Posted on 07/18/2004 3:42:57 PM PDT by RWR8189
Joe Wilson wasn't a truth-teller.
ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson. He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty weekly. Daniel Ellsberg was there. So was New Jersey senator Jon Corzine. Towards the end of lunch, plates of cold salad shunted aside, Wilson was invited onstage. Looking the part of a globetrotting former diplomat in his Zegna suit and trademark Hermès tie, he launched into a tirade against the Bush administration, which he claimed had ignored the findings of a trip he took to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had tried to acquire uranium there. His trip had disproved those claims, he continued, yet his findings were ignored. And when he went public with his story, the administration had tried to "silence" him by leaking to the press that his wife worked for the CIA.
There was much applause. And there was even more applause when Wilson then accepted the first-ever Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling, along with the award's $10,000 prize. (Ridenhour was the soldier who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969.)
The Nation (and cosponsoring Fertel Foundation) might want to ask for their prize money back. Because the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released on July 9, fatally undermines Wilson's accusation that the Bush administration "manipulated" intelligence by ignoring his report on Niger--which, in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, he mistakenly claimed "was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government," including the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Not so, according to the Senate committee's report on pre-Iraq war intelligence. Not so at all.
The first public mention of Joe Wilson's February 2002 mission to Niger appeared in a May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times. Shortly before, Wilson had met Kristof at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee conference in the capital. As Wilson later recounted to Vanity Fair, he told Kristof about his trip to Niger over breakfast the next morning, and said "Kristof could write about it, but not name him."
Kristof, the first of Wilson's many journalistic victims, accepted Wilson's claims at face value. "I do know from talking to people directly involved in the Niger deal that information did go to the vice president's office and did go to the national security staff in the White House and went to the top of the CIA," he told an NPR interviewer on June 25, 2003.
But read the various claims made in Kristof's May 6 column side by side with the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings, and you find two different stories. Here's Kristof: "In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information [of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal] was unequivocally wrong and that the documents [purporting to show such a deal] had been forged."
Wilson did report back to the CIA after he returned from Niger. And Wilson did say he was skeptical about claims of an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. But according to the committee's findings, Wilson did not report, by any reckoning, that the information was "unequivocally wrong" or that documents "had been forged" to show a deal. Indeed, he couldn't have.
That's because the bogus documents in question were not turned over to CIA personnel until October 16, 2002, about eight months after Wilson had returned from Niger. Also, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Wilson's initial February 19, 2002, meeting in CIA headquarters, "none of the meeting participants recall telling the former ambassador the source of the report."
This is how Pat Roberts, the committee's chairman, put it in his "additional views" section of the report:
At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the Intelligence Community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador's comments to reporters . . . could not have been based on the former ambassador's actual experiences because the Intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador's trip.
The Senate Committee asked Wilson how he could have come to such grandiose conclusions without any information:
On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For example, when asked how he "knew" that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved "a little literary flair."
"A little literary flair" is a good way to describe the following claim, also in the original Kristof column: "The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it [the forgery] anyway."
The Select Committee discovered otherwise:
DIA and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denials that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said [to Wilson] an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger [in 1999] for what [the prime minister] believed was to discuss uranium sales.
Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers. For the same reason, CIA's briefer did not brief the Vice President on the report, despite the Vice President's previous questions about the issue.
The story Wilson told Nicholas Kristof that May morning in Washington? Wilson made it up.
And he got away with it. And he began to talk more frequently with reporters. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, for one. Here is an excerpt from a Pincus article published on June 12, 2003:
During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.
During the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, someone asked Wilson how he could have told Pincus the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," as he never saw the forgeries in the first place. Wilson was nonplussed. According to the report, "The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged.'" Also, he said, "he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself."
Maybe Wilson was confused, too, when he talked to Spencer Ackerman and John B. Judis for a June 30, 2003, New Republic cover story, "The First Casualty":
Cheney's office [in early 2002] had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September [2002] detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the [2003] State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR.
Once again, the Senate Intelligence Committee report refutes all of this. The forged documents first showed up in October 2002, when an Italian journalist gave them to the U.S. embassy in Rome, which forwarded them to the CIA. Why did Cheney query the CIA in February 2002 about Niger? Because of a Defense Intelligence Agency report that same month titled Niamey [the capital of Niger] signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad. This report was thinly sourced, the CIA would later inform Cheney, which is one of the reasons they sent Wilson to investigate.
