If the Niger Yellowcake evidence was so good it made the SOTU speech,

why didn't this administration support it as soon as it was challenged by Wilson? Seems to me that they dropped it like a hot potato. With all of the propaganda sources available, why didn't this administration defend the evidence? I don't recall any support for the validity of the evidence...I do recall a lot of smearing of the messenger, though.

Maybe because they didn't want any more attention drawn to the source of the documents? :-)

years. They kept coming up with all this "evidence" so that the MSM would report it in headlines, the people would read it, and then believe it. Any retractions came days or weeks later and would not be noticed. They have done this over and over against for 5 years now. Their goal was to panic the population and confuse the Democrats. Once they got the invasion going, they accomplished what they wanted.

I think it is one thing to take information and slant it to fit your case for war. That's bad. But quite another to create the bogus evidence and then use that to justify your war.

We need to uncover how this 'evidence' came into being....then we will understand the true depths of this administration's intents on going to war.

. they didn't want the Niger documents to surface.
. they were more likely to be exposed sooner and with more players exposed. We don't yet know all there is to know about the players, Ashcroft, for example.
. They didn't want the Israel connections to become widespread.

The greatest plug we can get out of the Meirs nomination is her role in 'justifying' the war lie along with whom - Ashcroft? The Federalist Society?

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051023-104217-9679r
<snip>
It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

<snip>


So State knew almost immediately they were forgeries....why did Cheney bother to even follow up on this? If Franklin and Ledeen were in on it, seems like this was simply reckless for Cheney to continue to push....why?