Matthew Yglesias is in top form today

I am going to expound on the least brilliant of his posts "Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?". Briefly

Richard Stevenson and David Johnston of the New York Times write

It [the ssci report] cited a statement by a French official to the State Department in late 2002 that France, which was resisting Mr. Bush's efforts to make an urgent case for war, "believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger."

Matthew Yglesias writes

Now if I were writing this story, I would think it might be relevant to point out that the French official's statement was based on the same forged documents from Italy.

I write
Amen Matt.

I also wonder a few things. First, since the same point came to my mind when I read the same article, why didn't I blog it ?

Second, how exactly do I know that the French were relying on the Italians who were relying on the obviously forged dossier ? I think that I got the infor from Josh Marshall, but how does he know ? Ah it says so on page 69 of the SSCI report "There on page 69 the report says ...'March 4, 2003, the U.S. Government learned that the French had based their initial assessment that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger on the same documents that the U.S. had provided to the [IAEA].'"

Come on press corps, Josh Marshall is willing to do your job for you, you just have to read his blog. It doesn't take long.

Third, how could anyone take that dossier seriously for an hour ? As pointed out by Hersh the errors were glaring and obvious, so obvious that I find it impossible to believe that the forgers wanted to convince anyone. Rule 1 of forgery is that the signature has to look right. Rule zero is that the forged name has to be the right name. I sure hope that Moslems will be more alert if they find a forged document proposing an evil crusade against Islam dated 2004 and signed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Fourth, do we really want more international intelligence cooperation in the war on terror ?
In this case, a clearly forged dossier seems to have convinced the CIA, the French and, in part, the English all because SISMI shared the product without doing elementary checking. Sharing of conclusions without sharing sources seems to have helped Curveball pump up the mobile biological weapons laboratories story, after hiding his links to the INC by presenting himself as a refugee in Germany. The BundesBonds might have done a good job vetting curveball, but they can't be expected to check if curveball happened to the the brother of the top INC aid with the same last name, nor could they know that Curveball suddenly popped up with an answer to a question which Ritter had just asked Chalabi.

I really don't know what to do about this. Clearly we do want intelligence cooperation and clearly the identities of sources must be shared on an absolutely need to know basis. I guess the only thing to do is to remember the INC and to be suspicious when a lot of intelligence services get scoops on a matter which is not their main focus.