Alec over at Error Theory puts together an excellent piece which pokes many holes into the recent 60 minutes hit piece about the Wilson lies:

This Sunday?s 60 Minutes report, ?A spy speaks out,? went to extraordinary lengths to support Joe Wilson?s long exposed lies about Saddam?s attempts to buy uranium ore in Niger. Here is how 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley described Joe Wilson?s February 2002 trip to Niger:

Wilson spent eight days in Niger looking for signs of a secret deal to send yellowcake to Iraq. He spoke to government officials who would have known about such a transaction. No one did. There had been a meeting between Iraqis and Nigerians in 1999, but Wilson was told uranium had never been discussed. He also found no evidence that Iraq had even been interested in buying uranium.

[...]When the IAEA revealed in March of 2003 that the U.S. was in possession of forged documents pertaining to Niger uranium sales to Iraq, Wilson told several reporters that the phony documents were behind the CIA?s sending him to Niger, and that during his trip he had identified the documents as forgeries. He peddled this tale to Kristof at the New York Times, Pincus at the Washington Post, and to Judis and Ackerman at The New Republic.

Wilson?s claim to having expose the phony document was itself exposed as phony by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?s 2004 Report on Pre-War Intelligence, which noted that the forged documents had not come into U.S. hands until October of 2002, eight months after Wilson?s Niger trip. (SSCI report, part II, section B, Search ?misspoken?.)

Wilson was caught committing blatant treason, spreading malicious disinformation about classified intelligence in an attempt to undermine America?s war effort.

[...]What is diabolical about the 60 Minutes hit-piece is the measures it takes to revive and support Wilson?s claims that U.S. intelligence about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was based on the phony documents, and that the intel was known to be bogus before the President?s State of the Untion speech. To build this case, 60 minutes enlists the aid of ex-CIA agent Tyler Drumheller, who has his own axe to grind.

[...]Given how the whole 60 Minutes piece is so carefully constructed to support Wilson?s original fabrication about the forgeries being behind the State of the Union speech, it seems clear that none of this is innocent. One would have to know the facts in order to pick out such an artfully misleading array. The question is to what extent Drumheller was complicit in the larger story that 60 minutes was putting together.

It is possible that Ed Bradley duped him. Drumheller IS ex-CIA after all. It could be that the only reason he was calling the Iraq-Niger intel ?single sourced? was to have a way to justify his pet-peeve: that nobody paid much attention to his big Sabra scoop, just because it was ?single sourced.? Sabra was a member of Saddam?s ?inner circle? for pete?s sake. Drumheller should have been a star. Deny a time-server his fifteen minutes of fame and maybe that is enough motivation to phony-up a ?single source? double-standard and get himself a different fifteen minutes of fame.

Or maybe Drumheller is complicit all the way. Maybe he knows exactly how Wilson lied about having exposed the phony documents on his trip to Niger in order to try to claim that they were behind the State of the Union speech. Maybe Drumheller understands exactly how his ?single source? charge about the Iraq-Niger intel is another way to claim that the President?s State of the Union claims were knowing lies (treating intel that was full of caveats as supporting evidence, and sole supporting evidence at that). It would be a gambit hardly less dishonest than Wilson?s. Is that what Drumheller is guilty of? Or is he just a dunce?

No such ambiguity in the case of Ed Bradley: he is taking a highly calculated second stab at Wilson?s original treason.

Not surprising that 60 minutes would air this hit piece, knowing full well the lies they were propagating.

Equally unsurprising is the lefts shrill cries that the MSM is ignoring the story. Of course they realize all the different MSM organizations did in fact cover the story but slowly slunk away after discovering this:

“Another key issue was the nuclear question: How far away was Saddam from having a bomb? The CIA said if Saddam obtained enriched uranium, he could build a nuclear bomb in “several months to a year.” Sabri said Saddam desperately wanted a bomb, but would need much more time than that.

Sabri was more accurate.On the issue of chemical weapons, the CIA said Saddam had stockpiled as much as “500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents” and had “renewed” production of deadly agents. Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had “poison gas” left over from the first Gulf War. Both Sabri and the agency were wrong.”

So a month ago this Drumheller source told anyone who would listen that Saddam wanted a nuke bad and still had stockpiles of WMD’s.

As soon as the MSM found out that this source actually confirmed Bush’s belief that Saddam had WMD’s they put down their pen and paper and moved on.