Three years ago, Bush in his State of the Union speech told the American Peope: "The Brittish government has learned that Saddam Hussein...attempted to purchase yellowcake Uranium..."
At the time, then-national security advisor Condi Rice explained that the wording of those 16 words was "technically accurate." Actually it turns out that was another of the Imelda Marcos wannable shoe fetishist remarkable lies on par with the Aug. 6 PDB was "historical."
The Brittish government "learned" about the yellowcake from the same source as our goverment -- the Italian secret service of GWB's bitch, Silvio Berlusconi. Since the information in the 16 words was false, and proven false prior to the SOTU, it is remarkably hard to "learn" something when you know it to be untrue. Therefore the Brittish goverment had not "learned" about the Uranium. The Republicrook talking point will of course be based on verbal gymnastics parsing the definition of "learned." At least Clinton was "technically and legally accurate when he answered "it depends what the definiton of is is."
Without those 16 words, Wilson probably never writes an op-ed piece in the Times. Whether or not it would have stopped the Los Casa Blanco Junta from leaking classified information to Judy Miller is a different debate. It is interesting that Bush "declassified" the NIE to only Cheney, Libby and Judy Miller. No one else knew about and the document wasn't declassified for two weeks.
This raises the question whether Libby was banging Miller and was the information revealed during a "nooner." She has a reputation of fucking her sources, so the idea isn't that farfetched. although IMHO I thought Libby was gay (not that there is anything wrong with that) because my gaydar detector goes off when I see his smug face in the ubiquitous news footage of him.
But I digress. What you have here is Bush lying to the American people during the SOTU; Hadley or rather someone higher up reponsible for the false report which prompted Wilson to write a piece and so on.
We now know the Italian goverment was the source of the forged Niger documents but it was reported three years ago, but hardly since then, was the name of the official from the Niger government had been out of office since 1990 making the forgeries even more innept than the crudely made and often xeroxed letter from the Nigerian oil minister asking for you to send money to get some secret oil funds. Our goverment more innept than a bunch of Nigerian heroin scammers. Nice going W!