With the Kristof column, the Pincus piece, and the Judis/Ackerman article, however, Wilson was just getting warmed up. On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public with his story in three venues: an op-ed in the New York Times, an appearance on Meet the Press, and a front-page story in the Washington Post. In all three places Wilson told a yarn riddled with inaccuracies and, in some parts, constructed out of whole cheesecloth.
Records of his trip, he wrote in the Times, "should include" a "specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally)." Wilson had "every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government." Well, that depends on the meaning of appropriate. It certainly didn't get circulated to the vice president.
The exaggerations and falsehoods continued on that day's Meet the Press. His trip, Wilson told guest host Andrea Mitchell, "effectively debunked the Niger arms uranium sale." In fact, as the report details, it did no such thing. In his addendum to the Intelligence Committee report, Pat Roberts regrets that, while not disputing the facts, his "Democratic colleagues refused to allow" several "conclusions" about Wilson to appear in the report. Among them: "The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal."
WILSON FURTHER TOLD MITCHELL that Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice lied when they said they had not heard of him before his New York Times op-ed. He said, "If you are in the vice president's office, or you're a senior director at the National Security Council, you are senior enough to ask the question, you will get a specific response." He said, "The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there."
Or not. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Wilson didn't know what he was talking about. He repeated the same bogus charges to Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby, who included them in their sympathetic profile the same day.
Similar credulity dominated coverage of Wilson's accusations. What's puzzling is that at times intelligence officials, quoted on background, also supported Wilson's claims. In a July 9, 2003, Newsday story by Timothy M. Phelps, for example, a "senior intelligence official" agreed with Wilson that his report "was widely disseminated" throughout the Bush administration. This wasn't the case.
By last October, when Wilson accepted the "Truth-Teller" award, the Niger scandal had taken an unusual turn. The Justice Department was investigating whether an administration official or officials had broken the law by telling columnist Robert Novak in July 2003 that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. The Justice Department investigation afforded Wilson further media opportunities. He seized them. Appearing for a second time on Meet the Press on October 5, he was asked by Tim Russert, "Was there a suggestion that this was cronyism, that it was your wife who had arranged the mission?"
"I have no idea what they were trying to suggest in this,"Wilson said. "I can only assume that it was nepotism. And I can tell you that when the decision was made, which was made after a briefing and after a gaming out at the agency with the intelligence community, there was nobody in that room when we went through this that I knew." He makes a similar claim in his memoir, The Politics of Truth, published earlier this year: "Valerie could not--and would not if she could--have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey." And Wilson told liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall the same thing, at greater length, in a September 2003 interview:
For those who would assert that somehow [my wife] was involved in this, it just defies logic. At the time, she was the mother of 2-year-old twins. Therefore, sort of sending her husband off on an eight-day trip leaves her with full responsibility for taking care of two screaming 2-year-olds without help, and anybody who is a parent would understand what that means. Anybody who is a mother would understand it even far better.
And yet here, too, the Senate Intelligence Committee found problems with Wilson's story. "Some CPD [Counterproliferation Division] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact [Wilson]," its report says. "However, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip." There's more: "The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name,' and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife, says, 'my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.'"
Wilson continued to receive uncritical press. Walter Pincus wrote up his October 5 Meet the Press appearance for the Washington Post the next day, and two days after that, Wilson and his wife were the subjects of another gauzy Washington Post profile by Richard Leiby and Dana Priest. In January 2004 came Vicky Ward's 7,000-word profile of the couple in Vanity Fair. In May 2004, when Wilson's book was released, he appeared once more on Meet the Press, where he scolded Tim Russert:
"Remember," he said, "when you talk about [being] partisan, what I did was my civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said, a pattern of deception to the Congress of the United States and the American people, including these 16 words in the State of the Union address"--in which the president said Iraq had been seeking uranium for its weapons program in Africa. He paused. "I did not put those 16 words in the State of the Union address. Indeed, had the president heeded the report that I and others had submitted, had the vice president heeded what the CIA briefer had told him, had the national security adviser and her deputy remembered the two memoranda and the telephone call relating to this particular subject, that line might not have been in the president's State of the Union address."
