Joe Wilson Lied
and Owes George W. Bush and America
(and
Me) an Apology
The Senate Intelligence Committee
let some air – a lot of air - out of
Joe Wilson’s overly inflated ego last year when it issued its first report
on prewar intelligence.
While the committee heaped most
of its criticism on the Central
Intelligence Agency for getting almost
everything wrong about Iraq and weapons
of mass destruction it pointedly rebuked
the former ambassador and his infamous
mission to Niger.
Wilson spent 8 days in the
African nation in February 2002
investigating reports that Iraq had
attempted to buy “yellowcake”
uranium.
He told the CIA that he found no
evidence to substantiate that claim.
So when President Bush said the
“16 words” in his 2003 State of the
Union address that Wilson wrongly
assumed contradicted his report, he was
apoplectic.
The phrase used as part of the
overall case for justifying the invasion
of Iraq was, “The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa."
In July 2003, Wilson wrote and
op-ed piece for the New York Times
titled, “What I Didn’t Find in
Africa” where he said the
administration was lying about an
Iraq-Niger uranium connection.
This catapulted the anti-Bush,
anti-war media a full frenzy and the
White House clumsily tried to defend its
use of the phrase.
Reasoned discussion was tossed
aside as the media besieged the Bush
administration with accusations of
deception and manipulation.
The White House meekly backed off
the claim and tried to portray it as
something of a clerical error.
A week later, Robert Novak wrote a column during which he said that
a member of the administration told him
that Wilson got the Niger assignment
because his wife, an “operative” for
the CIA promoted him for it.
Probably compelled to prove that
he was still the consummate insider,
Novak published the name of Wilson’s
spouse, Valerie Plame.
That’s when the real trouble
began.
Wilson loudly cried foul, saying
that Plame was an undercover agent and
that the White House had blown her
cover.
Following Novak’s column,
Wilson said White House political
advisor Karl Rove began to shop the
story around to several journalists,
supposedly saying that his wife was
“fair game.”
Except for the fact that
intentionally exposing a covert agent is
a crime, it first appeared that this was
another inning in the endless game of
political hardball.
But Wilson quickly became aware
that the spotlight that he intended for
himself had shone on someone standing
very close to him; someone that he knew
lived in the shadows.
Wilson worked all of the talk
shows hard, becoming an instant media
darling.
His call for Rove to be
“frog-marched out of the White House
in handcuffs,” will long be
remembered.
Opponents of the President now
had the scandal they had long sought.
None of their previous attempts
had gotten much traction, but now they
could dust off the Watergate playbook
and focus on regime change.
The media’s zeal to parrot
Wilson’s increasingly vitriolic
accusations obscured what Novak had
really discovered, something that was
equally important.
It wasn’t until last Friday
that the other shoe dropped.
No matter what someone somewhere
told the Chicago Sun-Times columnist,
the Senate Intelligence Committee
published information that showed Joe
Wilson had lied about how he came to be
sent to Niger. He denied that his
wife had any role in it whatsoever.
But a memo Plame wrote on
February 12, 2002 proves otherwise.
She actively promoted him for the
mission, just as she had done in 1999.
The Committee also chastised the
former ambassador for using press
reports to make declarative statements
about the authenticity of documents he
had never seen.
It also said that his work was
inconclusive and gave more credibility
to the claims of an Iraq-Niger deal
instead of debunking them.
Now Wilson is silent.
The verbose windbag is nowhere to
be seen or heard. And it gets worse for
him.
On Wednesday, an inquiry into
British intelligence conducted by Lord
Butler said that while most of its
prewar information was wrong, the
assertions about Niger and uranium were
“well founded.” This is a
complete exoneration of the White House
on the “16 words.”
What George Bush said in the
State of the Union address was
absolutely true. I doubt if there will
be much press about that, based on the
yawn Friday’s report drew from the
media elites.
But there still is that sticky
matter of Ms. Plame.
The federal grand jury in the
matter is close to concluding its work.
Insiders say that there is an
even chance that no indictments will be
forthcoming since leaks are very
difficult to trace.
I have heard speculation that
some underling may be designated to fall
on a sword.
Either way, the conclusion will
be flawed.
Valerie Plame brought attention
to herself when she went outside the
agency to bring in her husband for the
Niger mission. One has to wonder how
the United States commits billions of
tax dollars to the CIA yet not a single
person within the agency was qualified
to sail off to Africa to “sip sweet
mint tea” with the locals.
