US Intelligence Agents Admit Bush Administration Knew Niger Documents were Forgeries Long Before Bush Lied to America in State of Union Address

Vanity Fair article also available here reports on the fact that the Bush Administration canceled the fact that the Niger documents President Bush used in his State of the Union Address to push for war in Iraq were forgeries. It was the “cornerstone of a highly successful ‘black propaganda’ campaign with links to the White House” designed to mislead the American people.

In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness."

All of which flies in the face of a campaign by senior Republicans including Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to blame the C.I.A. for the faulty pre-war intelligence on W.M.D. Indeed, the accounts put forth by Wilkerson and his colleagues strongly suggest that the C.I.A. is under siege not because it was wrong but because it was right. Agency analysts were not serving the White House's agenda.