Howard Kurtz attempts to perpetuate a discredited meme

In writing about Robert Novak's revelations on Plamegate, Howard Kurtz plays fast and loose with the facts on President Bush's State of the Union speech (emphasis added):

Novak triggered one of the capital's most tangled investigations with a July 2003 column reporting that Plame had suggested sending her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, to Niger to investigate whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain nuclear material from that country -- an unsupported claim that was included in President Bush's State of the Union speech.

In light of the facts, "Unsupported" is a characterization that, well, just can't be supported by Mr. Kurtz:

Two intelligence investigations show Bush had plenty of reason to believe what he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address

Summary

The famous “16 words” in President Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address turn out to have a basis in fact after all, according to two recently released investigations in the US and Britain.

Bush said then, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .” Some of his critics called that a lie, but the new evidence shows Bush had reason to say what he did.

• A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush’s 16 words “well founded.”
• A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from “a number of intelligence reports,” a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.
• Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush’s 16 words a “lie”, supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger .
• Both the US and British investigations make clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes soon after Bush spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence Bush cited, or the CIA's conclusion that Iraq was trying to get uranium...

Related: Instapundit uses logic to put the CIA between IRAQ and a hard place