Worst. Leaks. Ever.

So, those leaks from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq over which everyone is making such ado? Turns out the information wasn't even true:

When President Bush authorized Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide to reveal previously classified intelligence to a reporter about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium, as the aide has testified, that information was already being discredited by several senior officials in the administration, interviews show.

A review of the records and interviews conducted since that crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray to reporters as a "key judgment" by the intelligence community had in fact been given much less prominence in an earlier intelligence report.

What's brilliant is that through this farce the administration was able to trap some big-name reporters into rallying against efforts to disclose the sources of the leak, essentially the very people who had just cynically lied to them. Judith Miller especially must be feeling pretty stupid:

Mr. Fitzgerald, in his filing, said that Mr. Libby had been authorized to tell Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, on July 8, 2003, that a key finding of the 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq was that Baghdad had been vigorously seeking to acquire uranium from Africa.

But a week earlier, in an interview in his State Department office, Mr. Powell told three other reporters for The Times that intelligence agencies had essentially rejected that contention, and were "no longer carrying it as a credible item" by early 2003, when he was preparing to make the case against Iraq at the United Nations.

This disaster is, of course, all the fault of the reporters involved. Whether through laziness or loose ethics, they failed to double-check the information they were fed, choosing instead to take the administration at its word. Those in the media must learn from this that they simply cannot trust any statement of this administration, that everything must be vetted; Bush and his staff have abused their access to intelligence data and relationship with reporters, and any information they provide needs to be viewed in that context. If any in the press care at all about the truth, that is.