According to an article in the Seattle Times entitled "The cautionary tale of two public servants", Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, was hired by the CIA to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Ghana.

This allegation is in contrast to a similar assertion in the US State Department’s fact sheet on Iraq, which states that, the Saddam Hussein regime had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger (not Ghana). President Bush supported the state department’s claim in his State of the Union address.

This may have been an oversight by the author of the article, Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor at Western Washington University, since Ghana does not have any known deposits of Uranium.