The factcheck article is completely inconclusive, and says so itself in the last paragraph:
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The final word on the 16 words may have to await history's judgment....
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With selective quoting, you can use the article to argue any side you want to. Here are some examples:
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And soon after, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that the 16 words were, in retrospect, a mistake. She said during a July 11, 2003 White House press briefing :
Rice: What we've said subsequently is, knowing what we now know, that some of the Niger documents were apparently forged, we wouldn't have put this in the President's speech -- but that's knowing what we know now.
That same day, CIA Director George Tenet took personal responsibility for the appearance of the 16 words in Bush's speech:
Tenet: These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.
Tenet said the CIA had viewed the original British intelligence reports as "inconclusive," and had "expressed reservations" to the British.
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So it appears the authors of the factcheck article didn't have, in hand, all the classified information pertinent to the question, and other information existed at the time that that should have been used as a reason for excising those 16 words, but for some reason was not, according to Tenet.
The take home message that I see from that article is that the CIA was being pressured in a particular direction, which was not the direction towards the truth. I think it would be naive to think that this was not intentional.
But of course anything involving the CIA is shrouded in secrecy so we probably will never know the details. Hence the factcheck article's conclusion, again:
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The final word on the 16 words may have to await history's judgment....
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That's a pretty weak defense of Bush, IMHO.