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From the April 30, 2007 edition....

In October, 2002, in a basement bistro in Rome, an intelligence peddler named Rocco Martino handed a reporter a folder of documents. One of them, a letter describing the sale by Niger of five hundred tons of uranium to Iraq, made its way into President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech before being exposed, by weapons inspectors, in a quick Internet search, as a fraud. Eisner and Royce get past the morass of speculation surrounding the documents to provide an important look at the shabby materials from which the Administration built its case for war. The ineptitude of the forgeries, which were dismissed by experts at every stage, never loses the capacity to astound. The retrieval of these documents “from the intelligence garbage heap,” the authors make clear, could have happened only in a White House in which intelligence had been deliberately politicized.