I suppose it makes no difference to you that the article you reference is dated July, 2003, and states that the additional information on the source of Britain's and Italy's intelligence being those same forged documents was not known until about March of 2003.

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Is this the part of the article you're referring to?

But in a recent letter to the House Government Reform Committee, a senior State official suggests the other source is Italy, which provided the forged document information to both the U.S. and Britain.

Paul V. Kelly, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, said the administration received information about the uranium allegation from two foreign sources – the British government and a second "Western European ally," which has since been revealed to be Italy.

"Not until March 4 did we learn that in fact the second Western European government had based its assessment on the evidence already available to the U.S. that was subsequently discredited," Kelly wrote in his April 29 letter to the panel.

In other words, all three countries were relying primarily on the same source of information – the forgeries.

Notice this time that Kelly doesn't say that not until March 4th, [2003] did the Bush administration learn that both foreign sources were basing their assessments on the discredited evidence, as you wrongly stated. According to Kelly, the administration learned on March 4th that the second of the two foreign sources had done so.

Although why you think that's particularly relevant is anyone's guess. The administration had copies of the forged documents in October of 2002. Why would knowing that a second "western European" ally's assessment was based on the forged documents be enough to keep the administration from citing the information in those documents in a U.S. Department fact sheet, an NIE and a president's SoTU?

By October of 2002, Joseph Wilson has already reported the documents were probably forgeries and the CIA had already advised the British to drop the reference in the dossier they made public. By December, when the U.S. State Department's fact sheet said -- "The [Iraqi] Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger. Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?"-- the administration had had over 2 months to discover what the IAEA discovered in one day using Google: the documents were crude forgeries.

But if we had KNOWN the second western European ally was basing its assessment on the forgeries, THEN the State Department's fact sheet, the NIE and the President's SoTU wouldn't have
included the references to Iraq trying to attain uranium from Niger. We didn't know, but needed to know that one of our ally's assessments was based on the forged documents, our analysts being too incompetent to learn the truth before the administration embarrassed itself. Is that really what you believe?

For those not lobotomized or overly gullible, the administration's professions of ignorance aren't believable. It's much more likely our analysts got it right and the intelligence was cooked. Wouldn't be the first time.

Are we really going all the way back to the "16 words" again? It didn't work last time either.

It "didn't work?" That's not surprising. It'd be hard to put something over on a sharp guy like you. Ever consider owning a bridge?