Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin write in the Los Angeles Times,

More than a year before President Bush declared in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described by the retired chief of the French counter-intelligence service and a former CIA official during interviews last week, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

How many variations of this story have we seen so far? Newly undisclosed documents reveal that X warned the Bush Administration that intelligence Y wasn’t true, but the Bush Administration went ahead and used Y in their arguments for invading Iraq.

The repeated warnings from France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, DGSE, did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

It was not the first time a foreign government tried but failed to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence. In the notorious “Curveball” case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraq’s biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball’s claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable, unreliable and incorrect.

Yeah, but Bill Clinton believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction back in 1998, so that means the invasion was kosher. Somehow.

Gawd, I’m tired of this.