Salon.com | A diplomat's undiplomatic truth: They lied

Former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document -- now known to be a crude forgery -- that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.

The CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.

In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."