[techweenie]

If you follow the route of the forged Niger documents from Italy to the U.S., you will see that the documents were offered to the CIA and rejected multiple times, and then -- in a breach of protocol -- were taken to a senior Bush administration official, directly by the Italian equivalent to the CIA.

Somebody went to a lot of trouble to get obviously forged documents into the administration's hands.

I for one, do not think this was a CIA or even a Bush administration falsification. But it was a shred of (poor) evidence that came along at the right time for the administration's policy needs.