His eyes grew wide with fury.
"Either they were derelict or they were deceptive."
According to the conclusions of Sen. Pat Roberts, the words "derelict" and "deceptive" might better describe Joe Wilson:
During Mr. Wilson's media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had "debunked" the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT "debunk" the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect, but had no basis in fact. . . . .
The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading. Surely, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has unique access to all of the facts, should have been able to agree on a conclusion that would correct the public record.
However, committee Democrats, Roberts writes, "would not agree" to conclude publicly that much of Wilson's story was fabricated. Perhaps they were embarrassed. Many of them had grown to know Wilson socially over the last year, and many had adopted his cause as their own. Perhaps they did not want to embarrass the Kerry campaign, for which Wilson remains an unpaid adviser. Perhaps they did not want to embarrass media outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Republic, which published Wilson's falsehoods and have not yet retracted them.
Wilson, for his part, has laid low since the committee released its report. He has not done any television interviews. He has refused most requests for interviews, period. On Thursday, July 15, Wilson sent out an email to a host of reporters--including many whom he had snookered months ago. Attached was a long, rambling letter to Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, in which he disputes the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings. The idea his wife had suggested him for the Niger trip "is not true," Wilson wrote, adding that his wife's memo touting his credentials contains "no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip."
Wilson's letter is mainly notable for what it does not mention. He does not dispute the committee's finding that he was wrong to say he knew his report had reached the vice president's office, when he had no way of knowing whether it had or hadn't. He does not admit he was wrong to tell reporters that he knew the forged documents were bogus, when he had not seen them at the time of his trip. He does not leave the door open for future discussions about his trip, either with Congress or with the press.
Which is telling. Until now, Wilson had shown himself eager to talk to anyone who would listen--including this magazine. He was an engaging interview subject. In July 2003, when he sat down with Post reporters Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus for his first on-the-record interview, Wilson waxed philosophical. "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war," he said. One likes to think he was smoking one of his favorite cigars at the time--Romeo y Julietas, perhaps.
And then, turning to the two sympathetic journalists, Wilson, a curious expression on his face, asked, to no one in particular: "What else are they lying about?"
As it turns out, that was a question better put to the administration's critics.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
Thanks for ping--I was already here composing my posts!
I am getting aggravated that smart reporters didn't use information that was plainly available before this vaunted Committee report to expose Wilson.
Things like the timing the forgeries got in U.S. hands is not some new revelation---we've known it and we here at FR have been talking about the problems with Wilson because of it since the start.
Argh. At least it's coming out now.
The government doesn't need people with agendas like Wilson's acting on its behalf.
And it most assuredly doesn't need the people who share those agendae and hire people like Wilson.
He was hired because of his agenda. See the "puzzling" reference to "CIA officials" touting the Wilson line. It isn't puzzling. They were all in it together, this little band.
It is bigger than egomaniac Joe Wilson making things up. And it's a big mess that hopefully is the real focus of the investigation, not the bogus "who leaked Plame's name" business.
And no, you and Jenny are correct, our government doesn't need traitors.
I see you were saying the same thing I was---those in government who share Wilson's agenda. I wish it were easy to rid ourselves....Alan Foley, Plame's boss, left last September right after the story gained traction.
Let's hope the evidence is being assembled to take care of the rest who were involved.
Hmmmm .. When is that grand jury going to finish??
What else was discussed at this Senate Democratic Policy Committee conference and what was Wilson doing there?
1. March, 2002 -- Wilson goes to Niger at the behest of the CIA. He "investigates" and returns with a report that: a.) the Niger authorities claim they have not sold any yellowcake to Iraq and b.) the PM had, in fact, received a trade mission from Iraq which he assumed was seeking yellowcake. Shimmer dissolve to...
2. January, 2003 -- The President speaks his 16 words ("The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.")
As an aside, this statement is in complete accord with what Wilson reported to the CIA, is it not?
3. February, 2003 -- Joe Wilson and Nicholas Kristof are reportedly both in attendance at a Democrat Senate Campaign Planning Conference. At this conference, it is purportedly revealed that, in the wake of the Democrats' disasterous mid-term electoral defeat, their strategy for 2004 will be to a.) attack Bush's credibility and b.) undermine American efforts in the WOT.
