Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger in February 2002 by the CIA to perform a mission for which he was not qualified. From his days working in the US embassy in Gabon Wilson had contacts throughout Africa, but contacts do not a weapons of mass destruction expert make. And Wilson had no experience, at least none publicly acknowledged, in the area of weapons proliferation. Yet he was sent on a vital CIA mission, without undergoing the usual national security protocols, to determine whether Saddam Hussein had sought yellowcake from Niger.
His wife, Valerie Plame, did have such WMD experience, and when she recommended Wilson for the job of traveling to Niger and investigating the possibility that Iraq had sought to acquire yellowcake uranium, the CIA listened. Ambassador Wilson got the job.
Even though Wilson had no experience in investigating weapons proliferation issues. And even though Wilson's findings had the potential of leading America into war, or of letting Saddam Hussein off the hook again.
Not that his mission would have taken an expert, necessarily, though one would hope the CIA would have and would use experts on such a momentous mission. He was sent to Niger, after all, to assess one single question: Did Iraq seek yellowcake from Niger? So he went to Niger, all too eager to get himself inserted in the great game. And he sipped tea poolside, never really investigated a thing, and upon returning to the US, delivered a verbal briefing after the trip.
To whom? Well, the same people who sent him to Niger, naturally. Who are...?
We don't know. But we should. Because Wilson's mission appears to have been a sham from the start.
It wasn't handled seriously at all. He filed no after-action reports, left no paper trail other than expense reports, and obtained no hard evidence about anything. His own account of the trip has him never setting foot outside his hotel complex; he met local officials poolside and chatted them up.
This is how you investigate the serious question of whether or not Saddam Hussein was attempting to re-start his nuclear programs?
And apparently this kind of investigation satisfied whoever sent him to Niger in the first place? Only if they had a pre-determined outcome in mind, and Wilson's briefing more or less fit the bill.
Not long after the war, the CIA started to leak like a Russian submarine. Disinformation began to show up in the press via anonymous CIA sources last summer, as the hunt for Iraq's WMDs wore on.
Exhibit
The CIA warned the US Government that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were not true months before President Bush used them to make his case for war, the BBC has learned. Doubts about a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were aired 10 months before Mr Bush included the allegation in his key State of the Union address this year, a CIA official has told the BBC.
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But the CIA official has said that a former US diplomat had already established the claim was false in March 2002 - and that the information had been passed on to government departments, including the White House, well before Mr Bush mentioned it in the speech.
That diplomat would be our friend, Joseph Wilson, named later in the story. The anonymous CIA officer is mischaracterizing Wilson's report from Niger to smear the President of the United States. That story appeared on the BBC, July 9, 2003. Who is the anonymous CIA source? Is the source the Anonymous, the CIA officer and author of Imperial Hubris, the book that alleges the US is fighting all the wrong wars to defeat the terrorists, and losing them? Was Anonymous involved in Wilson's mission in any way?
Or is the anonymous BBC source from last year Ms. Plame, seeking to push her husband's story at the appropriate time? Or is it someone else?
Whoever the source is, a couple of things are apparent. First, the source was probably involved in Wilson's trip at some level. At the very least, the source was familiar enough with Wilson's trip to take part in his press offensive, kicked off just a day or two before this story showed up on the BBC.
Secondly, the source took the same deceptive line that Wilson took regarding his trip, namely, that his 8 days in Niger debunked the SOTU 16 words citing a UK intel report that Iraq had sought yellowcake from Africa. Wilson's trip to one African country did not and could not have debunked that UK claim; therefore the source was in on the talking points.
The reality was that if anything, Wilson's meager findings from Niger actually bolstered the case that Iraq was seeking yellowcake. But his--and the anonyous source's--talking points say otherwise. This smacks of collusion. One other tip toward collusion: Nick Kristof's May 6 article on Wilson mentions Kristof having talked directly with the people who sent Wilson, and they told Kristof that Wilson's report had been sent up at least to the Vice President's office. According to the Senate Intel Committee's report, that wasn't true. The CIA didn't find Wilson's report substantial enough to alter its overall findings on Saddam's WMD pursuits in any way.
Who is the CIA source for the BBC story, and for Kristof's story? Who developed the after-trip talking points that Wilson and at least one CIA officer (and probably more than one) used to build their case against the 16 words?
Behind Joseph Wilson's many lies, we have a set of mysteries on our hands, and we may well have a mole or a small cell of moles working against the interests of the United States from inside the CIA in the midst of war.
"a mole or a small cell of moles working against the interests of the United States from inside the CIA in the midst of war."
James Angleton, head of counterintelligence in the CIA, determined that the Soviet section of the CIA was heavily penetrated with moles decades ago. He worked with Golitsyn, a high-ranking KGB defector.
He was attacked as "crazy" by both the media and many in the intelligence establishment. As Golitsyn predicted, a stream of defectors erupted from the KGB, all saying that Golitsyn was lying. Angleton was driven out of office.
