can't remember quite where) I recall reading that the 2002 Niger claims were backed separate documents from those Josh and Laura investigated, which surfaced in Italy after the Sept. 2002 dossier. Does anyone recall reading this -- that earlier documents, also forgeries but better-produced, were the spur that initiated Wilson's trip?

2. In the UK, the David Kelly story unfolded during a time frame that overlapped Wilson's op-ed and the outing of Plame. Dr. Kelly was outed on July 9, Plame on the 14, and on July 17 Dr. Kelly went missing and ended up dead.

We know Judith Miller received email from Kelly the day he disappeared. What I'm wondering is whether the 20 days worth of her phone records that have been subpoenaed might reveal something about the Kelly matter, too. Does anyone know the dates encompassed in the demand for phone records and/or whether email records would be considered part of such a request?

It's not at all surprising that these reports were never forwarded to the White House.  The WH wasn't trying to determine whether Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq.  They were trying to build a case that would support their claim the sale had been made.  They weren’t interested in information that would disprove it.

Josh Marshall: However, there was an earlier British parliamentary inquiry in September 2003 -- before the issue became such a political hot potato.  And that report makes clear that most of the British judgment was based on the forged documents. 

September 2003 Report: The SIS stated that the documents did not affect its judgment of its second source and consequently the SIS continues to believe that the Iraqis were attempting to negotiate the purchase of uranium from Niger.  We have questioned the SIS about the basis of its judgement and conclude that it is reasonable. (emphasis in original, par. 93)

To look further at the September 2003 Report, "We were told that it [conclusions that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger] came from two independent sources, one of which was based on documentary evidence." (Report, par. 89) 

Even if this or something else can be interpreted as suggesting that the documents somehow provided "most" of the support for the conclusion, independent evidence existed that British intelligence believed supported their conclusion to which the September 2003 Report found reasonable.

Thus, the less "political" report reached the same conclusion as the more "political" Lord Butler Report.  Regardless of when the forged documents came into the knowledge of British intelligence adequate independent information existed that provided the basis of assessments that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger.

Josh dismisses the Senate report as "intentionally misleading and tendentious."  The bipartisan report was written by a committee that included Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Durbin, John Edwards.  Does anyone seriously suggest that these Senators signed an "intentionally misleading and tendentious" document to exonerate the CIA and Administration?

Anyone who rejects the conclusions of the Senate Report, the Butler report and the 2003 Report has to face one simple point.  Niger exports uranium (65% of its exports), livestock products, cowpeas and onions.  Does anyone seriously think that the Iraqi delegation that traveled to Iraq in 1999 to "discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Niger and Iraq" really sought to buy onions rather than uranium? 

Cheers.

Accoding to Wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly

"One of the e-mails he sent that day was to a journalist on the New York Times, to whom Kelly mentioned "many dark actors playing games," 

The 2nd link after that sentence is a pdf of the email with names blacked out. Wiki says the email was sent to someone at the NY Times.

I'm not sure about the exact dates of the records requested. Most were from 7-6 to 7-13-2003, but maybe Fitzgerald went farther back. 

Just to clarify that last post, apparently the story is that these reports were not properly forwarded on by (1) the CIA (Wilson's), (2) the State Department (Owens-Kirkpatrick's), and (3) the Pentagon (Fulford's).

And that is really, really important, because we went to war on a pack of lies.  That is the biggie here.

All the threads of this story are becoming too complicated for me to follow, but Frank Rich's latest in the NYT is a kind of boiling down that I can take in.  Here's the link if you'd like to read it:

http://nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?hp 

a reporter to phone the senior advisor to the President and give him/her a 'heads up' on an article?

The big picture, which the Bush/Rove smear machine is good at distracting from, is that these guys lied us into the Iraq war as an election stategy because they didn't know how to tell the American people why we couldn't chase bin Laden into Pakistan, without sounding like Democrats. Plamegate is just a piece in that big picture.

And since these guys think they can spin anything (and with the current generation of reporters, why shouldn't they?) why did they cave so quickly on the uranium from Africa SOTU claim? Very fishy. They are hiding some very embarrassing info on the forged documents that were cooked up to make that claim.

I wondered about that, too, when I read about Rove's email to Hadley. I know reporters call individuals who are in any way the subjects of their stories to give them a chance to comment on what will go into print. But calling Karl Rove to let him know in advance that a story is coming out so he can rev up the spin machine sounds way, way too cozy to me.

In a short exchange on the subject over at Atrios' blog a commenter remarked that Rove-to-Hadley email was a giggler, which I took to mean that it was self-serving, maybe deliberately planted to establish a paper trail cover for the Plame outing. If so, it certainly undermines Cooper's credibility, at least in my eyes, at the same time.

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/13jul20041400/www.gpoacce
ss.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/roberts.pdf

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/iraq.html

The major accusations against Wilson and for a Niger press cake deal were not contained in the unanimous main report of SIC, but in one signed by Roberts, Bond, and Hatch. Only  three of eighteen senators signed on to the rather bizarre accusations of their bretheren.  In fact, most inflammatory accusations hoisted upon the public by the right wing spin meisters were judged accurate by about the same percentage of senators who reviewed the data as the percentage of Americans who believe Elvis is still alive.

Maybe he is, and perhaps the Brits can tell us where, just like they can tell us where the evidence is that made them believe Iraq was attempting to buy Ur press cakes; even though nobody else can.

Josh dismisses the Senate report as "intentionally misleading and tendentious."  The bipartisan report was written by a committee that included Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Durbin, John Edwards.  Does anyone seriously suggest that these Senators signed an "intentionally misleading and tendentious" document to exonerate the CIA and Administration?

 Oh, come now.  The above is baloney (only three senators signed off on the appendix in which the conclusions now trumpted by conservatives are found).  It's known to be baloney.  Everyone here knows why this is baloney.  So who do you think you're fooling?

You waste space and look the fool trying to promote such mendacious claims to those who already know the claims are bogus.

Mr Yglesias, showing an admirable interest in the facts of the matter, had a conversation with Joe Wilson about the potential second source.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=Convent ion4

The following comes from the body of the Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence aggreed to by all Senators, not the Additional Views of various individual Senators:

"Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq- Niger uranium deal.  For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal ...."

"The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name' and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, 'my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.'" (Report, p. 39)

"When the former ambassador spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respect." (Report, p. 44)

"The intelligence report [based on Mr. Wilson's debriefing following his trip to Niger] indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states ... however, that in June 1999 [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Niger and Iraq.  The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted 'expanding commercial relations' to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales." (Report, p. 43)

"In an interview with Committee staff, the former ambassador was able to provide more information about the meeting between former Prime Minister Mayaki and the Iraqi delegation.  The former ambassador said that Mayaki did meet with the Iraqi delegation but never discussed what was meant by 'expanding commercial relations.'" (Report, p. 44)

"[The CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the [Wilson] report was that the Nigerien officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerien Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting." (Report, p. 46)

"Because CIA analysts did not believe that the [Wilson] report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers.  For the same reason, CIA's briefer did not brief the Vice President on the report, despite the Vice President's previous questions about the issue." (Report, p. 46)

Thus, the body of the Report agreed to by Democratic Senators found that Mr. Wilson confirmed the CIA assessment that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger.  One may readily disagree with that assessment.  Of course, to do so one must believe that a high level Iraqi delegation met with former Prime Minister Miyaki to talk about the purchase of onions.

Frankly, I don't believe that any rational, non-ideologically blinded person would believe that. 

Cheers.