4. April, 2003 -- isn't it along in here, Shermy & Wolfstar, that the Wilson/Plame originated "leaks" begin to show up. Leaks attributed to "intelligence officials", appearing in The Independent, the BBC and Kristof's column in the NYTimes?
5. May, 2003 -- Wilson speaks for the record. To Kristof.
6. June, 2003 -- It becomes apparent that the various "leaks" and "rumors" designed to discredit Bush's "sixteen words" are not having their intended political effect. In the wake of a wildly successful Iraq campaign, the Bush bandwagon appears unscathed and unhindered.
7. July 3, 2003 -- Joe Wilson pens his op-ed for the New York Times. And he appears to gain some traction, at least with the NYTimes crowd and other media sycophants.
8. July 14, 2003 -- Novak "outs" Plame as CIA and the sponsor of Wilson's Niger mission. The case becomes a cause celebre, if not a fait accompli.
We know the rest of the story...
But the point of the chronology is to establish that, when Wilson heard Bush's "16 words", he knew them to be true! In fact, he could even be forgiven for assuming that they had been based on his own report.
Nonetheless, Wilson either volunteered or was recruited into what amounts to a conspiracy to undermine the credibility of the President of the United States, in time of war.
Some (Steyn among them) have given Joe Wilson credit for contriving this scheme on his own and practicing a single-handed deception on the media and the Democrat leadership. I think that's given Wilson far too much credit. Instead, I believe Wilson was the instrument of others -- in the media and the Democrat leadership. They encouraged his lies. And, indeed, knew they were lies!
What's more, others were in on the act, as well. that's the only way to explain:
What's puzzling is that at times intelligence officials, quoted on background, also supported Wilson's claims. In a July 9, 2003, Newsday story by Timothy M. Phelps, for example, a "senior intelligence official" agreed with Wilson that his report "was widely disseminated" throughout the Bush administration. This wasn't the case.
Wilson's lies were being supported by others inside the intelligence establishment. Or Timothy M. Phelps was himself lying (a not unlikely conclusion, given the media's dilute form of veracity).
The Wilson Affair was part of a wide-ranging, highly orchestrated plot. FReepers have suspected as much for some time. And, perhaps, that is what the Fitzgerald grand jury is really all about...
Here's an article from July 9 (Wilson's op-ed appeared July 6) over in the BBC news quoting a "CIA official". Another example of the others involved (Plame has been our guess of who this source was) as this source touts the Wilson story in every aspect:
White House 'warned over Iraq claim'
July 9, 2003
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.
~snip~
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.
~snip~
Well, there goes that CIA official. Passing on flat out lies. Yes, I have long hoped this investigation is into how the hell we have rogue CIA agents undermining the U.S. at time of war by passing off bald-faced lies to the press.
It's strange that Loftus is running cover for Wilson. Loftus is helping out in the suit of the 9/11 families against the Saudis. Wilson belongs to a Saudi-funded think tank - the Middle East Institute. He is also affiliated with a consultant firm (Rock Creek Corporation) that does business with the Saudis.
Loftus and Wilson are scheduled to be guests on the John Batchelor show on WABC Radio on Monday, July 19th. It will be interesting to see what gems they come up with.
I sure hope so, although I'm not betting the farm on it, so to speak.
•
And what was the media (Kristof) doing there?
Plotting and scheming, evidently.
Disappointed in Loftus for defending Wilson. He simply had a 'wrong opinion'? More Democratic dissembling. Wilson is a lying political hack, seeking to position himself for a job in a possible Kerry Administration.
Told him HE better get caught up since HE is behind the curve. Bachelor's show should be interesting. He's down to 11:00 pm talk radio to make his case now that CNN/Wolfie cant save him.
Oh, it's going to get worse than this before the elections. Those reporters who were taken would be wise to out this guy and get on the right side of history. Those who don't are going to be ruined.
Looking forward to the show tonight too. Unfortunately Batchelor does not take calls.
Just caught Loftus on Bachelor giving Berger a pass for taking classified documents and notes out of the archives. I'm writing Loftus off as another apologist.
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