Still more puzzling is how a
retired second-tier diplomat is supposed
to convince anyone to admit to providing
uranium to one of the most dangerous men
in the world.
A memo written by an INR
(Intelligence and Research) analyst who
made notes of the meeting at which
Wilson was asked to go to Niger sensed
that something fishy was going on.
That report made it to the
outside world courtesy of some patriotic
whistleblower that realized that a bag
job was underway.
Novak’s column 15 months later
only confirmed what some already knew:
Valerie Plame, a CIA employee had
actively promoted him for the task.
I believe Plame was exposed at
this point – far sooner than the
timeline Wilson suggests.
The classified document that
slipped out sometime after the meeting
put her name before the public, albeit a
small group of inside-the-beltway types,
but effectively ended the notion that
she was still covert.
There is even some question as to
whether she was covert at all.
Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the
New York Times that some at the CIA
believe Plame had been betrayed to the
Russians by Aldrich Ames in the early
1990s.
He suggests that she was
relegated to a desk at Langley as a
result.
I raised all of these questions
with Wilson in October 2003 in an
interview for Talon News.
Since I was aware of the INR
report, I confronted him about it.
TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?
Wilson: No. The decision to ask me to go out to Niger was taken in a meeting at which there were about a dozen analysts from both the CIA and the State Department. A couple of them came up and said to me when we're going through the introductory phase, "We have met at previous briefings that you have done on other subjects, Africa-related."
Not one of those at that meeting could I have told you what they look like, would I recognize on the street, or remember their name today. And as old as I am, I can still recognize my wife, and I still do remember her name. That was the meeting at which the decision was made to ask me if I would clear my schedule to go.
TN: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?
Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities.
Despite his deception, I was
pleased with the interview until I read
a front page article in the Washington
Post on December 26, 2003 that said the
CIA was angry that an INR report was
circulating, mentioning Talon News as
having written about it.
The source said that the document
was false and that whoever wrote it
could not have possibly been at any such
meeting.
The Senate Intelligence Committee
also blew that nugget of disinformation
out of the water.
The INR report was right on
target.
What is difficult to understand
is the reason that the CIA would want to
discredit this report.
The first clue came when the
agents from the FBI came to my home in
March 2003 to question me in connection
to the leak probe.
I was flattered to think that I
was important enough to be included
among the luminaries like Andrea
Mitchell, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews
who were also named in a Justice
Department subpoena of records from the
White House.
But most of the questions were
about the INR report.
They wanted to know where I got
it and what I knew about it.
Of course, as a journalist there
wasn’t much I could say without
revealing my sources.
I’m sure they were not
satisfied, but it made me wonder why
they were so interested in a document
the CIA said was false.
Now we know. It was true – very
true – and it blew a huge hole in the
Niger story and the Plame story.
She played a critical role in the
Niger trip.
Rush Limbaugh suggested that
Plame pushing her husband for the job
was the only way it would happen since
someone in the administration would have
never chosen him.
I have been saying that very same
thing for quite some time.
If we are to believe that Vice
President Cheney was over at Langley
breathing down the necks of analysts in
order to shape intelligence, how did he
not know that Wilson would be sent on a
mission he himself requested?
Joe Wilson once worked for
Democrats Tom Foley and Al Gore.
He also was a member of the
Clinton administration.
More importantly, he was a known
opponent of plan to invade Iraq.
That would have disqualified him
on that basis alone.
I’m not a member of the black
helicopter crowd, but I do read books by
Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn.
The Left wants us to believe that
a fanatical group has hijacked foreign
policy.
They’ve even been given a name:
Neo-cons.
They are described as hawkish,
pro-Israel conservatives purportedly
with a desire to use America’s
military arsenal to change the political
landscape of the Middle East.
If we are to buy into that, how
difficult is it to grasp that there
might be a small group at the CIA who
were working to undermine the
administration?
In his book “See No Evil”,
former CIA agent Robert Baer blames the
Clinton administration for decimating
the CIA and politicizing the agency.
Is it possible those that
remained after the purges have political
leanings that were inconsistent with the
Bush administration?
No matter what kind of
conspiracies one might fantasize
about, one thing is certain:
Joe Wilson lied.
Lying to me is just bad manners,
but lying to the nation is something he
should be called to account for.
More than anything, Joe Wilson
owes George W. Bush an apology.