Vanity Fair:
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew." Both Rice and Hadley have declined to comment.
The story of the Niger forgeries is definitely woven into the major Bush Administration scandals - the fake war intelligence, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Chalabi-defector manipulations, and it directly spawned the Valerie Plame scandal. When Plame's husband publicly called out the forgeries, Scooter Libby and others "outed" his wife as a CIA agent, more or less because they wanted to "play dirty" to defend fake elements of the war propaganda, such as the forgeries.