[Happy Monkey]

Wilson discounted rumors of an abortive transaction between Niger and Iraq. The documents suggesting the transaction turned out to be forgeries - an early set that the Italians provided summaries of to England and the US, and copies of to the US, and a later, extremely poorly forged set that mrnoodle already mentioned. Wilson's report said that there was no such transaction, but Nigerien (is that really how it's spelled?) officials assumed that an Iraqi delegation four years earlier was hoping to talk about uranium. The consensus in the intelligence community was that the Niger story wasn't strong enough to use, evidenced by the speeches from which it was deliberately excised. And in hindsight, after inspection of the actual nuclear capabilities in Iraq, that consensus turned out to have been correct.

In any case, all this is really irrelevant to the Plame issue. It's interesting back story and a fun debate, but it has no bearing on the case. No matter how politically biased Wilson was, no matter how involved Plame was in getting him sent, no matter how competently he handled the mission, the proper way to handle it is not to break the cover of a CIA agent to a journalist.