AN EXAMPLE OF SOLID REPORTING

Marcy Wheeler, aka emptywheel of The Next Hurrah, found that President Bush WAS interested in the criticisms of his 2003 SOTU claims about Saddam. As Marcy points out, he was specifically interested in this piece by Nicholas Kristof:

Why truth matters
By Nicholas D. Kristof Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Posted: 1023 GMT

In the article, Kristof relays information told to him by Joe Wilson:

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Marcy's evidence for Bush's interest comes from Libby's own notes and here's the key piece of evidence: