This the second post on the Fitzgerald Affadavit released recently. The previous one is here.

In the recently released Fitzgerald Affadavit on Judith Miller we see that Fitzgerald had, and may still now, bought into the misinformation of the Niger forgeries and their role in the early reporting on the Wilson Niger trip. Forgeries now debunked since they supposedly did not exist in US hands for another 8 months after Wilson’s trip.

On page four (which is a scanned image so copying text is not possible, leaving me to transcribe portions – a painful process) Wilson includes the now debunked Niger forgeries as key to the overall context of the investigation. Not they falseness of the claims, the import of these forgeries to the national debate:

…Those remarks, since referred to colloauially as the ‘ 16 words’, were called into question by a series of articles in the spring of 2003, including several ultimately sourced in part to Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
…
After the State of the Union speech, the International Atomic Energy Association revealed in March 2003 that documents apparently evidencing efforts to obtain yellow cake uranium from Niger were demonstrably forgeries. Thereafter, over the course of spring 2003, the “16 words” controversy attracted greater media attention. Wilson, who was not a government employee at the time of the trip and REDACTED, spoke to several reporters, including Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who wrote articles on May 6 and June 12 respectively concerning Wilson’s trip to Niger without naming Wilson. The articles called into question the accuracy of the ’16 words”.

Tom Maguire hinted at this in one of his posts, but this is amazing stuff. First off, Fitzgerald is trying to establish facts of the case, and uses bogus aspects of the Niger forgeries as part of that factual basis. But what is clear is Wilson was not, as I suspected, the lone source for these early stories.

My money is that ‘redacted’ is Valerie Wilson Plame. But it could be an as-of-yet-indisclosed CIA insider connected to Plame and Wilson. That would make more sense for the current redaction.

On page 5 we have a hint to the redaction for section 12 because it appears to discuss a reporter or news outlet, given the footnote which discusses the media’s definition of classes of sources – and the unredacted sections do not reference the footnote or mention sources.

More later….