AP continues to promulgate the myth:

Wilson’s revelations cast doubt on President Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration’s key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

Of course, it wasn’t possible for Joe Wilson to cast doubt on such a claim, because President Bush never made such a claim, in the SOTU or elsewhere, but that never seems to stop these people. Why do they continue to think they can get away with this, when anyone can go read that speech?

We’ve been over this many times, but apparently, it’s necessary to do so again. Here are the sixteen words:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That’s it. It doesn’t say that uranium was sold to Iraq, it doesn’t say Niger. It says that the British government has learned about attempts to purchase uranium from Africa. Africa is a big place. Nowhere in the speech does it claim that the attempts were successful, and nowhere in the speech is Niger mentioned. The sentence, as written in the AP story, is completely false, but many persist in believing it, because apparently it confirms their prejudices. In their minds, it’s “fake but accurate.”

We need to call out Ms. Locy and her editor on this.

As to the story about Libby testifying that Cheney told him to release classified info, I’ll wait for some actual facts to come out, rather than rumors from unnamed sources.

[Update in the afternoon]

Powerline says that the story about Libby leaks of classified info is much ado about not much:

The NIE has been declassified since the summer of 2003, and we have quoted from it many times since then. These proceedings from the House of Representatives show that the NIE had been declassified no later than July 21, 2003. So it’s not exactly a mystery whether “that happened in this instance.” There are only two alternatives here: either AP reporters are too lazy to spend 30 seconds on Google to educate themselves as to what happened during the ancient history of 2003, or they write articles that are deliberately misleading.

Or outright false, as demonstrated above.

[Saturday morning update]

I’ve still received no response from the AP on this matter.

[Monday update]

They’ve redirected that URL to a new version of the story, absent the misstatements.