THE US: It has been known for some time that a forged document was used to back up a claim by President George Bush, in the build-up to war with Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
Now conclusive evidence has emerged that it was widely known in the Bush administration that the document was bogus long before Mr Bush made his claim in his State of the Union address to the nation in January.
The White House, the office of the Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, the State Department and the National Security Council were all told by intelligence officials months earlier that it had been discredited by the CIA.
The 1½-page document, which alleged that Iraq had bought tons of "yellow-cake" uranium from Niger, was reportedly supplied in late 2001 by Italian intelligence to Britain and forwarded to the CIA in early 2002.
The CIA sent a former ambassador to Africa in February 2002, and he reported back to it and to the State Department in March 2002 that the document was a clumsy fake.
There were two reasons for this conclusion, wrote columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has been reporting allegations of hyped intelligence from within the intelligence community.
The Niger minister who allegedly signed the paper had left the position years earlier, and an international consortium controlled sales of Niger uranium, not the Niger government.
This information was relayed by the CIA at the time to Mr Cheney's office and to the National Security Council headed by Ms Condoleezza Rice, wrote Kristof yesterday.
Also yesterday the Washington Post reported that in March 2002 the CIA sent a cable to the White House and other government agencies saying the document had been repudiated by officials from the central African country.
In a rare public comment, a CIA spokesman, Mr Bill Harlow, insisted that the agency had kept the executive branch fully informed and "the CIA did not withhold any relevant information from appropriate officials."
In December 2002, a month before Mr Bush used the alleged purchase of uranium as part of his case for invading Iraq, the CIA told the State Department to drop a reference to the allegations from a white paper on Iraqi weapons programmes. It came too late to prevent publication, an intelligence agent told the Post.
Around February this year the document was supplied by the State Department to Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the UN chief nuclear inspector, apparently without comment. On March 7th Dr ElBaradei told the UN that his experts had quickly discovered it was crudely forged, with anomalies in the signatures, the letter-head and the format.
Two days later in television interviews neither the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, nor Ms Rice would acknowledge that the document was fake. Mr Powell said: "It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine." He said "We're continuing to examine this issue".
The Post reported yesterday that Bush administration officials claimed the document given to the White House did not include the conclusion of the former ambassador and attributed Niger officials' denials to an anonymous source.
A White House spokesman acknowledged that documents detailing a transaction between Iraq and Niger were forged but that "they were only one piece of evidence in a larger body of evidence suggesting Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Africa." No details of such evidence has been produced.