ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson. He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty weekly. Daniel Ellsberg was there. So was New Jersey senator Jon Corzine. Towards the end of lunch, plates of cold salad shunted aside, Wilson was invited onstage. Looking the part of a globetrotting former diplomat in his Zegna suit and trademark Hermès tie, he launched into a tirade against the Bush administration, which he claimed had ignored the findings of a trip he took to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had tried to acquire uranium there. His trip had disproved those claims, he continued, yet his findings were ignored. And when he went public with his story, the administration had tried to "silence" him by leaking to the press that his wife worked for the CIA.

There was much applause. And there was even more applause when Wilson then accepted the first-ever Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling, along with the award's $10,000 prize. (Ridenhour was the soldier who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969.)

The Nation (and cosponsoring Fertel Foundation) might want to ask for their prize money back. Because the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released on July 9, fatally undermines Wilson's accusation that the Bush administration "manipulated" intelligence by ignoring his report on Niger--which, in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, he mistakenly claimed "was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government," including the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Not so, according to the Senate committee's report on pre-Iraq war intelligence. Not so at all.

The first public mention of Joe Wilson's February 2002 mission to Niger appeared in a May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times. Shortly before, Wilson had met Kristof at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee conference in the capital. As Wilson later recounted to Vanity Fair, he told Kristof about his trip to Niger over breakfast the next morning, and said "Kristof could write about it, but not name him."

Kristof, the first of Wilson's many journalistic victims, accepted Wilson's claims at face value. "I do know from talking to people directly involved in the Niger deal that information did go to the vice president's office and did go to the national security staff in the White House and went to the top of the CIA," he told an NPR interviewer on June 25, 2003.

But read the various claims made in Kristof's May 6 column side by side with the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings, and you find two different stories. Here's Kristof: "In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information [of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal] was unequivocally wrong and that the documents [purporting to show such a deal] had been forged."