The Letter That Launched a War

How the so-called "Italian Letter"—the discredited document suggesting Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from Niger—made its way from the hands of an Italian journalist into the President's State of the Union speech is the subject of an irresistible piece of sleuthing by  Peter Eisner in the Washington Post.

Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journo, takes Eisner through each step in the process, from meeting her source to handing the documents over to the U.S. Embassy for verification. "You know I feel bad about it," Burba says of giving the letter to the Americans. "With the documents I brought to them, they justified the war." (More Iraq stories.)