State and the Valerie Wilson memo. Blogger Next Hurrah and I have been batting back and forth theories of the State Department memo on Joseph Wilson's fact finding trip to Niger reported on today in the NYT, and it's got me thinking. The IAEA declared in March 2003 that the Niger docs were crude forgeries. State which had forwarded the documents to the IAEA a few months earlier started trying to document the Niger-Iraq info's circulation through the US system. Hence, it makes sense that State's Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), headed by Carl Ford Jr. (who we know from the Bolton testimony) had overseen preparation of the memo, and that Powell/Armitage would have requested it when there started to be an increasing number of news stories anonymously describing Wilson's trip to Niger that had found the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations to be implausible. The memo's purpose might have been benign* -- e.g. not to leak to harm Wilson/Plame, but to explain how in the world the Niger forgeries had managed to corrupt US Iraq intelligence pronouncements, despite the fact the State INR analyst had found the documents to be likely forgeries from the moment they arrived in Washington. But as the State memo got distributed through the White House/NSC/Vice President's office, someone seems to have gotten an idea about pushback. That might explain why Rove emailed Hadley after he spoke to Cooper, and why the name of Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby keeps coming up in this affair. * Update: On second thought, perhaps not so benign after all.

Posted by Laura at July 16, 2005 05:51 PM