…either way, they shouldn’t be leading us to war. The New Yorker has a great article about the fake documents claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Apparently the information in these documents was so explosive that the allegations made their way into the State of the Union address. It’s too bad they didn’t warrant a little fact checking as well :

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, ?These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.?
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The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co?peration, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that ?they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.?