The Senate's bad intelligence [Wilson/Plame letter to Sen Roberts]

Thank you for reading his letter, line by line, and then thank you for your excellent precis of Mr. Wilson's remarks.

My reaction has been, that his writing is a downed tree with many wedges and levers pounded by him into it, such that it may be split any way a liberal may wish to use the "seriousness of the charges."

While your accurate "sought" v. "got" is a true hit.

Maybe Mr. Wilson is who he is because he is a whiz at such bureaucratese, but his letter seems to have been worked over with the advice of counsel (Bloomenthal et al come to mind).

I blog on this on Liberating Iraq blog:

July 17th: AP grudgingly admits Bush was telling the truth and intelligence backs up his claims, and yet in Iraq Uranium Claim Gets Some Support, they still get the story wrong: "It cited various reports, however, that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Thus, although Bush cited only British documents that later proved to have been forged, intelligence files clearly contained other evidence of the truth of the claim." WRONG, AP!

Pejman quote the FT's report on the Butler report released in Britain:

Butler's other areas of investigation was the issue of whether Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence. ... The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part.

The British intelligence was based on independent sources. Funny, the AP story includes that factoid: The British inquiry said it was generally accepted that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999, and there was intelligence from several sources that the visit was to acquire uranium. "Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible," the report said.

The bottom line is that Bush's 16 words were correct, he referenced British intelligence, which the Brits stand behind... So how can the AP contradict themselves in their own article?

There is a TON of Wilson debunking material, starting with: The Joe Wilson story timeline from May 2003 to now. Pejmanesque's roundup debunking of Wilson on the Senate intelligence report, he says:

We already know that the Butler inquiry in Britain states that Saddam Hussein's regime did indeed try to buy uranium from Niger. So we have independent verification that validates the famous "sixteen words" in the President's 2003 State of the Union Speech, and invalidates Wilson's claims that there was no attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium from Africa.

Piling on with glee, we have Mark Steyn and JOM on Steyn and Wilson and a Wilson website exposed by instapundit, and now the reverb of Media malfeasance in covering Wilson's tracks: NY Times backpedals yet "Times remains sphinx-like on the Senate report finding" that show Joe Wilson lied.

This aint over: Joe Wilson fires back at Senator Roberts ensuring this will be a partisan slugfest, but he makes a remarkable claim: I never claimed to have "debunked" the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. I claimed only that the transaction described in the documents that turned out to be forgeries could not have occurred and did not occur. In other words, his only use during his fifteen minutes of fame was to tell people what we already knew - and ignore that "Bush lied" ... oh wait a second "I did not speak out on the subject until several months after it became evident that what underpinned the assertion in the State of the Union address were those documents" ...

And THAT my friend explains the LIE in the AP report, and shows IMHO that Joe Wilson is still lying. You see, the media has to run interference and somehow link the forged documents to the "British intelligence" claim that Bush made in the 2003 SOTU. In fact, they are not related, nor would Joe Wilson know, since he has no access to British intelligence sources.

"she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead."

Did Kristof testify?