Payback is a Bitch

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/politics/politicsspecial1/24leak.html?pagewanted=1

WASHINGTON, July 22 - President Bush was celebrating his 57th birthday at the White House on July 6, 2003, a muggy midsummer Sunday. He had played golf with old friends at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday, followed by an early birthday party arranged by his wife. The weekend marked a rare lull in the presidential schedule, a welcome break before a grueling trip to Africa that would start on Monday.

The State of the Union address in January 2003, when President Bush stated that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Africa.
But a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV had just delivered an unwelcome present. In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, an interview with The Washington Post and an appearance on "Meet the Press" on NBC, Mr. Wilson accused the administration of twisting the facts about Iraqi weapons and leading the nation to war on false pretenses.

In the growing chorus of criticism of the run-up to war, Mr. Wilson's one-man media onslaught stood out as a sort of eyewitness account. He had been dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to see whether Iraq was buying uranium there for nuclear weapons. He claimed to have debunked the story in March 2002, only to have it reappear in January 2003, in the president's State of the Union address.

If believed, Mr. Wilson's accusations were poised to add an insider's authority to the cloud of doubt beginning to grow around the Iraq enterprise, as the resistance was proving far more stubborn than anticipated and the search for Saddam Hussein's weapons was coming up empty.