The Iran connection

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note picks up on the Raw Story piece I posted earlier about Valerie Plame having worked on Iran weapons systems. He writes:

Someone with knowledge of the classified report that Joe Wilson "orally" filed after his now famed investigative trip to Niger shared with me that there were two notes in that report that had nothing to do with Iraq and its purported activities in Niger.

These two notes focused on Iran's interests and possible activities in Niger.

The question is "why would Iran be interested in Niger uranium when it has more than adequate domestic sources of uranium?"

The response that has come from various intelligence sources that I have consulted is that if Iran was trying to access external sources of uranium -- somewhere like Niger -- it is because those "secret efforts" would be outside the international intelligence monitoring of Iran's domestic mining operations.

I do not have the fully articulated "notes" from Joe Wilson's Niger report (in fact, I have just learned that those written "notes" were destroyed), but I have just learned that these Iran-Niger references appear in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Joe Wilson's Niger trip. (I will link as soon as I secure the electronic version).

What is fascinating is that one of the staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence mistakenly recorded in the published report that Iraq -- rather than Iran -- attempted to purchase 400-500 tons of uranium. Wilson apparently made clear that it was Iran and not Iraq attempting to make such purchases.

Was this part of what Cheney & Co. were trying to squash when they outed Valerie?