Alright..this is all coming back to me now. I remember alot of this...the dates and even Kelly's dissapearance.
But the Plame issue....to me seems to be a relevant issue on a totally different playing field. Meaning , like I said, the Rove issue is a diversion from the real story.
So put this in context for me. Are you suggesting that Wilson's " fact finding " mission was a deliberate attempt to shield a French company from inquiry?
Because his article about Bush was not until the debate was at a fever pitch....if his info was so daming to Bush you would think it would have been pronounced post-haste.
Also are you intermingling oil for food= oil for nukes?
I'd suggest it as a possibility, not a fact--we'd need more evidence to assert something like that as a fact, and I think there are still too many unanswered questions in this investigation to reach any conclusions. But sticking to the facts, the reason for Wilson's trip remains an unanswered question in need of a satisfactory explanation. Wilson wrote in his April 2004 book, "Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger’s uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip. The suggestion that Valerie might have improperly influenced the decision to send me to Niger was easy to disprove." But that July the Senate's investigation into the matter found, as The Washington Post reported, "Wilson. . .was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has stated publicly. . .[A] CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame ‘offered up’ Wilson’s name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her 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.’" The conflict between Wilson's explanation for his wife's role in his trip and the Senate's findings makes me wonder just what the motive for Wilson's trip was. When I look to other clues to try to answer that question, one thing I have to wonder is if the French interest in the company Wilson was investigating played a role, especially considering that Wilson's attack on Bush coincided with French foreign policy aims and pivoted around the same documents the French had tried to push on Bush earlier.
Because his article about Bush was not until the debate was at a fever pitch....if his info was so daming to Bush you would think it would have been pronounced post-haste.
By the time Wilson's own article came out in July 2003 it was too late to influence the decision to go to war. But Wilson had been trying to influence the debate before that by leaking information to a number of reporters--Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, and David Shipley are three known ones, there may have been more. And even after it was too late for him to influence the decision to go to war, there was still an opportunity to influence the course of the war and the reconstruction, and to influence the domestic politics of the upcoming election. Before Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, the Democratic National Committee was circulating a memo planning a public relations strategy for the 2004 campaign which would include “[c]laiming the Bush administration has ‘manufactured’ evidence against Saddam Hussein and used that evidence to encourage Britain and other allies to join the American fight against Iraq."
Also are you intermingling oil for food= oil for nukes?
I'm not sure what you mean there--maybe if you put it another way I can answer better.
I need to log off soon, so if I don't get your reply tonight I'll check back with the thread tomorrow.