Ping a Ling
MICHAEL SCHEUER, CIA bin Laden Unit Chief, who resigned Nov. 12, 2004 after running the CIA office that tracked Osama bin Laden
He wrote the recent best-seller "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror."
At the U.S. Army War College's 16th Annual Strategy Conference last week, a senior Department of Defense strategist defined U.S. "Grand Strategy" as the export of freedom and democracy. He added that the U.S. military would play a huge role in implementing the strategy. In short, and to paraphrase, the official said: "Get ready, soldiers, you're going democracy-crusading."
Exporting freedom and democracy is not a Grand Strategy. It may be an ambition, an obsession, or – most likely – a hallucination. The idea that such exports are a "Grand Strategy" spotlights the ignorance about America of the men and women who today lead the country. Ditto for many of the 535 individuals in the Senate and House. America is not a nation meant to order others how to live and then push them at bayonet point into that lifestyle.
The force behind this Grand Strategy is President Bush's inane, ahistorical claim that "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." This is pure Wilsonian claptrap with the lethality-multiplying extra of being hands-on, rather than rhetorical Wilsonianism – the difference being that foreigners died from the latter, while Americans will die from the former. Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, Ms. Rice, Mr. Cambone, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Bolton, and their acolyte front organizations at the Weekly Standard, American Enterprise Institute, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, etc., are not bad or evil people. They're just confused and ignorant about the meaning of America.
Wilsonianism is nothing more than cynically promising oppressed people freedom that cannot be delivered without using force. As an anti-military, provincial bigot, Wilson knew this. He knew Americans would not allow their sons to be killed in large numbers so that 1919 Bosnia-Herzogovinians could vote. He also knew the rhetoric of "self-determination" and "teaching people to elect good men" would cost him nothing. He did not care what it cost the foreigners who believed his twaddle; they could not vote.
Today's Wilsonians, with father-and-son Bush in the van, are far more dangerous to America than the late, unlamented Wilson. Their ignorance of the Founders' intentions and lack of any semblance of the Founders' wisdom have made them democracy-crusaders in every blood-spilling sense of the phrase. Knowing nothing of, and thus having no respect for, the long and bloody post-Runnymede struggle of Americans and their ancestors to build an equitable democracy at home, the new Wilsonians are using – and intend to expand the use of – the U.S. military to seek overseas the unobtainable, war-inducing goals of the crazed Woodrow.
As the president and his aides expand the Bush-family-spawned democracy-krieg, they are also preparing the world's strongest, smartest, most decent, and best-trained military to be shock troops. Ignorant of America, contemptuous of other cultures, and driven by the fantasy that our liberties depend on those of others, the new Wilsonians will use our sons and daughters to teach all peoples, in all cultures, at all times, and in all places to "elect good men." This is a recipe for war in each place we decide to "help." Hands-on Wilsonianism means our leaders will go looking for trouble around the world. They will find it and then cheerfully spend the lives of our soldiers and Marines on warfare in numerous places, overwhelm the volunteer military, and necessitate conscription's return. Worse, our soldiers and Marines will be transformed by this ignorant crew from the protectors of the United States to the bloody – and bloodied – imposers of a brand of democratic orthodoxy that brooks no opposition based on others' history, culture, or faith, and is eager to teach democracy with the sword.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1122/csmimg/p20a.jpg
From 1993 to 1996, Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, headed a special unit the agency set up to track Osama bin Laden. Scheuer, who retired from the CIA in November 2004, has authored two books under the pen name Anonymous: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror; and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
"We had a very difficult time, as one intelligence agency to another, convincing the Europeans that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were really a threat," he says. Scheuer also discusses the policy of rendition, whereby the clandestine services capture suspects and send them to third countries, a policy that he says was "cobbled together" by the CIA. "The back end has never been discussed, has never been settled," he says. "How do we handle the people we capture? The only answer we came up with -- and it's the agency that came up with it and it was blessed by lawyers -- was to take these people to countries that wanted them for their crimes of terrorism."
statement made on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews on 16 November 2004:
Right now, the choice isn‘t between war and peace. It is between war and endless war.
On Osama bin Laden:
He‘s already said publicly that you can have all the oil you want. I can‘t drink it. We‘re going to sell it to you at a marketplace.
He doesn‘t want to fight this war forever. A lot of people mistake him as someone who can‘t get along without fighting. But that‘s not clearly the case.
On what he believes was the counterproductive nature of the decision to invade Iraq:
I wasn‘t in the room with the president and Mr. Tenet. But I can tell that you that the people who were working against Osama bin Laden were assured from the first day that much of the work we had done in the last decade would be undone by that war.
BUMP to both of you for excellence in posting.
I don't think there can be any question of that once you begin to line up WH statements and the anonymous leaks, claiming the authority of the CIA, to discredit them. It seems to me that these leaks were being used in the same way the "wall" was and probably by the very same people. My only question is if Fitzgerald has taken this view and led his investigation accordingly. His background says it's possible.
Bumpity, bump.
