Joseph Wilson And The Making Of Sense

I could not possibly care less about the idiotic attacks on Joseph Wilson -- not because I have any investment in his honesty, but because the attacks seem to be (1) mostly groundless, and (2) completely irrelevant even if true.

Still... I can't help but notice Wilson's just made a particularly strange claim. On Saturday Kevin Drum mentioned an internal CIA memo dated June 17, 2003 that's included in the Senate report on intelligence about Iraq. The memo stated:

...since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.

Drum speculated that Wilson saw the memo soon after it was produced, and it encouraged him to go public with his complaints about the Bush administration soon afterwards.

However, Drum reports that Wilson then emailed him, saying:

"I never knew about the June 17 document you cite in the blog....I did not know about it then and only your blog brought it to my attention."

This makes so sense. Wilson was attacked in the Senate report on intelligence about Iraq, and responded to the report with a long letter. So how could he have not read the CIA memo contained in the Senate report?

The only answers I can come up with are that (1) he's an incredibly bad reader, or (2) he wanted to flatter Drum. Who knows?

However, I still don't care.