# Posted 2:40 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

DOES JOE WILSON MATTER?  The extremely charitable Matt Yglesias has graciously sought to straighten out some of OxBlog's muddled thinking.  Yesterday, I admitted that

Frankly, I'm still confused as to why top-ranking administration officials were so eager to distance themselves from the 16 words if Wilson's accusations were so exaggerated.

Matt's answer is that while Wilson exaggerated his role in exposing the mendacity of the 16 words, the words themselves were simply untenable. 

But I beg to differ.  Wilson claimed that his February 2002 report exposed the Italian documents on Iraqi-Nigerien relations as forgeries.  But the CIA didn't have those documents until October 16, 2002.

Nine days earlier, on October 7th, George Bush delivered an address in Cincinnati which the CIA aggressively edited to ensure the accuracy of Bush's comments about African uranium.  As Tom Maguire points out, what the CIA removed were very specific claims about the Nigerien uranium that it couldn't back up. 

Then, shortly after the Cincinnati speech, the CIA suggested replacement language that was extremely similar to the 16 words that ultimately made it into the SotU.   What the CIA suggested was "Sought uranium from Africa to feed the enrichment process."  What Bush ultimately said was "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

As Tom points out, the similarity of these two statements debunks Matt's claim that the CIA specifically objected to the SotU language (aka the "16 words") as early as October.

Now, since Matt wasn't able to help me resolve my initial confusion about the efforts of Rice, Tenet, et al. to distance themselves from the 16 words, I've come up with a hypothesis of my own: Wilson's accusations may have been false, but they drew attention to the fact that the American, British and French intelligence services had all based their conclusions about the Nigerien uranium on a set of forged documents.

Arms inspector Mohammed El-Baradei publicly exposed the documents as forgeries in March 2003.  What I can't figure out is when, exactly, the US government learned out that the documents were forged. 

This post from TPM suggests that the British didn't identify the documents as forgeries until at least February 2003, i.e. after the State of the Union.  My best guess is that if the UK didn't know until February 2003, neither did the US.

So, in conclusion, my hypothesis is that the Bush administration's panicked response to Wilson's accusations reflected its embarrassment about the forgeries, not Wilson's false accusation that the administration lied.

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